Page 82 of Witchlight
He no longer felt small.
On Ragnor’s uniform was the red moon on the black field. And just as he felt bigger, stronger, the sigil no longer looked gruesome. Instead,it looked like a moon wrapped in Heart-Threads.I am bound to Moon Mother,it seemed to say,and she is bound to me.
“Why have you brought me here?” Iseult asked.
“Why do you think?” His voice was soft. “I want you to see the Origin Well.”
“You could have shown that to me hours ago.”
A smile slid over Ragnor’s lips, though it never reached his eyes. “But then you would not have had time to read what was on my desk.”
Ah. Iseult let a smile of her own come, but it was one of stasis. One of cold detachment that would have made Gretchya proud. Especially because inside her brain, everything she’d thought she understood was once more reassembling. For there was something so chilling in the way Ragnor had said,But then you would not have had time to read what was on my desk.
Of course she’d assumed hewantedher to explore all his maps and missives, but she had also assumed it was to instill her with a false sense of safety. Like someone who coaxes out a cat by holding very still.
Now that Iseult faced Ragnor again, however, she saw he possessed such clarity in his Threads—such certainty of his own correctness and truth—that it made Monk Evrane’s clarity seem fanatically unhinged and Eron fon Hasstrel’s certainty seem naive.
For half a breath, Iseult felt as she did when she sparred with Habim, like she faced a master who was already three moves ahead of her. Like no amount of strategy or wiles could let her win here.And that,she realized with a sickening kink of her intestines,isactuallywhat he wanted me to see.
“Walk with me,” Ragnor commanded.
“Yes,” Iseult agreed.
FORTY-ONE
Safi reached the edge of Last Holdout, emerging from the bowed branches and protective trees to find chaos on the river beyond. The two people she’d followed stood on a soggy shoreline. Natural and magicked winds beat against them.
But it was what swept high above that held everyone’s attention: a limp figure plummeting from a fall too high to survive—while the storm hound swirled and flipped around him. Lightning flared off Aurora’s body before she wrestled hold of the figure.
Of Merik.
Then came a sound like gunshots to fill the night. Safi’s attention snapped to the river—but it wasn’t rifles or pistols she found. It was ice, crackling across the river like a ship cutting through waves. And at its helm was a figure with her arms opened wide.
Air kicked against Safi’s bare face. Sleet too, needles to stab at her palms, her cheeks, her brows. But she didn’t retreat from the river.
“Rifle!” Safi barked. “Shoot that witch on the ice!” She knew the winds would blow any shot wild, but surely an attack was better than watching idly as Merik and the storm hound fell.
The person with the rifle seemed to agree. They crouched. They aimed into the chaos. Yet before they could pull the trigger, something happened that, even years later, Safi would have trouble describing.
The forest came alive.
Tree branches stretched out like sluggish whips, the wood groaning so loud, it rattled into Safi’s chest and overwhelmed the winds. Stones seethed outward too—even though Safi had never seen such stones here before. This whole place was made of soft earth, yet from somewhere, boulders, rocks, and pebbles launched across the river.
The unknown Waterwitch barely had time to raise a shield of ice. It stopped the stones.
It did not stop the branches.
The wood curled around the shield and onto the Waterwitch, who writhed and resisted. Until the branches had closed away all shape of humanity. Then those branches tugged, creaked, moaned backward into the trees that had birthed them.
The forest swallowed the Waterwitch whole.
Seconds after that, the full power of the storm hound’s winds hit Safi, forcing her and her companions back into the trees. Lightning charged and sparked, and for what felt like an eternity, Safi huddled. She waited.
Until at last, atlast, the clamoring storm settled into silence. But when Safi raced to the shoreline expecting to find a collapsed man waiting there with his storm hound coiled around him, she found only the hound—and only ice, quickly melting as the river surged by.
Aurora sank back on her haunches and howled into the dawn.
The branches were eating Stix alive.
