“Do not make me compel you,” Mathew warned. “I did so with the Empress, and I will do it to you too.”
“You already have!” Safi laughed again, a ridiculous, high-pitched sound that screeched inside her skull. Mathew must have commanded Vaness not to move, so she could stand there and take a blade through her belly. Now, he would do the same to her. “You bewitched me in the storage room earlier, Mathew. And you bewitched me a month ago in Veñaza City.”
His betrayal had cut deep then. Now, it severed her heart entirely.
All her life, these men had been there. To scold and to teach and to tend her wounds from another sword lesson gone wrong. They were not evil; Safi knew that as surely as she knew that Vaness was not evil.
They were merely wolves in a world of rabbits, who had forgotten that rabbits were important too.
Safi had no doubt that Mathew, Habim, and Uncle Eron believed in their cause—she also had no doubt that it had begun as good and true when they’d first started scheming twenty years ago. But along the way, they had become exactly what they hated.
True.
And now it was up to Safi to remind them that rabbits mattered too.
True, true, true.
She slipped her hand into her pocket. “You say that Vaness is what her parents taught her. Well, I am too, Mathew and Habim. You both showed me right from wrong, and you gave me a conscience.
“I love you,” she finished, “but I will not help you.”
She yanked the spark-candle from her pocket and threw it at the men who’d raised her as a daughter. “Ignite,” she whispered, already spinning away. Already slamming her body into Vaness and sprinting like the Void was at her heels.
Thank the gods, Vaness was small. And thank the gods, Mathew and Habim had trained her for exactly this moment, when she would have to lift a compelled Empress onto her shoulder and make a run for it.
As she’d expected, the spark-candle was no spark-candle at all. An explosion cracked behind her. Mathew roared her name—roared a command for her to stop. And she would have followed the command too, unable to resist such Wordwitched power.
But she was to the garden’s edge and he was too late.
She and the Empress toppled over and plummeted toward the lake.
FORTY-SEVEN
The Fury flew them down the mountainside, a sharp descent that made Aeduan’s ears ache and lungs compress until they were lowering again. No light shone on the forest below, and no amount of squinting through the winds revealed any landscape beyond. All he knew was that they were nearer to the valley that separated Ragnor’s mountain from the Monastery’s.
And all he could assume was that the Fury was bringing him to his father.
They lowered into a clearing surrounded by evergreens. One pine spired above the rest, twice as tall, twice as wide. Snow sprayed wide, carried on the Fury’s winds. It gathered in a circular bank around them.
Aeduan’s knees almost gave way upon the landing—and his teeth gritted against the sudden surge of pain. His Painstone bore only flickers of magic. He had, at most, an hour before the curse regained its full control.
At most.
“Hurry,” the Fury ordered, impatience thick in his voice as he left the clearing, and in his posture too. Eyes glittered within the trees, watching Aeduan and the Fury as they passed. Soldiers, Aeduan realized by the weapons in their hands and at their hips. They lurked in the darkness, some sitting, some standing, and all clearly waiting for a signal.
Aeduan had found his father’s forces—and an attack must be imminent. There was only one target this way, though: the Monastery.
After passing rows upon rows of archers at work crafting arrows with the practiced speed of the battle-worn, and then passing Baedyeds on horseback, their steeds draped in camouflaging white cloth, the Fury led Aeduan to a round-roofed tent. Light shone from cracks in the hide walls and a hole at the top. Voices wafted out; smoke did not.
Which meant this was the command tent. Ready to be moved at a moment’s notice. Ten women and men hovered nearby, varied in their skin and clothes, because Ragnor had chosen a personal guard from each faction he commanded. They scowled as the Fury passed, but none tried to interfere.
Then the Fury shoved into the tent, and immediately, all voices silenced. Aeduan followed a heartbeat later. Orange light washed over him, bright enough to steal his sight.
Gradually, four figures materialized, poised around a long table covered in maps. On the left was a woman with skin as dark as the night’s sky and white hair piled atop her head. She held a pipe in one hand, extended mid-gesture before Aeduan entered. A jade ring glinted on her thumb.
Beside her stood a man with serpents tattooed across his brown face and the gold serpentine belt all Baedyeds wore. On the table’s right was a Threadwitch, tall with wide-set green eyes that glittered in a brazier’s glow.
At the head of the table stood Aeduan’s father, the Raider King of the North.
Ragnor det Amalej.
He was not a tall man, shorter than Aeduan by half a head, but furs added breadth to his shoulders. Beneath them, he wore the same high-necked black silk he always wore. Silver streaked his hair, more since Aeduan had last seen him. There were more lines around his eyes too—eyes of pale hazel beneath thick lashes.
Age, height, and eye color. The only differences between father and son.
“Leave us,” Ragnor said, and his three commanders instantly obeyed. The Baedyed and the Threadwitch ignored Aeduan as they strode by, but the white-haired woman paused her saunter just long enough to give him a thorough once-over.
And just long enough to murmur, “Blood on the snow.” Though if she directed these words at him or at herself, he could not say. Then she was gone, and the Fury swiveled to follow.
“Wait,” Ragnor ordered in Arithuanian.
The Fury obeyed, spindling toward the table. The tent was too small for him; he had to duck beneath struts, and once at the maps, he twitched and blinked and fidgeted like a leopard trapped within a cage.
He bore no sign of cleaving darkness, though. No shadows or cruelty or anything beyond blond height, blue eyes, and a mangled ear. Snow flickered around his head. He bowed.
“General.” It was the wrong title, but Ragnor did not correct him.
“Find Corlant. Bring him to me.”
The Fury straightened. “What about the attack on the Crypts? I have a new strategy for entering the door—”
“And this errand will not detract from it.”
The Fury’s face tightened. Snow swirled faster around his head. “But it will. I lose precious time with the Puppeteer. She fights me at every turn.”
“Then you will have to fight harder.”
Another tightening. Another swishing of snow. “And what if your soldiers reach the Monastery before I can break the Crypts?”
“Then so be it.” Displeasure hardened Ragnor’s tone. “Why do you argue with me, Bastien? Go to Esme, have her find Corlant. Then fetch the priest and return him here. These are your orders.”
For a long moment, the air in the room stretched long and tight. A bow being drawn. Until at last, the Fury loosed it.
“I do not like Corlant,” he spat, and at that declaration, frost erupted across the floor. It crackled over the rushes and climbed the walls. It crunched on Aeduan’s boots. “This iteration is an abomination, and you know it. Kill him and be done with it.”
“We need him. A babe is no use to our cause.”
“Nor are raiders! They will turn on us—and on each other at the first gleam of gold.”
“We have opened our arms to all, and that means all.” Ragnor’s voice had turned lethally low, unimpressed by the Fury’s ice. “Now leave. This argument is over, and I will hear no more on the subject. You have your orders. Follow them.” Without another word, Ragnor turned his back on the Fury and focused on the maps before him.
Black lines laced over the Fury’s face. The snow around his head turned to
shadows, and the frost at his feet turned to darkness.
Then his whole body tensed, head cocking sideways as if he heard something far away. Two breaths before his face relaxed, the shadows dissolved. He sighed audibly, a smile even towing at his mouth.
The Fury left in a slice of cold and wind.
Aeduan approached the table, approached the bloodied iron and sleeping ice that marked his father’s blood. The frosted baby’s breath and bone-deep loss. Even as weak as Aeduan was, his father’s scent was too familiar to ever lose—and too strong to ever evade. It called to his magic, a brief spark of power muffled by the curse’s pain.
His father had already sent for Corlant, so Aeduan would deal with the poison in his veins when the man who’d caused it arrived.
As Aeduan skirted the table, a map of the valley came into focus, recently drawn, with the river’s current flow and the islands marked. Coins were spread across the eastern hillside, denoting troop placements. Ragnor offered no expression when Aeduan came to a stop beside him. He simply assessed his son.
There was a stillness about the Raider King. A thoughtful calm that suggested that he always knew the best course of action and that he had, in his quiet way, thought through all possibilities before landing on the best outcome for everyone. No words were spoken without a pause, no choices ever made without great deliberation. This moment was no different.
“Son,” Ragnor said eventually, using Nomatsi.
“Father,” Aeduan replied. Two years of saying that word, yet it still tasted so strange.
“It is good you arrived when you did,” Ragnor said. “I did not want to begin the assault without you.” He bent over the map.
“You plan to attack the Monastery?”
“We have already begun.” His father pointed to silver coins placed atop the river. “Icewitches,” he explained. “From the Herk-hül tribe in the north. As we speak, they freeze the river so our troops and cavalry may cross.” He waved to bronze and copper coins. “The horn for the attack should sound at any moment.”
“Many of your soldiers will die.”
“Yes,” his father agreed.
“The Monastery is built to withstand years of siege. Decades, if needed.”
“Yes,” his father repeated. “But what is it that I always tell you?”
Aeduan swallowed, fingers tapping at his sword pommel. “That the empires have grown lazy and unambitious.”
“And the monks have fared no better. They have gone to war amongst themselves, never suspecting someone might be waiting for such an opportunity.” With curt efficiency, he pulled a second vellum map from a stack beside the table. Two steps brought him to a clear expanse, where he unfurled it.
Despite dirty edges and faded ink, the layout of both the Monastery and its surrounding grounds was unmistakable. Large portions of the building were absent, though. The forge and mills were in the wrong place, and there were inconsistencies in the landscape. Trees where there should have been a stream, rock where there was now forest.
Sweat broke out on Aeduan’s brow.
“This is the fortress as it was a thousand years ago,” Ragnor said. “When it still belonged to kings, this cave here,” he tapped a shaded circle at the base of the cliff, “leads to a tunnel. It was once used for escape. Today, it has been left forgotten—and left open.”
“How do you know this?” Aeduan asked. The curse was working quickly, constricting at his insides. Cording around his bones.
His father did not answer, and Aeduan had not expected him to. After all, this was not the first time Ragnor had said something that came from another age. Often, he referred to histories as if he had been there. Legends as if he had faced them.
Aeduan knew his father had been a soldier for some nobleman in these mountains. That he had met Aeduan’s mother, and they had joined a passing Nomatsi tribe. Yet soldiers did not speak of long-dead kings, and tribesmen did not know of castles built a thousand years ago.
“What I want to know,” Ragnor continued, “is what awaits at the end of this tunnel.” He traced a line up the cliff, under the Monastery. It forked halfway up, one line aiming to a spot beyond the Monastery, the other tracing toward a second circle in a long, rectangular room marked Chapel.
It was not a chapel now. “That is the main library,” Aeduan said. “There is no door in that corner there. Only wall.”
“I expected as much, which is why I have a Stonewitch to handle it. Is the space guarded?”
“No.”
“And the layout?”
Aeduan hesitated. The sweat on his forehead was now sliding down his jawline, and pain sent heat waves floating across his vision. “What,” he began after a long inhale, “do you plan to do inside?”
“Justice. The monks have slaughtered our people, and I will not leave that unanswered.”
“So you will slaughter them in return?”
“Do you care?”
Aeduan’s pulse echoed in his eardrums. He thought of Lizl. “Not all monks know of these attacks. They do not all deserve to die.”
“Perhaps not,” Ragnor admitted. “But if we try to separate the good from the bad—these so-called ‘insurgents’ from the others—then too many of our own people will die in the process. Remember: it is always easier to kill ants in the mound than spread out upon the field.”
He did not wait for Aeduan to respond to this before he pushed away from the table and returned to the first map. For the Raider King, once a decision had been made, the conversation was over. It was not cruelty that made him act so, but simple logic. The transaction was complete, what more was there to say?
In the past, Aeduan had liked it that way. Simple, clear. He was given orders. He followed them. Coin and the cause, coin and the cause.
Right now, though, as the tent began to dip and sway around him, he found his father’s expectations rankling. Scratching atop skin made of flames.
“There will be two main groups,” his father explained while Aeduan shuffled toward the first map. “Foot soldiers, cavalry, and archers will launch a frontal attack as soon as the Icewitches have finished their work. Then a small group—which you and I will join—will enter through the cave.” He dropped a wooden coin atop the Monastery. “Once we are in the library, then the foot soldiers from the frontal assault will follow.” He pushed the other coins toward the cliff where the cave awaited. “By dawn, the Monastery will be ours and the Cahr Awen will be eliminated.”
The Cahr Awen eliminated.
Cahr Awen.
Eliminated.
And just like that, Aeduan understood why his father truly wanted to enter into the Monastery: he wanted Iseult. He wanted her gone.
It made no sense, though. “Why?” The question croaked out, surprising Ragnor. Aeduan did not withdraw it, though. “Why do you want the Cahr Awen?”
His father considered him, frowning. Never had Aeduan pressed him for deeper explanations, never had he required more answers. But now, Aeduan did not merely want them. He needed them.
His father seemed to understand, for the lines of his face abruptly smoothed, and he held Aeduan’s gaze a beat longer than was comfortable.
“You … have her eyes.” He turned away, lips compressing. Lines returning. “Perhaps, though, it is time I explain what your mother wanted—”
A horn, deep and distant, bellowed out. Three short blasts, followed by a fourth long drawl.
Ragnor’s demeanor turned to stone once more. He was not a father, but a king. “Remove your cloak. A spare fur is in that trunk.” He jerked his head toward a shadowy corner. “Take it and your blade. Then meet me at the tallest mountain pine. We ride out when the second horn sounds.”
A flap of tent and a gust of wind marked the Raider King’s exit.
Aeduan was alone.
Alone, yet no longer unsure. He had been wrong back in Tirla. Lady Fate’s knife had not yet fallen. Now, it hovered above him. Now, the edges gleamed, ready to draw blood.
With
pained care, he peeled off his old cloak. Blood-streaked and shredded, the white salamander fibers had carried him far. He had lived inside this cloth for three years, believing it would protect him. A wall against the flames.
But walls hadn’t saved his mother. They hadn’t saved the woman and babe dying on the forest floor. And this cloak had not saved him from a curse borne by Nomatsi arrows.
The cloak pooled around Aeduan’s feet, and it was done. He turned his attention to his chest, to where the Painstone made a small bump beneath his blood-crusted uniform. No matter how hard he strained, how deeply he inhaled, he could not feel his heart pumping just below it. He could not sense any of his organs or any of his blood.
He was alive, but he was empty. The curse’s work was complete.
There was nothing he could do about it either. He had known this moment would come, and caring now seemed impossible. If he had truly wanted to stop the curse, then he should have made different choices, should have followed different paths.
He was a Bloodwitch no longer. He was a monk no longer.
He was man, just a man.
It would have to be enough.
* * *
Iseult stood half crouched beside her bed, breath held as she stared at her Threadstone. It blinked, insistent and inescapable.
Safi was in trouble. And judging by the stone’s brightness, Safi was far away. Very.
Even if Iseult could escape this Monastery, she would be too late. Safi needed her now. Safi’s life was in danger now.
Her gaze flicked to Leopold sleeping in his armchair. Was he the enemy or her salvation? Could he help her reach Safi or would he slow her down? Lips parted and head tipped to one side, he looked young. Just a boy, innocent and dreaming. Even in the dim moonlight, he shone bright as sunshine, his Threads spun from gold. His promises spun from charm. Iseult so desperately wanted to believe he was on her side, but even she was not so fanciful a fool.
Not after what she had seen tonight.
Evrane, the Abbot, the Firewitch forever cleaving, the shadows that flew on black wings. No one could be trusted but Safi.
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