Page 72 of Witchlight
“I’m sorry,” she gasped out, clinging tightly to his neck. He was wet, bleeding. “I’m so sorry.”
He didn’t answer. He simply chased after Lev. Two Hell-Bards Vivia hadn’t trusted who now were the only things keeping her and Empress Vaness alive.
They left the workshop. The waters, the foxfire. The sleeping ice too, and the screaming voices. Lev and Zander retraced their steps, through the winding tunnel where new foxfire flared at their approach, then faded at their departure.
Vivia wanted to carry herself. She wanted to help carry Vaness or doanythingthat wasn’t simply clutching at Zander like a child. But the little fox couldn’t find the mask labeledbear. The tides still cried out for her.
Down, down. The Way Below was endless and unchanging. Dust kept falling. The ground kept quaking. Vivia didn’t notice when they passed the hole in the ceiling. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to fall back into the tide’s embrace and never find herself again. To be neither little fox or queenly bear, but rather water, ever changing and free.
“Look,” she heard Lev say. “The ice is gone in the tunnel. We can get through.”
“How?” Vivia tried to ask, but the word was lost to a rising cacophony. Familiar now, in all its many layers. Many languages. This time, though, Vivia could understand bits—and this time, she saw faces attached as Zander stormed by her.
“Knife with two sides!”
“No coincidences!”
“Think beyond!”
“One by one, into the ice!”
They were old faces in every shade of skin imaginable, with hair of silveror white or no hair at all. Vivia heard languages she’d been taught growing up and others that were fully unknown. She heard clear crystalline tones; she heard voices murky and slurred. But the one thing every woman had as she fell or climbed or reached out of the ice was silver in their eyes.
“A door!”Lev roared.“That’s a door!”
Vivia forced her head to turn and forced her sight to lock on to a glowing, frizzing archway hammered into a patch of wall not coated in sleeping ice. She recalled the doorways from the map. She recalled what Cam had warned about them. They shouldn’t exist; they would lead her far,farfrom home.
“No,” she tried to tell Zander, “let’s keep going. All the way to the big cavern.” But Zander didn’t hear her. Or perhaps didn’t understand, because he nodded as if he agreed and hollered, “Go!”
Lev, with the Empress of Marstok in her hands, leaped through. She vanished in a burst of crackling energy. Three staggering heartbeats later, Zander also reached the door. He charged forward.
The magic laid claim. Quivering, ecstatic, violent as it sliced Vivia apart like a chicken on the butcher’s slab—her soul, her body, her thoughts, her Threads—and then sewed her back together again. She landed on a red stretch of dirt, where heat sweated in and white asphodels grew. At first, Vivia thought they were back in Nubrevna. That she was home, maybe even at Noden’s Gift beside the Origin Well…
But then, as she coughed and gasped, the differences battered against her. Oaks instead of palms or cypress. Reddish-yellow soil instead of white. And just visible through the trees, a languid, murky river that did not move like any waters Vivia had ever met before.
Not that this stopped them from calling out to her like an old friend desperate to make contact.
They were in the Contested Lands. That name had been on the map, and this looked like every description Vivia had ever read.
She swallowed against the magic rising inside her. Zander was at her elbow; he helped her stand. Blood poured down his nose, and he was pale—too pale in this night surrounded by jungle.
“The Empress,” she choked out. “Where is she?” Vivia spun, searching until she spotted Lev through the shadows. The Hell-Bard had carried Vaness into the trees, and Vivia instantly stamped after. Yet before she could reach them, her foot caught on something. She tripped. She fell. Small stones cut into her palms.
Then Zander was at her side again. He lifted what Vivia had trippedover and held it toward the Sleeping Giant sparkling across the sky: a rusted helm. “The Contested Lands,” he murmured, voice gravelly. He wiped his bloodied nose on his shoulder. “I don’t know how it’s possible… but we’re in the Contested Lands.”
“Hye,” Vivia confirmed, her voice broken and defeated. “These are the Contested Lands, and now we’re hundreds of miles from where we need to be.”
Kullen,
I have been missing something hugely important. All this time, I’ve forgotten one piece of the puzzle that is critical: Merik.
I’m ashamed to admit the idea didn’t come to me on my own. Instead, it was the cards. They say what they’ve always said:Lady Fate, the Cleaved Man, the Paladin of Hounds.But there was a new card that kept itching its way in.
I don’t know how else to describe it. It is afourthcard that’s begging to be drawn, even though I’ve only ever used three cards to guide me.
The King of Hounds. Merik.
He is bound to you, as your Threadbrother. But also as yourking. That bond matters, I think. You’ve always known, in your Paladin heart, that Merik would one day lead—even before you knew you were a Paladin. So what if that connection between Paladin and ruler is important here? Merik didn’t die when he should have. His connection toyoukept him alive. Why?How?
