Page 38 of Witchlight
Then she laid her hands on Safi’s forehead, and the soothing, salty tides swept into Safi anew.
“I know you hate your uncle, Safiya, and I suspect that in many ways, Merik feels the same way toward me—and likely Aeduan feels it too, for I raised him with as much harsh care as I gave Merik. But in the end, nothing can change that we do the best we can with the tools we have. Sometimes we use our tools wisely. Sometimes…” Evrane shook her head. “Sometimes our best is not enough.”
The tides swept in more strongly, but they were not drowning waters. Nor rough and stormy. They were gentle currents meant to carry Safi’s floating body out to sea, where healing and sleep awaited.
“I hope that I see Merik again one day, if only so I may tell him that hehas turned out far wiser and far fiercer than I could have ever dreamed he would be. Now sleep, Safiya, and dream of peace in your mind, peace in your body.”
Safi sighed. Her muscles softened. And there it was: the true sleep that had eluded her for days.
The last thing Safi heard before she sank under was: “Thank you, Light-Bringer, for this gift you have given me tonight. It was the reminder I needed that the path I am on is true.”
EIGHTEEN
The moon was fully risen by the time Iseult navigated the Nomatsi trail again. She did not return to the hunting lodge, but instead made her way to the ancient tower with its altar inside. The pack weighed heavy on her back, but it was steady. Comfortable, even.
She scanned the tower, full of shadows. A world of black and white. Snow still skated languidly down, and a barely perceptible wind whispered every few seconds. But something was wrong. Something had changed since Iseult had come here with Safi that morning.
There were the supplies, tucked into the darkest corner with the blanket above. Snow had once more banked around the crates.
There was the altar, only ten feet away. Still, silent, timeless.
There were the crumbling walls and broken staircase and winter trees beyond.
Iseult shifted her weight, splaying her toes in her boots, trying to find warmth. The pack shifted with her. She should add its supplies to the organized crates in the corner. Open up the leather and catalog exactly what Alma had given her.
But Iseult didn’t move. Instead, she eased the pack off her back, letting it land directly behind her. A bulwark against cold—and against the strangeness still huddling around her.
There were no Threads here, so she did not fear humans. And she didn’t fear animals, since they, like men, avoided this place. Of course, there were ways to hide Threads. Ways to travel that even a Threadwitch could not see…
Wind pulled at her hair as she withdrew Eridysi’s diary from a leather pouch at her belt. She always kept it with her, for its words were too precious, too dangerous to ever leave untended.
Iseult lowered to the snow-covered earth, folding her legs beneath her before laying the diary on her lap. She closed her eyes. She slipped into the Dreaming.
It was so easy here, in this old tower where the walls between this world and the Old Ones’ were thinner. She only had to imagine the Dreaming, and suddenly she was there. The night hazed around her. The edges of her vision blurred into gray nothing.
“Leopold,” she called. “I know you’re here. Show yourself.”
She sensed his emergence before she saw him. A heaviness where her periphery smeared—a slowing of time that made the snow drift differently, as if gravity no longer operated by the same rules.
She turned toward him and found he was not Leopold at all, but the purest distillation of his Paladin form. He stood at the tower’s entrance, a ghostly figure. Almost insubstantial, yet also many people at once, many genders and many races before all the incarnations of his Paladin soul finally settled into the version Iseult knew best: Leopold fon Cartorra.
Except now he wore the Rook King’s silver crown, and his cloak was black and bulky, adding breadth to what she knew were lean shoulders.
“This is a welcome surprise.” His voice and Threads indicated it wasn’t welcome at all. “I did not think I would see you again, Dark-Giver.”
“Don’t c-call me that.” It was Iseult’s title as the Cahr Awen, but Leopold always made it sound insulting. She rose to her dream feet while her physical body remained behind. “Where are you? I know you must be near.” The last time she had seen Leopold in person had been here, after he’d stabbed Corlant in the back.
Leopold paused at that altar now, inspecting the precise spot where his blade had cut through Corlant’s spine, as if he were an artist looking upon his work. “Is it so strange to want to see how the Cahr Awen fares?”
“Yes.”
“I have spent a thousand years trying to heal the Wells. Give an old soul this…pleasure.”
“Except you were the one who betrayed the Six. Oh yes, I’ve read the diary in full now, Leopold. Eridysi writes that you betrayed the Six so that the Exalted Ones knew of your plans. The Six were going to kill the Exalted Ones, but you warned them. And so the Six failed.”
“And Eridysi was wrong. I was not the betrayer, Iseult.” A pause. A contemplative twirl of Leopold’s Threads as he motioned toward the altar. “I was, in fact, the one whoensuredthe Exalted Ones were slain.”
“Portia was not slain.”
