Page 116 of Witchlight
She couldn’t escape it because shewasit, and every slash of airborne magic flayed Threads and emotions against her. So much rage and hate and hunger—yet sadness too. Regrets of such profound depth, there was no name for them. There was only the blue and the blue and the blue.
Until, just as the prior emptiness had faded, the fullness eventually fell away too. A gradual peeling of Threads, of storm, of emotion and thunder until there was only Safi.
And she was so very, very far from the ground.
Safi began to weep. Not because of the death that would break her whole body when she hit the earth below, but because of what she saw.
The battlewasover, and they had lost. The entire Well was gone. Decimated. A hole in the earth where there had once been, if not life, then at least the possibility for it.
Even that spark of potential was gone now. There was nothing left behind. No Iseult. No Aeduan, no trees nor stones nor snow. Even the seafire had vanished in a wide, jagged circle near the Well.
We lost,Safi thought as tears cut over her frozen face and slung upward, gifts to the unfeeling sky while she fell.I’m so, so sorry, Iseult. We lost, and I could not say good-bye.
Iseult was spinning. Flying faster than she’d ever experienced in her life. Threads. Magic. Rage.Ragnor was right. We should not have healed the Wells.
That certainty hit Iseult almost as hard as the impact that came next. Itfelt as if the earth leaped up to meet her. Her spine snapped and her brain slammed against her skull.
Then she realized she was no longer in the storm of unbridled Threads, no longer in the real world at all, but instead in the gray nothingness that was the Dreaming. One heartbeat stuttered by. A second and a third. Until Iseult melted back out of the Dreaming and found herself at one of Middle Sister Swallow’s shrines.
No, she was attheshrine where she, Safi, and Aeduan had camped only two days ago.
It was unchanged. Wholly still, wholly silent because the cataclysm that had struck Poznin hadn’t reached this far. But it would eventually—Iseult could see that in the Threads scuttling across everything. Lacy and vibrant and sucking through the land.
Iseult’s heart boomed in her skull for several long minutes as she crouched there, bent upon the snow. The brightness of the Threads, the cruelty of the storm, the impossibility of Aeduan’s too-still, too-dead, crystal-veined and bloodied body…
And Safi.Wherewas Safi?Wherewas Iseult’s Threadsister?
Iseult’s organs pounded with a stasis she didn’t want—one that held her in place like a prisoner chained to the ground. She panted. She shook.
Until her legs gave out, and she knew in a detached way that she was convulsing on the snow. She also knew there was nothing she could do about it. She saw nothing but shadow, she felt nothing but pain. It was as if her body couldn’t adapt to a sudden emptiness—or her brain couldn’t comprehend why there was so much space now, when before she had been so full.
Full of what?
Searing silver Threads stretched across her. Then came a voice she knew well. “It will pass,” Leopold said. “The power of the blade is gone from you now, but your body will adapt. I promise, Iseult. I would never hurt you.”
But you already have!she wanted to scream at him.You have taken everything from me!Because that was the truth of it, wasn’t it? Ragnorhadbeen right. Safi and Iseult should never have healed the Wells.
“Where is Safi?” she rasped out. “And… Aeduan?”
“Safi is safe. Or she will be shortly. And as for the Bloodwitch.” A tip of Leopold’s head. A bounce of his shoulder. “He fulfilled his purpose as Lady Fate’s knife, now there is nothing left.”
“I don’t b-believe you.” Iseult shook her head. Each movement sent Threads—of sky, of wind, of dawn—rippling above her like pebblesdropped into a pond. “Save the bones, save the bones.You can do that again, like you d-did with Alma.”
“I cannot.”
“Cannot orwillnot?”
“Cannot,” Leopold said softly. “Everything near the Air Well has been destroyed, Iseult. Gone. Eliminated—”
“No.”
“—so even if I wanted to, I could not bring that Bloodwitch back into life. There is no corpse within which to bind his soul.”
Iseult’s head shook faster. Snow and soil scraped against the back of her head. “Why? How is that possible, Leopold? What d-did… what did wedo?”
“Ah.” He draped a cool hand on her brow, and like a maestro leading a symphony, he reached out to brush the weave of the world. Iseult could scarcely see him, but the Threads—the Threads were inescapable.
They shivered. They sang.
