Merik’s whole body tensed, shoulders rising to his ears. Pain—he knew the pain was coming.
“No.” The Fury clamped a hand on Esme’s shoulder. “He comes with me.”
Esme jerked free. She looked fit to destroy Kullen. Her fingers had curled into claws at her sides. “I am not done with him.”
“He is not yours to play with. Release his collar.”
“He is mine. Both of you are.” Again, her arm levered high as if she planned to use her Loom.
But the Fury only laughed, a mocking, chesty sound that echoed across the water. “You cannot control me, Puppeteer. And you cannot hurt me. My power is too immense for your magic, as you well know.”
“I do not need to control you, because I can control him.” Her fingers moved, and Merik moved with them.
It was not as if he wanted to; his feet simply walked toward the Well, and there was nothing he could do to stop them. Cold splashed against his feet, then his ankles, then his calves, and no matter how much he spun his torso or tried to twist back, his feet kept striding. He even stretched and spun his arms, grasping for the shore, but it did nothing. Step, step, step. Splash, splash, splash.
And now it was the Puppeteer’s laughter that echoed across the waves.
Hips, waist, chest. Cold squeezed the air from Merik’s lungs, and soon only a few steps remained before he would be fully submerged. His breath had turned staccato. “Please,” he tried to say, but the sound was instantly swallowed by a gathering storm.
The Fury’s storm.
“Enough.” The Fury rounded on Esme. “Release him.”
“No.” She stood taller. “I want to see what happens if he drowns. Will he come back from such a death, I wonder?”
Merik’s feet took another step. Water lapped against the collar, against his neck.
“Do you want to enter the mountain or not?” the Fury demanded. “The prince is my key inside.”
“Is he?”
Another step. The water reached Merik’s chin, even with his head tipped as high as it would go. And now water slapped against him and choked down his throat, carried by the Fury’s building winds.
“He has agreed to lure the Sightwitch through the mountain door. Release him.”
“The mountain door?” Esme hooted a laugh. “You have not even reached the mountain door! Your soldiers still fight the monsters of the Crypts!”
The sky overhead turned darker with each passing, spluttering breath. No more moon. Only hell-waters and ash.
“Leave,” Esme ordered the Fury, shouting over the growing storm. “Or I will drown him.”
“He is not the only reason I am here—” Merik did not hear the rest of the Fury’s words. A wave crashed into his ears, into his mouth. By the time he could hear or breathe again, Esme was responding.
“I told you,” she spat. “He is not so easy to find as the others.”
“Why?”
“He has no Threads. He is outside the world’s weave.”
“Impossible. Do not lie to me.”
“He was born in the sleeping ice. You, of all people, should remember that.” A withering tone had taken hold of Esme’s voice, and finally—finally—the storm reared back. Less wind, fewer waves. Holding his breath, Merik lowered his chin and twisted his face toward the shore.
The Fury looked puzzled. The shadows on his skin, the snow and the winds—they had faded. “You have found him before.”
“Because he was with others I knew.” Esme gave a dismissive flick of her wrist. “He is no longer.”
“The General will be displeased.”
“Then tell him to come here and say so himself.”
“Oh, I see.” Kullen’s head fell back, and he cackled at the sky. “That still bothers you, does it? You are still bitter he did not bring you with him.”
“No.” The word cracked out, and with it, a pain lightninged through Merik. His back arched. He gasped for air.
Then it was over, as fast as it had come.
“The King,” Esme snipped out, “will bring me to him once he opens the doors.”
“Is that what you tell yourself?” The Fury clucked his tongue. “A lovely delusion, Puppeteer, except he already got what he needed from you. He got me.”
A pause. Stillness and silence softened around the Well. But it passed in an instant, and Merik had just enough time to suck in air before the storm tore loose.
First came all-consuming pain. His muscles locked; his throat screamed.
Then came waves. Wind too, and the sudden hammering of rain. He could not breathe, he could not see. No screaming, only choking and convulsing.
Finally, his feet moved. He stepped below the surface. Three long strides while cold and darkness shuttered over him, stealing sound. He exhaled, bubbles charging out even though he needed to conserve air. There was no conserving anything here. No thinking, no moving. The only thing he could do was drown, electrified by Esme’s cleaving while the last of his life drained away.
Merik lost consciousness, there beneath the waves. He couldn’t say for how long. He could not say how many lungfuls of water he inhaled. All he knew was that the final sparks of pain towed him into Hell … Then he came back into his body, and he was on all fours upon the shore, vomiting.
He was mid-heave, bile-laced water gushing from his throat onto grass, when he realized he was awake. He was alive.
Esme sat several paces away. Her prim pose was a lie; her tight smile a painted mask. Her fingers yanked grass from the earth. Fistful after fistful, she wrenched up the blades and then dropped them at her feet.
Blinking, Merik scanned the forest and the Well, searching for the Fury, but the man was nowhere. Only the usual Cleaved remained, standing guard as always. How long had Merik been underwater? How many times had he drowned?
“No gratitude.” Esme ripped up more grass, smiling a flat-eyed smile at Merik. “They have no gratitude for what I do, Prince. No understanding of the difficulty. They come to me, they demand I find people, and then they leave again. No gratitude.”
It was similar to what the Fury had mentioned, and even in his drowned misery, Merik had enough sense to tuck away that information.
“He has no Threads!” she went on. “I can only find him if he is near Iseult—not that I have told them that.” Another fistful of grass. “She is mine. Not theirs. And you are mine, Prince. Not theirs.”
Merik forced his head to nod and throat to wheeze, “Yours,” before his lungs started seizing again. Dry heaves shook through him.
Esme, however, stopped her grass-shredding, and when she cocked her head sideways, the anger had dimmed in her yellow eyes. “So you will not help the Fury enter the mountain?”
Merik had to wait until his stomach stopped shuddering, his throat stopped coughing. Then he eked out, “No.”
“Then why did the Fury say such a thing?”
Move with the wind, move with the stream. “Because he wants to frighten you. You are the Raider King’s favorite.”
Her flat smile faltered. “And why do you think that, Prince?”
“Because it’s obvious.” Merik sucked in a broken breath, forcing his exhausted eyes to hold Esme’s. “The King sends the Fury on menial errands. Fetching other people? That is the job of a page boy.”
Her nostrils flared. Her lips twitched—the hint of a real smile in her eyes.
“You, however, have an entire city. You have an entire army at your command, while the Fury commands no one.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Her face fell. She wrenched up more grass. “But he does command an army. He leads the Raider King’s southern assault upon the Sightwitch Sister Convent. And once they enter the mountain, he will use the doorway to enter Lovats and claim the hidden Well that should have been mine.”
Merik’s stomach hollowed out at those words. The doorway to enter Lovats. Noden, no.
“The Fury’s soldiers will stream into the city from the underground, and then he will win all the g
lory.” Esme’s lips curled back. “All while I am stuck here, winning nothing. Just waiting for them to find the doorway that leads to Poznin.”
Noden, no, no, no. The world wavered and blurred around Merik. His home was in danger. Never had Lovats fallen, even in the worst of wartime. The Sentries and the water-bridges had always protected it.
But if soldiers attacked from within—if they used these magic portals and poured in from the underground …
Merik’s retching resumed. Bile splattered the grass.
Vivia had planned to lead refugees into the underground. They had thought the newly discovered ancient city a miracle, a space to house all the homeless and hungry and lost. Now the homeless and hungry and lost would be the first to die.
Merik had to stop that. He had to lose this collar, no matter the means, and he had to stop that.
“I never should have cleaved him,” Esme went on. “Not before I made a second Loom. If I hadn’t, then I would be the one now leading the march—”
“Do it.” Merik’s voice graveled out, desperate and wild. “Do it. Beat him to the Crypts, and use me to lure out the Sightwitch. Then I will kill her, and you can go inside before the Fury does.”
Esme eyed Merik askance, as if she thought through what he’d just said. As if she played it out, step by step, and—
“Yes,” she breathed. “Oh, yes, yes, yes. You can fly me there, Prince. And then you can trick the Sightwitch from her hiding place and kill her while I deal with the monsters of the Crypts. I know how to control them—it’s in Eridysi’s diary. Yes, yes, yes! I will lead the advance into the mountain before the Fury can, and then the Raider King will see how much he truly needs me. And oh,” she sighed, “if we are so near to the sleeping ice, perhaps it will suck him in. Eliminate the Fury and all of his memories for good.”
In a lurch of speed, grass flinging around her, Esme pushed to her feet. She was grinning now, an exultant expression with cheeks flushed and eyes aflame. In three skipping hops, Esme reached Merik. Her fingers gripped and tugged and twirled around the collar, as if she teased apart a braid of Threads he could not see. Her eyes flicked quickly side to side. Her heels bounced and her cheeks scrunched with a grin.
Then the collar gave a soft hiss, like steam leaving a kettle. The wood clanked apart, two halves that toppled toward the earth. Neither Merik nor Esme tried to catch them.
Merik grasped for his magic while Esme’s hands shot toward the Well. “You are mine, Prince. You know what pain awaits you if you disobey.”
He nodded. “I will not disobey.” Then, to convince her fully, he bowed his head. “Command me, Puppeteer.”
She giggled, and Merik used the moment to inhale as deeply as he could, fumbling, fumbling. His magic was in there—he could feel the faintest spark alive within his lungs. But it was weak. It was tired. It did not want to wake up.
That was all right, though. He knew that if he fled while Esme was at her Loom, then she would lash him with pain unimaginable. And if he fled at any time, the Fury would sense the magic and return. Merik would simply move with the wind and the stream, allowing his magic to rebuild with each careful step.
His plan, however, was short-lived. For as he lifted his face to watch Esme, still bouncing and laughing and thoroughly absorbed by her dreams of glory to come, a figure darted from the forest. It moved quickly through the lines of Cleaved, immobile and unresponsive to this living person in their midst.
The Northman, his red-tailed knife in hand, vaulted across the grass and stabbed Esme in the back.
FORTY-FIVE
Pain clogged Aeduan’s veins by the time he reached his father’s encampment, a sign the Painstone was almost depleted. He had jogged most of the way, only slowing when terrain or humanity required it. Four times, he had come upon battles in action—and four times, it was his ears that had warned him of what lay ahead. Not his magic.
Which was one more reason to return to his father. With his father, he could find Corlant, and if Corlant had indeed cursed these arrows, then Corlant could also cure him.
At least so Aeduan hoped.
He had known this might be coming, of course: the end of his power, the end of being a Bloodwitch. But caring had seemed an impossibility before. Loss was such an abstract thing until one was pressed beneath it and forced to stare into her dead eyes.
So Aeduan ran faster, pushing the limits of what the Painstone and his magic could still provide, and avoiding battles as they came. Nubrevnans and Marstoks, Baedyeds and Red Sails. Blood and death and violence that he could no longer smell.
He hit the first outskirts of the encampment as the moon began its descent. Snow fell, a fresh dusting atop the permafrost. The air nipped at Aeduan’s face and fingers. He had grown up in this cold, but years away had erased the memory of how it needled into one’s bones.
Thousands of Nomatsis, Purists—and anyone else on the run—were nestled into these snow-glossed spruce trees. A lesson in efficiency, with hundreds of makeshift homes hammered into whatever space the land allowed. Smoke trickled up in pale mists from the loose-woven Nomatsi tents, and in darker ribbons from the sharp-sloped tents that Sirmayan natives and Northerners favored. Frequent campfires, frequent families.
But no soldiers, no raiders. These were the people displaced by war, not the ones who fought in it. Occasional sentries armed with bows and spears were the closest Aeduan ever spotted to fighters of any kind. Yet he’d seen his father’s ranks before, tens of thousands of women and men who sought the end of imperial whips—and tens of thousands of raiders, too. The skirmishes Aeduan had encountered coming here only accounted for a fraction of those soldiers, which begged the question of where the rest of the forces had gone.
As Aeduan strode through a cluster of Nomatsi tents, two older women tending a central fire caught sight of him. Terror widened their eyes. They darted for children nearby, herding them frantically inside.
And Aeduan realized a step too late that he had forgotten to turn his Carawen cloak inside out. In his rush to get here, he had not considered how he might be received. After all, in the past no one had given him a second glance—and some had even recognized him as the Raider King’s son. Now, though, white cloaks were the harbingers of death.
But it was too late to turn the fabric inside out, and now a Nomatsi huntswoman charged his way, a square shield on her back and bow drawn.
Aeduan’s hands lifted. “I’m not here to hurt you—”
“On your knees!”
He lowered to his knees. The huntswoman reached him, and in quick, practiced movements, she slung a rope from her hip and bound him. Aeduan didn’t resist. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to. His magic was too frail—it took him three rib-stretching inhales to even sense a glimmer of this woman’s blood-scent, so there could be no controlling it to escape.
There would also be no healing from any wounds she might try to inflict. Not merely because his magic failed him, but because the Painstone was fading fast. A subtle burn throbbed louder by the second, as if fire ants crawled beneath his skin. As if they gnawed and stung and singed ever closer to the surface.
“King Ragnor,” he tried to say. “I am his son.”
The woman ignored him, and now other Nomatsis crowded in. There was hate and fear in their eyes. Well deserved, and he knew there would be no convincing them that he was not like other monks.
How could he have been so foolish? Exhaustion and pain had leached him of common sense.
A second huntswoman appeared, carrying a canvas sack. She moved for Aeduan, clearly about to yank it over his head, when a voice rang out. “Wait!”
It was a woman’s voice, thin and aged, but instantly, the Nomatsis nearby fell silent. Then the speaker herself hobbled into view, and Aeduan understood why. Beneath a heavy fur, she wore faded Threadwitch black—making her the leader of this tribe.
Frostbite scars marked the folds of her inscrutable face. She was old, she was tired, and she was used to having her own way.
When she came to a stop before Aeduan, she stared down with the same unabashed emptiness Iseult always wore.
“You are a monk.” She spoke Marstoki, clearly assuming Aeduan would not understand her native tongue.
But he did, so he responded in Nomatsi, “I am. And I am also the Raider King’s son.”
No change in her expression. No reaction at all.
“Is it true?” She switched to Nomatsi. “Is Dirdra truly at the Monastery?”
Aeduan frowned. Then shook his head. “Dirdra?”
“A child from my tribe.” At Aeduan’s continued frown, she added, “She is an important child, stolen by raiders. And now we think to be stolen again by the monks.”
Owl. She had to mean Owl.
Aeduan drew in a long breath, grappling for whatever Bloodwitchery remained inside him. It made his lungs burn and his skin scream, but he held tight. And he grasped and he fumbled and he reached until …
Summer heather and impossible choices. This was the woman he had been following. The only survivor from Owl’s tribe. Finally, he had found her, safe beneath the banner of the Raider King.
Aeduan’s lips parted to tell her he had saved Owl before, and that if she was at the Monastery, he would save her again, but before the words could rise, a wind burst through the tents. Strong enough to knock over people, strong enough to sputter the massive fire.
Then small cries sounded, and the Nomatsis scrambled for safety. Not the huntswomen, though, and not the Threadwitch. When the Fury stalked into their encampment, they only straightened their spines and glared.
“What have we here?” the Fury asked, moving past the fire. Snow swarmed around his head, kicked up around his feet. “I hear a monk has arrived in the camp, and it turns out to be the General’s son. I must admit, Bloodwitch, I am half tempted to leave you here after all the effort I wasted trying to find you.” He came to a stop, hands gliding open. “But unfortunately, time is of the essence with the coming assault.”
“You cannot have him,” the Threadwitch said in broken Arithuanian. There was iron in her posture. Ice in her gaze. “I am not finished with him.”
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