It didn’t help that Owl made no attempt to pretend she felt anything other than disdain for Iseult, and Iseult was not particularly skilled at pretending she felt anything other than disdain for the little girl. Oh, she could keep her face blank easily enough, but then her words tended to snap. And if she managed to keep her voice calm, then her face sank into a frown.
Currently, though, they were in a standoff. Iseult wanted Owl to bathe. Owl wanted nothing of the sort. Her ancient gown had once been sage, now it was pure brown. Her skin fared no better.
“We’re all dirty,” Iseult explained. “Look.” She pointed to the washbasin, swirling with filth. “I just washed all of that off of me.”
Owl glowered at the basin, Threads gray with stubborn hate.
“I’ll get clean water for you, of course,” Iseult added. “Just like I got for me after Aeduan left. Don’t you want to be clean too, Owl? Remove all that dirt?”
“Dirt is good.” Owl stomped her foot.
And Iseult sighed. Of course an Earthwitch would say that, and at this point, Iseult was too tired to keep arguing about it. Let Aeduan deal with her when he got back.
When Owl realized she had won the argument, triumphant pink flew up her Threads. She even flung an arrogant smirk Iseult’s way before scrambling from the bed to the window.
Goddess, she was awful. A demon-child to the core—and this truth was only proven all the more several minutes later. Iseult had just finished sopping stray water off the floor, when Owl suddenly smacked her palm against the window.
“Dead,” she snarled.
Iseult flung toward her, alarmed.
“Dead,” the girl said again, smacking harder at the glass. Loud enough to draw stares from the courtyard below. “Dead, dead, dead—”
“Enough!” Iseult scooted across the room, but Owl jumped off the bed and darted to the center of the room. Then she began to stomp.
“Dead.” Stomp. “Dead.” Stomp. “Dead.” With each stomp, the room shook. The mirror, the washbasin, the window—they all rattled in time to her feet. And with each stomp, her Threads grew more frenzied, jumping between shades of fiery fury and tan confusion, of slate fear and purple want. There were even strands of blue sadness to twine between it all.
It made no sense, and it also was not going to work. It must sound like an earthquake in the room below, and if Iseult couldn’t get Owl to settle down, there might be an actual earthquake to contend with soon. Or at least a lot of angry soldiers at the door.
“Stop.” She lifted her hands, palms out. “Owl, stop—you have to stop. You’re snagging the weave!” She approached cautiously, hands never dropping, and this time, when she reached for her, Owl did not pull away. Instead, she gave a final stomp, pointed a finger at the window, and declared, “Dead.”
For several long breaths, Iseult did not move. She reached out with her magic, breath held, sensing for any Threads approaching. But the Moon Mother favored her, for no one near seemed to have noticed Owl’s tantrum. In fact, it sounded like a storm was rolling in, so perhaps people thought Owl’s stomping had been nothing more than thunder on the horizon.
“Outside,” Owl said, the first word that was not dead in several minutes, so Iseult took the hint. She clambered over the bed and peered outside. Darkness had moved in, forcing her to squint against the brightness of the room glaring on the glass.
Sure enough, at the heart of the square below, the dead alder thrust up toward the sky. Raindrops speckled its pale trunk, one by gathering one. “That was here when we arrived,” Iseult said. “Why does it bother you now?”
“Danger,” Owl explained, and a bolt of fear briefly shimmered up her Threads.
Iseult’s lips pursed. She could see them puckering in the glass. A Threadwitch does not frown.
“I suppose the storm could knock it into the inn,” she offered, schooling her face. “Is that what you’re worried about? Surely after all these years it would have fallen if…” She trailed off. A figure had appeared beside the tree. A man in a beige hood with Threads that shone bright as sunshine.
Trickster.
He paused on the near side of the tree, head dipping back as if to look up. To glance Iseult’s way—
She jerked away from the window and twirled around on the bed until her back was against the wall. Her heart thudded behind her rib cage. Her eyes met Owl’s.
The girl nodded.
Iseult had lost Trickster, though, hadn’t she? Yes, yes, she absolutely had, so how in the Moon Mother’s great weave had he found her again?
She stretched her magic wide, grasping, reaching—there. His Threads scissored into her awareness. He was entering the inn by the front entrance, yet he had veered right into the main room. Maybe he doesn’t know I’m here. Maybe he isn’t looking for me at all. Maybe he just needs a place to stay.
Unlikely, she decided, and not worth risking. She needed to end this situation before it could even begin—and the last thing she wanted was to get trapped in this tiny, claustrophobic room. Or worse, for Owl to get trapped in here, panic, and destroy the inn outright.
Burn him, suggested the Firewitch, but Iseult tamped that down. She was logic, she was focus, and there would be no flames. There would be no emotion at all.
The hall outside is dimly lit. The faucet at the end is beside a back stairwell. Unlit. Iseult could wait in those stairs, watch from the shadows. If the man approached, she could head him off before he reached their door.
“Owl,” she said, easing back over the bed. Calm, casual, nothing to see here. “I am going out into the hall for a moment. Lock the door behind me and stay quiet. Can you do that?”
To her vast relief, Owl nodded and sank to the floor. She must have sensed Iseult’s urgency—and how could she not? Despite Iseult’s cool words, she was creeping toward the door, hunched practically in half to avoid the window. She paused at the hook where her cutlass and belt hung, but no. Even if Marstoks allowed Nomatsis to carry weapons in public, tensions were too high. It was not worth the risk.
Besides, Iseult could fell a man barehanded if she had to.
“I’ll be back soon,” she whispered. Then she slipped into the hall. The lock clinked into place behind her.
Twelve careful steps carried Iseult to the end of the hall. The faucet dripped as she passed, then she was to the stairwell. It was perfect for hiding. Iseult dipped into the shadows, magic casting outward once more …
The man was ascending the stairs, his Threads shot through with the green concentration of someone on the hunt. He moved fluidly. One step, two step, three—all the way up until he prowled into the third-floor hall. Slower now, he approached the door on the balls of his feet. Well trained and silent in this growing storm.
If Iseult did not have her witchery, she never would have sensed him coming.
As it was, this close, his Threads burned bright as a full moon. And the longer she stared, the more she sensed a charge crackling beneath the surface. Like a river in winter, where a riptide of dark currents churned at the slow, icy heart.
Trickster, she thought again. Then a heartbeat later, Danger.
The man aimed straight for room thirteen, no hesitation, no pause—and any lingering doubts Iseult had that he was here for her were gone in an instant. He sank to a crouch before the door, then he shrugged his cloak off one shoulder.
A one-shot Firewitched pistol rested in a holster at his hip.
The man’s Threads shrank in tightly, pulled taut by single-minded intensity. And in that moment, as his arm stretched long overhead and his wrist cocked back as if to knock—at a normal height, so that anyone who opened the door would be taken by surprise—Iseult realized she had not told Owl what to do. She had not said, Do not answer if you hear a knock.
Owl would open the door. The man would attack.
Iseult moved. No stealth, only speed, she charged from the staircase into the hall. She reached the man right as startled turquoise ignited his Threads. Right as he angled tow
ard her and grabbed for the pistol.
A front kick to his arm. The pistol flew. Then she pivoted and drove her knee into the back of his neck. He snapped forward, a shout breaking loose. His face hit the door.
But Iseult wasn’t done. Burn him, burn him, burn him. His hood had slipped back, revealing pale hair. She grabbed it, yanking his face toward her. Then she kneed him again—this time in the temple. Over and over and over, until his body went limp. His Threads hazed into unconsciousness.
For several seconds, Iseult stood there, planted above him and staring down. Her pulse boomed in her ears, her breath came in panting gasps. She needed to move. Needed to get out of the hallway before anyone saw her here. Already, curious Threads were moving toward doorways in the rooms nearby. Any moment now, someone would arrive. She was Nomatsi; he looked Cartorran. This would not go over well.
Except Iseult also couldn’t simply leave this man here. He would wake up eventually, and then he would attack again.
Burn him, burn him, burn him.
Her nose twitched. Threads approached from downstairs. No time, no time.
“Owl?” she called. “Open the door, please.”
Immediately, the door swooshed back, as if the little girl had been waiting there all along. Iseult pushed inside, grabbed the man by the shoulders, and dragged.
She had no idea how she moved him all on her own. He was not a large man, but dead weight was dead weight. Thank the goddess for the storm outside, hiding the scraping, scratching, heaving sound his body made across the floorboards.
All the while, Owl watched on, her Threads curious and, for some reason Iseult did not want to consider, thoroughly delighted.
Iseult got the man mostly inside. She dropped his shoulders, dove for his feet, and then curled his legs up. Right as she got his boots in far enough to shut the door, a person stepped into the hall.
It was the man from the faucet, his Threads now alight with horror.
“He drank too much,” Iseult said. Then she slammed the door and fell to her knees.
NINETEEN
Aeduan stared at the tier ten, unmoving. Unblinking. The room, the monks, their voices and their blood-scents—it all melted back into distant nothing. Elbows jostled, eyes glared, but Aeduan did not leave. He did not look away.
Ten thousand talers for his father’s head.
A king’s ransom indeed.
Two weeks ago, Aeduan would have taken the assignment without hesitation. He would have updated his father immediately via Voicewitch, and then he would have found a way to collect all that coin.
So, so much coin.
He would have had no qualms about faking the bounty. His father’s cause mattered more than the crude morality of the Monastery. Nor would Aeduan have cared if more monks died along the way, trying to win the coin for themselves.
Life was the price of justice, and Ragnor’s cause was a righteous one. The time to end imperial tyranny was now. Two weeks ago, Aeduan had believed that without question. No cracks in the stone, no weakness in his foundation. He was the son of Ragnor the Raider King, and his sole job was to raise coin for the cause.
Which was why he should take this tier ten. He should take it right now and then find a Voicewitch.
Instead, Aeduan turned away from the wall. The paper and its words smeared into nothing. He left the common room.
Rain beat down in the cloister, the storm having risen to full force. Clouds blocked out the sunset, darkening dusk to a false midnight. Aeduan walked along the covered edge, staring at leaves bent by raindrops.
He left the outpost, where his gaze skimmed with unseeing eyes over water splashing on the quay. Frothy with dirt, it pooled fast. He might have left the monks behind, he might be striding beside Lake Tirla while rain soaked him through, but he was not moving forward.
He was pulled in three directions. The inn was one way. His father was another, and the Monastery assignments another too, leaving Aeduan well and truly caught now. No different from the man with the lamb in the story—and also like that man, Aeduan knew he could not evade Lady Fate’s gaze forever.
She would find him; she would make him choose.
The people pulled Aeduan from his thoughts. They fled past, racing from the docks and sprinting for buildings beside the quay—and that was when he noticed the waves crashing up from the lake. Ships teetered and tottered, slamming against one another with wood-crunching force.
Rain slashed harder and harder with each passing second. The wind slashed harder too.
The animals, though, were what set Aeduan to running. Dogs, cats, and rats by the hundreds poured out of structures and flooded the street. They circled the lake, leaving the city. Had Aeduan been alone in Tirla, he would have followed. Had he been the Aeduan of two weeks ago, he would have abandoned the city and left it to the storm.
He was not that Aeduan, though. This Aeduan was caught between starvation and the slaughter. This Aeduan was not yet ready to choose.
Wind and rain howled loud as a nightmare. Street signs vanished behind the rain, building fronts faded into gusting darkness. Only his familiarity with the city kept him moving onward in the right direction.
And the Painstone. Without it, he would have been trapped at the outpost, possibly even unconscious by now. He certainly would not have been able to face the hail. Small rocks that kicked off the cobblestones, spraying water and slamming into Aeduan’s legs, chest. They expanded the farther he jogged, soon growing as large as his fists. These shattered; explosive shards that smashed through awnings, carriages, and soon, if he wasn’t careful, would smash through his skull too.
Aeduan veered left. The crowded roofs above this street gave some respite from the hail. Short-lived, though, for the road soon ended and he was on another wide artery aiming uphill. He covered his head with the satchel of clothes and ran faster.
Then lightning shredded down. It wiped away Aeduan’s sight and blanked out his hearing—and the thundercrack that followed almost toppled him. It was only the beginning, though. Again, again, the lightning thrashed, and the city quaked beneath its power.
Aeduan hurtled forward.
At the periphery of his rain-streaked vision, he saw a corpse. Bloodied, flattened, felled by hailstone. Then a second, seared by lightning. There was nothing he could do for them; all he could do was keep moving.
He drew in his magic. Weaker than he would have hoped, but something. Enough to propel his limbs deeper into the storm. Left, right, no remaining sense of which streets he careened up, only knowing he aimed vaguely toward the inn.
Right as his feet splashed over fallen wind-flags, bright bursts of color amidst the shadows, a new sound hit his ears. Or perhaps it was not a sound so much as a tremble in his ribs, coming from the north.
He glanced back, squinting against the rain and hail. Then he ground to a halt. A cyclone, black and snaking, writhed across the lake. It moved impossibly fast toward Tirla.
In moments, it reached the ships, smashing through them as easily as a cleaver through bone. It was headed this way. It would reach Aeduan if he did not move.
He ran, pulling any magic he could find. Every ounce of his witchery, every drop of blood he drove into his muscles. Faster than before, faster than any human could run.
But it still was not enough. Nothing could outpace this cyclone. It was on his heels now. He could hear it getting closer, crushing buildings one by one. Great eruptions of wood and stone, and all while the winds screamed louder.
Aeduan could not escape it. His only hope was to take cover. Something stone, something strong. He dove sideways, aiming for the nearest building. Bodies, bodies—how were there so many bodies? He reached steps leading to a front door and dropped to the ground beside them. Then he curled into a ball and covered the back of his neck with his hands.
Wind crushed over him. Water gushed into his mouth. Hail the size of bricks punched against him, and he felt two ribs break. His left finger knuckles broke too. Any moment now, the
full cyclone would hit him. The building above him would topple down. He wouldn’t die, but others would. Many others.
Except the attack never came.
Instead, the storm ended entirely. Between one shuddering breath and the next, the winds broke off. Hail stopped falling. Rain faded to quiet, a mere echoing throb in Aeduan’s ears. The eye of the storm, he thought, and he unfurled, ready to resume running.
Yet as he straightened, his broken ribs numbed by the Painstone, a blood-scent rippled into his awareness. Black wounds and broken death. Pain and filth and endless hunger.
Cleaving.
Instantly, Aeduan was on his feet, rounding backward. He unsheathed his sword, ready to face whatever madness now approached amidst the calm. When he turned, though, he did not find a man corrupted by magic. This man, towering and pale haired, strode toward Aeduan with clarity and purpose. His eyes shone black, rim to rim, and lines slithered across his skin. Yet with each step that he prowled closer, the more the darkness shrank.
Like maggots wriggling into a corpse, the shadows vanished. The cleaving scent vanished too, until all that remained was a young man whose blood smelled of rocky shores and gasping lungs. But there were other blood-scents tangled inside him, like a knot of worms pulled from the soil. Hundreds of them, too many for Aeduan to tease apart or catalog.
He’d never faced anything like it.
“Are you the Bloodwitch?” the man called in Nubrevnan, still approaching. His now-blue eyes scraped up Aeduan. Then down. “You certainly look like him.”
Aeduan sank into a fighting stance.
This only made the young man smile, a horrifying thing that stretched his face into inhuman proportions. Half his right ear was missing, blackened blood crusting the edges.
“Come no closer,” Aeduan called.
“Or what?” the man drawled, though he did at least pause his advance. “Your sword can do nothing to me. You should know this, Bloodwitch. Unless…” His head tipped sideways. He tapped his chin. “Unless your father hasn’t told you who I am.”
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