“So,” Lev piped up, “I guess it’s fair to assume those Marstoks are not on our side?”
“No.” Safi swung out of the boat. “Run.”
The Hell-Bards did as ordered. Again, Zander slung Vaness onto his shoulder, and Vaness uttered no word of protest. Her nose still gushed, her face had lost all color, and now her crepe bandage leaked blood down her face. It sprayed against the street in time to Zander’s leaping stride.
They cut off the quay onto a side street, barged through an intersection, and then shoved onto a wider thoroughfare. Crowds clotted thick against them; pistols chased from behind. No slowing, no looking back. They pushed and ducked and fought their way through the throngs.
Two streets later, though, Lev hollered over the traffic, “Where are we going? We need a plan!”
“You think?” Caden called back. “I don’t want another Ratsenried any more than you do.”
“We had a plan in Ratsenried,” Zander inserted. “It just didn’t work.”
“Because it was your plan!” Lev began. “Hell-pits, if you’d just let me—”
“Shut up!” Safi snatched Lev’s arm. “All of you, shut up and follow me!” As before, the Hell-Bards obeyed, and at the next intersection, Safi angled left. West, toward the mountains.
She had a plan. Oh, it was slapdash and Iseult would pick it apart in seconds, but it was something. Act now; consequences later. Plus, it gave her a place to run toward and easy landmarks to follow: the golden spires. One after the other, she found them above the buildings, above the crowds, and one after the other, she tracked them toward the heart of the city. Toward the largest spire of all.
“Yesterday,” Safi shouted to Lev, the closer they got to the final spire, “how did you get into the Origin Well? Where was that hole in the wall?”
“Why?” Caden demanded, eyes widening as he pushed around a woman with a squalling child.
But Lev—blessed Lev—simply barked, “Shut up, Commander. She didn’t ask you.” Then she pointed north. “The hole was that way!”
So Safi went that way. Four more streets and two more turns, she spotted the wall. No longer glamoured, but very well guarded. The gaping, crumbling hole revealed cedars and shadows.
“Vaness!” Safi called without slowing her stride, even as the twelve soldiers spotted their approach. Even as two on the right unsheathed their blades.
“Yes,” Vaness slurred. A snap of her fingers …
And the two blades turned molten in the soldiers’ hands.
They screamed. Their blades fell and Vaness snapped again.
Every piece of iron nearby melted. Anything that it touched caught fire. Sheaths, uniforms, people. Burning flesh, burning hair—it all sizzled into Safi’s nose as she sprinted by. Then they were to the hole in the wall. Then they were through the hole in the wall and tramping into a blackened stretch of charred forest.
Soon, they reached the tiles surrounding the Origin Well, and Safi risked a backward glance. Maybe there was time to heal Vaness before …
No, there definitely wasn’t. Hundreds of soldiers poured into the Well grounds, and if Safi and the Hell-Bards didn’t move fast enough, those soldiers would see exactly where Safi was running to.
“Faster!” she screamed, her feet slamming onto the tiles. The waters rippled and hummed beside her. Then she was past, the Hell-Bards at her heels, and charging once more into the cedars—not blackened. Good cover for what she was about to do.
They reached the spire.
Safi cut left.
And there, hidden within the dirt and the rocks and the trees, was the crack in the earth she remembered. “Down here.” She scrabbled toward it.
“Domna,” Lev warned behind her. “This seems like a very bad idea.”
“Just trust me!” As she’d hoped, the blue light shone before her. She scooted toward it, scree slipping beneath her ankles, and the closer she inched, the more magic pulsed against her skin.
True, warm, happy magic that strummed in her heart. That beckoned her to enter. Yesterday, she’d fallen through. There’d been no chance to feel this magic. No chance to revel in its power or analyze what it might mean.
Lev crawled down behind her, and when Safi glanced back, the Hell-Bard’s mouth hung open, her eyes huge and glowing in the light.
“This is your plan?” Lev asked, voice barely a whisper.
“Yeah.” Safi grinned. “Follow me.”
She stepped through.
FIFTY-FOUR
Heat roars. Wood cracks and embers fly.
“Run.” Blood drips from his mother’s mouth as she speaks.
It splatters his face.
With arms stained to red, she pushes herself up. She wants him to crawl out from beneath her. She wants him to escape. “Run, my child, run.”
But he does not move, just as he did not move when the raiders first ambushed the tribe. Just as he did not move when his father drew his sword and ran from their tent.
Or when the raiders reached their doorway, loosed their arrows, and then his mother fell atop him. She had hidden him with her body until the raiders had moved on.
“Run,” she whispers one last time, pleading desperation in her silver eyes. Then the last of her strength flees. She collapses onto him.
The six arrows that pierced her body slam into Aeduan. Pain and punctured breath and blood, blood, blood. Always the blood.
He is pinned by cedar and corpse. His mother is dead.
And now there will be no running. Now there is only flame.
He begins to cry.
* * *
Aeduan watched himself. He stood where the raider had stood when he loosed the six bolts into Dysi’s back. He stood at the mouth of their tent—except there was no tent now. No walls or battle raging in the tribe. All that surrounded him was fire and shadow.
Over and over, he had died that day. A thousand times until the rain had come and Evrane had found him. The arrows had bled him. The fire had burned him. Yet always, he had come back. Always he had snapped awake to find his mother’s dead face above him while the flames and smoke bore down.
Death follows wherever you go, yet by the grace of the Wells, you always outrun your own.
It was true. Always, Aeduan had outrun death, beginning on this day fifteen years ago.
Except there was one thing Lizl had gotten wrong: it was not grace that had saved him. It was a curse. All he had wanted that day was to die and stay dead. All he had wanted was to join his mother and escape the flames forever.
But death had refused to claim him. Aeduan’s magic had healed his wounds while his mother’s body had kept away the full brunt of the fire’s force. Until she was nothing more than a charred husk, and the arrows in Aeduan’s body had burned away to white-hot heads buried inside his chest.
Eventually, the rainstorm doused the flames. Eventually, only damp smoke remained, and Evrane’s gentle face and gentle hands found Aeduan among the debris.
Every night, he relived that attack in his dreams.
Never before, though, had he hovered outside like this. Never before had he watched his mother die or his own wounds ooze blood upon the floor.
Now, he stood at the edge of the scene, observing while the boy died without him beneath a burning sky. He watched his mother’s flesh sizzle and smoke. He watched the tears slide down his broken cheeks, evaporating instantly with the heat. He watched his young skin sear, only to heal as fast as it could be blackened.
He watched the life leave his body, only to return a moment later. Again and again.
He watched the fletching in his mother’s back catch fire. Six bright bursts of light before the shafts caught fire too. Down they burned. Through his mother. Into him.
Still he healed. Still he sobbed. Still he died.
But this time, Evrane never came for him. The rainstorm never broke.
It took Aeduan a long time to notice that the memory had changed—that it wasn’t adhering to the truth of that day fifteen years ago. The tru
th of what happened every night when he dreamed.
Evrane should have come by now.
For the first time since awakening in this memory, Aeduan turned—as if he thought he might find Evrane behind him. As if she might be stuck, waiting for him to stand aside so she could move within.
There was no one there, though. Of course there was no one there, and all he found was more fire. More smoke. More shadows and more pain.
He was alone in this nightmare. There was no Evrane. There was no escape. There was only the darkness and himself.
He turned back to the child. He turned back to the boy he had once been. He did not see a demon. He did not see a monster.
And in that moment, Aeduan understood: it was not just that he had wanted to die forever that day. He had died. The child inside him had burned away alongside his mother, and since then, though he might have existed, he had never truly lived.
Now nobody came for him in the nightmare because that was the truth of it. No one had come for him. Evrane might have moved his mother’s corpse off Aeduan, she might have tended his wounds and taken him to the Monastery, but she had not saved him.
All these years, he had blamed himself for what had happened. If he had just fought, if he had just reacted, then his mother would not have died. Then he would not have been trapped beneath her; his tribe would not have burned.
It was as if by blaming himself, he had given the death meaning. He had given it a reason—and that reason was his own existence. His own failings and weakness and monstrous, Void-bound magic fueled by blood.
But there was no reason. There never had been. He was just a child, trapped in the wreckage of war. He had not done this, he had not caused this. Yet he had lost his life to it all the same.
Now no one could save him but himself.
Four long steps carried Aeduan to the boy. He stared down into his own face, half hidden by the charred remains of his mother. Dysi had been beautiful in life. Now she was nothing more than a smoldering corpse and a handful of memories.
With careful hands, Aeduan gripped her arms to move her. The instant he touched her, though, she crumbled into black nothing and whispered away. So he sank to a crouch beside the boy—beside himself—and he gazed into ice-blue eyes.
Aeduan had never gazed into his own eyes before. They swirled with red.
“Run,” he told the boy. “Run.”
“I can’t,” the boy said.
“You can,” Aeduan replied. “We can. Together.”
* * *
Heat roars. Wood cracks and embers fly.
He is pinned by cedar and corpse. His mother is dead.
But he is not supposed to die with her. She had told him to run, so running is what he needs to do.
He pushes upward, a scream ripping from his lungs. Up his scorched throat and out across the fire. Push, push—his mother is heavy, but he cannot let the loss of her hold him down.
His screams pitch louder, his muscles labor and groan. The wounds in his chest stab deeper and the flames score at his cheeks.
Then he is up. His mother falls stiffly to one side, leaving his legs free. His path is free too, a clear gap in the flames, and winding through that trail is a single red line. Feathery and fine, it reaches into the boy’s chest.
It is shrinking fast, though. With each heartbeat that passes, with each flame that claws at him from all sides, the line shrivels inward like a string that has caught fire. Or like a thread burning to dust.
The flames cannot have this thread, though, for though blood might burn, the boy’s soul will not.
The Bloodwitch named Aeduan runs.
FIFTY-FIVE
When Aeduan’s eyes opened again, light flared around him, as if the night had turned to day. As if he had somehow fallen into the heart of the sun.
Waters streamed, obscure and blinding … and then morphing into a face.
Iseult.
She hung suspended in the water, eyes closed. Hair floating around her face, a halo of night to encircle the moon. The white Carawen cloak undulated behind her, heavy and wild. No bubbles left her nose or mouth.
Instantly, panic laid claim to Aeduan’s muscles. He grabbed her, one arm looping around her waist. Then he released the clasp at her neck.
The cloak fell beneath them.
He kicked for the surface, strong and fast and desperate—and it was as if his blood had waited for this precise moment. As if this was all it had ever wanted to do. His magic ignited within him. It spurred his muscles to a speed and power no man could ever match, and he flew toward the surface with Iseult at his side.
The Well had healed the curse, just as Iseult had promised. Then it had brought Aeduan back from death and returned to him the one thing he had spent his whole life hating. He’d had it all wrong, though. He saw that now.
Being a Bloodwitch did not mean he could not also be a man.
He towed Iseult toward the night, and a moment later, they crashed above the surface, cold and jarring. Aeduan grabbed for the nearest expanse of ice and held on, tugging Iseult tightly to him so she would not drift away.
Light and steam rolled around them, erasing the world. Blending it into a featureless expanse. He saw no one else. He heard no one else. For all he knew, they were the only people left alive in this battle.
In the entire world.
“Iseult,” he tried, willing her to wake up. “Iseult, Iseult, Iseult.” He could not stop saying her name, even as it came out in short, shallow bursts. Even as he searched for a way out of the water, a spot to gain purchase on the ice. Her name simmered from his chest and would not stop.
“Iseult, Iseult, Iseult.”
She had saved him. One more life-debt he owed her, except now he saw it did not matter. It had never mattered. Not since she had stabbed him in the heart beside a lighthouse. Not since he had given her his salamander cloak and told her Mhe varujta.
“Iseult, Iseult, Iseult.”
He could scarcely see her face through all the light and steam. He needed to get them out of this Well. With one arm, he pulled himself—and Iseult too—along the jagged ice.
He knew this went beyond life-debts, and that this fear anchored in his chest went against everything Aeduan had ever wanted to be—against everything he’d ever believed himself to be.
There. His fingers hit a ridge he could hang on to.
“Iseult, Iseult, Iseult.”
He grabbed hold. He pulled. His fingernails carved into ice. His forearm strained. A cry broke from his chest, and he could no longer say her name. So he thought it instead. Iseult, Iseult, Iseult.
He kicked his legs. The water pushed and his magic sang. Soon, his biceps cleared the ice. Then his head. Then her head too.
Iseult, Iseult, Iseult.
Now his chest was out of the water, and with one final kick, he wrenched his whole torso free. It was not graceful, nor gentle. Iseult’s body scraped against the ice, but she was high enough that he could release her for half a heartbeat.
Aeduan pulled himself the rest of the way onto the ice, then he scrabbled around to haul her out beside him. Steam coiled off her body. Off his too, and the cold of the valley gnawed deep into his bones.
“Iseult.” He uttered her name again, hoarse and low. Again and again and again.
She was warm to the touch, and a pulse fluttered at her neck. She breathed. Shallow movements in her chest that meant she had not drowned.
In a vague corner of Aeduan’s brain, he supposed the Cahr Awen could not drown—not here. When they had been in the water, he had felt sentience. Oneness. Completion. He had no doubt now about what Iseult was.
Aeduan ran his hands down Iseult’s wet arms, down her wet legs, checking for broken bones. For anything that might explain why she would not wake up. But he found nothing. Everything he touched was intact, though growing colder by the second.
“Iseult, Iseult, Iseult.”
She and Aeduan had survived the cleaving Adders in Lejna. They had survived
raiders and the Amonra. They had survived a Firewitch and the Contested Lands and weeks of survival in the Sirmayan Mountains.
He could not lose her now.
It was as Aeduan pressed his fingers to the back of Iseult’s neck, searching for some damage to her spine, that her body tensed beneath his.
He stilled, waiting. Staring.
Then her back arched, face tipping up. She gulped in a single, wheezing breath before her body relaxed beneath his. She opened her eyes.
Golden eyes streaked with green. The only eyes that had ever met Aeduan’s without looking away.
His heart fluttered at the sight of them. His whole body did, a strange feeling of relief and confusion. He tried to pull back, to give her space, but in a movement too quick to resist, she gripped his collar. She yanked him down. His elbows gave way. His chest landed atop hers. Their faces were only inches apart.
Iseult, Iseult, Iseult.
The ice was cold against Aeduan’s hands on either side of her. Wind furrowed into his wet clothes. Water dripped off his face. A drop landed on her cheek and slid sideways. He wanted to brush it away, but he was afraid to move. Afraid that if he did, she would remember who he was. She would recoil and retreat.
And she was so close now. He could see every line of her. The way her jaw sloped to a pointed chin. The way her lips parted to reveal the edge of teeth, a flicker of tongue. But it was her eyes that held his attention—that had always held his attention. Her pupils pulsed in time to her breaths. Her ribs did too, battering against his.
He did not know how he had ever thought her plain.
Iseult’s fingers curled more tightly around his collar. She tugged him closer, until their noses almost touched. Already, hers had turned pink with cold. Her cheeks too.
Iseult, Iseult, Iseult.
Her abdomen contracted beneath his. She curled toward him until she was so near, her breath whispered against his lips.
“Aeduan,” she began. “I—”
The light within the Well winked out. No warning, and abruptly, the forest coalesced around them—as did smoke and fires …
And faces. A hundred soldiers stepping from the northern trees.
Bloodwitch Page 39
