Page 69 of Witchlight
Merik hesitated, and for half a moment, Safi thought she saw a bit of the boy he’d once been. An uncertain boy, afraid to make the wrong move with so many people watching.
“Please,” Safi pressed. “The last time I saw you, we were both inside a mountain. I need to understand where I am. How you’re here. Who these people are that are out there searching for Iseult.”
“Still as impatient as ever,” Merik murmured, and a real smile towed at his lips.
“And you’re still as stubborn.”
His smile turned sad. “I hope not.” He shook his head, wiped a hand across his face, and finally straightened upon his stool. “It started when assassins came in the night to theJana.I thought my sister had sent them, and so I traveled to Lovats to confront her…”
THIRTY-THREE
As soon as Aeduan came out of his roll inside the mountain, he caught flickers of a blood that his witchery instantly snarled at:Clear lake waters. Frozen winters.But he was too late to turn around—to leap out of this bear trap before iron fangs closed.
He dove for the magicked door, but already the light was shrinking, fading, vanishing. His hands hit stone, and although static charged through him, he did not topple back out the other side.
He was stuck here.
“No,” he growled at the granite, pounding it. Then louder,“No.”He grabbed at triangular carvings around the door. He pressed them, he scratched them, he shouldered into them until it left bruises that his magic had to tend to. But nothing happened; the stone remained stone. Aeduan could not get back through.
If Aeduan had been angry with himself on the plains and irate with himself in the forest, it was nothing compared to what plunged through him now. He had danced like the broken bear; he had fallen, yet again, for Leopold’s games.
Aeduan spun away from the door. His Bloodwitchery surged, bolstered by fury, and he flung it outward in a wide, vicious net. Leopold was here, and Aeduan would find him.Ahead,his magic told him, so ahead Aeduan went. He wasn’t surprised to find no floating remnants of the silver taler now. No mountain ranges or dandelions, either.
Iseult wasn’t here. Safi wasn’t here. They never had been.
And now Aeduan finally did what he should have done earlier: he pulled the Truth-lens from his pocket and slung it over his neck.
Like the first time Safi had placed it upon him, power roiled through him. It plucked down his vertebrae, it swelled inside his lungs.This is truth, this is rightness, this is all that is pure and good.
Then the intensity of it shrank, like a settling tide after an unexpectedwave. And for several dragging minutes, Aeduan waited—and took full note of his surroundings. It was indeed the mountain where, supposedly, the sleeping goddess Sirmaya made Her home.True, true, true.Yet it looked nothing like Iseult had described to Aeduan. She’d spoken of storm and stone, lightning and earthquakes. Of a cataclysm filling a colossal cavern that wanted to kill all in its path.
Nadje’s memories, meanwhile, suggested silence and stillness and peace. When that Aether Paladin had gone into the mountain a thousand years ago, the mountain had welcomed her children home. War had raged, yes, but it had not been the mountain’s doing.
What Aeduan found before him was neither peaceful nor apocalyptic, nor even a cavern. He was in a tunnel made from the same uncanny granite as the spiraling ramp in the woods. Lanterns flickered, not with flame, but with foxfire casting the stone in green.
But that was all Aeduan saw—and all Aeduan felt. A single confirmation from the lens that yes, this was the goddess’s mountain…
And now silence. Now nothing. Every few seconds, the tunnel shivered around him. A vibration that rattled through his feet and up into his eyes. Not a quake so much as a distant heartbeat. This too elicited no response from the lens.
“Useless,” he said to no one as he tore it off again to return it to his pocket. Then he started, walking, aiming steadily through the tunnel while time bleared past. His Bloodwitchery latched on to Leopold.
Dance, little Bloodwitch, dance.
Slowly, the tunnel did change. Its corridors widened, the ceiling lifted, and the throbbing beat in the stone fell away. Gradually, a new light claimed the foxfire shadows: a bluish glow that leaked out of veins in the stone.
Aeduan’s fingers flexed at the sight of it. At the cold, and his heart pumped out a melody he didn’t recognize. Part lingering bewilderment from the weight and strangeness of the mountain. Part booming hunger because Leopold was here and pulling strings…
But most of all, Aeduan’s heart beat with an atavistic terror that said:You should not be here.The veins that thrummed in the stone were ice, and inexplicably, his old wounds were responding to them. As if they’d heard their master calling and they’d waited so long for this moment to come.Finally, you understand what we have wanted from you.
Aeduan didn’t understand at all.
The ice in the rock crackled and groaned, sounding almost like speech as Aeduan walked by. And with each forward step, the more thickly ice coated at walls. Climbed the ceiling. Frayed onto the floor.
Not your mind. Not your body.
Aeduan focused on his breaths, even as pain sharpened in his chest. Even as the six wounds began their oozing again, soaking him in blood. Aeduan breathed in through his nose. Out through his mouth. He could not let the wounds or the ice distract him.
Except there was one small problem: the farther he strode, the more blood scents began to waver against him. Five. Ten. Hundreds. Thenthousands,as if somehow there were people all around him. Living and waiting in the stone.
