Page 93 of Witchlight
The Witch, the Empress, the Sun, and Birth.
Arrows sliced into the water around her, harmless. Lost. Then Safi reached the other side of the ice. She didn’t land easily, and the muscles around her knees felt torn asunder as they tried to stabilize her. But she didn’t fall, and the arrows now aimed in great droves could not seem to hit her.
She thrust back into her sprint, the ice hardening with each leaping step she took. More arrows, their fletchings an array of colors. Red, green, black, brown. Like Threads weaving around Safi, connecting her directly to the world.
She darted, she curved, she spun and lurched until she was no longer on snow-laden ice, but on a snow-laden shore. Raiders aimed for her, and Safi realized with remote awe that it wasn’t merely arrows giving her the illusion of Threads. Shecouldsee Threads, just as Iseult did. She had, for reasons she could not fathom, bits of Iseult’s magic rousing inside her.
Safi withdrew her sword. It flashed with the reflected light of dawn and seafire. It hummed with the power of a Truthwitch. Then Safi reached the first raider, and she cut. Not their Threads—she didn’t have all of Iseult’s magic—but their limbs. Their bellies. Their necks and their armor. Anything her sword touched, it carved effortlessly through.
I am coming, Iseult,she thought with each swipe, each duck, each shove.Do not leave me until I reach you. Do not complete until I am there.
Merik was dead. This was nothing new because he had been dead for several months now. The only things tethering him to a semblance of life were the Threads that bound him to Kullen, sleeping in the ice.
Yet although he was dead, his body kept sputtering along. Death would shatter it, then Kullen’s bound soul would restore it. Right now, it had restored Merik to his false life directly inside Noden’s watery Hell.
It was too dark to see anything, and the cold was so complete, Merik could not have moved his limbs if he’d wanted to. The current was so powerful that he could do nothing except be dragged along by it, ever deeper into Hell.
Water had entered his lungs. He’d been dead when that had happened; now that he was slowly returning to life, he could feel the water inside him.
Merik’s body died again. From cold, from drowning, from a broken neck. And still Noden’s currents carried him toward the final shelf.
Why do you hold a razor in one hand?
So men remember that I am sharp as any edge.
And why do you hold broken glass in the other?
So men remember that I am always watching.
When Merik came into consciousness a second time, his body once more stitching itself back together, his eyes had become ghost eyes. Or maybe that was the light of Noden’s Court. Either way, he could see now. Not well, but his dead, dead brain connected to his dead, dead eyes, and his dead, dead awareness sensed streaks tendriling through the water column. Merik was still too broken to fight the current—and really, what chance did he have against Noden? Plus, his lungs were too filled with water to live for long. He would die again at any moment.
But at least in all this cold, there was no pain. No frustration either. His time had finally come, and not even Kullen’s Paladin Threads could keep him bound to life. Noden wanted Merik, so now Merik would go.
He drifted. Onward, onward while the shadows coiled closer.
Then he realized what he saw, and he let his dead eyes close in supplication. These were Noden’s Hagfishes. They were going to escort him past the final shelf. He felt their slippery skin against him. He felt their muscles twist and tighten around his arms, his legs, his neck. They were somehoweven colder than he was, and were he still a living man, revulsion would have kicked in.
But he wasn’t alive, and his belly was filled with water. So he felt nothing but gratitude because this, surely, would speed up the process. This, surely, would mean it would all be over soon.
He was not afraid of death—he’d been trapped on the final shelf for so long now, he knew the abyss was waiting for him. Hewassad, though. He didn’t want all those souls in Last Holdout to suffer at the hands of the Raider King. He didn’t want all those Cleaved in the city to stand forever, trapped like Merik had been in a life that wasn’t life at all. He hoped that Loulou might take over. With Sky and Revan beside him, he would lead well—
One of the Hagfishes that had slid around Merik’s neck now snaked into his mouth. Its small head pushed through his teeth. Then it pushed and pushed to reach his throat.
Now the revulsion switched on. Now, bones that had been shattered were repaired enough for his muscles to engage. For instinct to unreel and Merik’s fingers to claw at the creature trying to swimintohim.
He gripped it. He pulled. The other Hagfishes embraced him, like shackles. Like Threads that bind and will never let go. And the Hagfish at his mouth forced its way all the way down Merik’s esophagus.
Merik died a third time.
But not before he felt the strangest thing happen inside his chest: water pumped out of his lungs.
Then came a voice he knew almost as well as his own:You don’t get to die before I do, Threadbrother. We’re still needed in this fight.
A light brightened before Merik.Ice,he realized, and it occurred to him—in a cloudy, unformed part of his dead brain—that perhaps he wasn’t in Noden’s abyss at all and perhaps these weren’t Hagfishes. Maybe he was still in the river, and that pallid blue coming closer was nothing more than the surface and a dawn sky.
His feet caught on something that latched into him with such gritty severity the current was forced to release him. The Hagfishes were able to relax their control and, one by one, release Merik until there was nothing between him and the cold.
The last to leave was the one in Merik’s throat. It withdrew, wriggling and graceful.
