Windwitch

by Susan Dennard

  And Vaness would notice Safi’s absence. Sooner or later, she would come looking and see those overflowing canteens.

  “Zander,” the commander called, and the sword dug deeper into Safi’s back. “Help Lev.”

  The giant nodded and twirled about to vanish in the grass, silent. Unnaturally so.

  Safi twisted back toward the commander, ignoring how his blade cut through her gown, how he glared down at her, a shimmering pair of eyes beneath a dark helm.

  “Let me go,” she said, hollowing out her Cartorran vowels, lilting her voice into her most regal accent. His was the accent of Safi’s childhood, the accent of the ignorant, mountain estates. She would crush him with the voice of royalty. “You do not want me as an enemy, Hell-Bard.”

  The sword pressed farther. Pain, distant and cold, bit into her flesh.

  Then a soft sound split the rain. He was laughing. A strange, foreign sound—like a sudden gust of wind. A new rise in the storm.

  When he spoke next, his words were laced with amusement. “No, Safiya fon Hasstrel, you’re right that I don’t want you as an enemy.”

  Hearing her name made her gut drop low. The sense of falling, falling too fast rushed over her.

  “But the reality is,” he continued, oblivious of the bile rising in her throat, “I want your betrothed as an enemy even less. After all, Emperor Henrick holds my noose, so where he points is where I go. And whom he desires is whom I capture.”

  He has won, Safi thought, dumbfounded. Emperor Henrick had destroyed her ship, and now he’d captured her too.

  The Sun card taken by the Emperor in a single poorly placed hand. The Empress card is still in the deck.

  But it wasn’t. The Empress had been drawn too, and that truth pummeled into Safi mere minutes later. The rain had eased into a gentle sprinkle when a new figure entered the clearing. With a crossbow in hand, the third Hell-Bard was by far the smallest of the three.

  “Commander Fitz Grieg,” the Hell-Bard said, her voice female. “We retrieved the empress.”

  Then came the giant. Zander. Across his arms hung a limp Vaness, a thick wooden collar locked around her neck.

  Safi knew that collar. She’d seen it enough times growing up, and terror of it was as much a part of her childhood as the Hell-Bards were. The heretic’s collar is what Hell-Bards put on their prisoners, Uncle Eron always said. The collar cancels out dangerous magic. Even wolves can be transformed into rabbits.

  For half a humid breath, panic set in. There was no escape now. No fighting, no running. Safi had gotten herself in a mess, and there was no one to come to her rescue.

  What would Iseult do?

  She had her answer immediately. It was Habim’s favorite lesson of all: Iseult would learn her opponents. She would learn her terrain, and then she would choose her battlefields where she could.

  “How long will the empress be unconscious, Lev?” The commander addressed the smallest Hell-Bard while he bound Safi’s wrists behind her back with a wet, chafing rope. She didn’t resist, she didn’t fight.

  But for all her seeming pliancy, Safi kept her fists curled inward, her wrists as wide as they could be.

  “It was a large dose,” said the Hell-Bard named Lev. Her voice was husky and slurred. An accent of the Pragan slums. “And her majesty’s a small woman. I’d say she’ll be out for at least a few hours.”

  “Can you carry her that long?” the commander asked, now pitching his question toward the giant as he gave a final testing tug on Safi’s ropes.

  Pain lanced up Safi’s arms. Her fists were already aching. But she wouldn’t release. Not until the commander had moved away.

  “Yes, Commander,” Zander replied. His voice resounded so low, it was almost lost to the subsiding rain. “But we did pass a settlement an hour back. We might find a horse there.”

  “Or at the very least,” Lev chimed in, “shoes for the ladies.”

  “Good enough,” the commander agreed, and he finally—finally—moved away.

  Safi relaxed her hands. Relief, small but there all the same, sang up her arms. Blood began to pump once more into her fingers.

  A settlement meant a stop, and a stop meant an opportunity. Especially if Safi could learn something about her opponents before then. She hadn’t initiated this, but she sure as hell-fires could complete it.

  So when the commander barked, “Stand, Heretic,” Safi stood.

  And when he barked, “Walk, Heretic,” Safi walked.

  EIGHT

  After leaving the Purist compound, Aeduan retraced his steps through Nubrevna’s pine forests. He had no destination in mind, but since Corlant had two men tracking him, Aeduan needed to look as if he had a purpose.

  He let them follow for a time before pushing his witchery to its full power. Faster, faster he ran until the men vanished from his senses entirely. Until at last he was far enough away to know he could pause undisturbed in a clearing where underbrush grew thick but shafts of cloudy light streamed in. Here, Aeduan examined the arrowhead.

  Nothing. No blood-scent, just as the Threadwitch had no blood-scent.

  There were different smells, though. Faint and mingling, as if others had handled the arrowhead. Corlant’s scent hovered deep beneath the bloodstains. And then, lacing over the top, was a smell like hearth fires and teardrops.

  Yet nothing for the Threadwitch Iseult.

  Aeduan wanted to know why. Did she lack a blood-scent entirely, or was he simply unable to smell it?

  He ran his thumb over the arrowhead, and a memory unfolded. Hazy at first. A face made of moonlight and shadows. An ancient lighthouse and a sandy beach. A night sky, with the Threadwitch’s face at its heart.

  She had outwitted Aeduan that night, distracted him long enough to ensure her friend got to safety. Then she’d leaped off the lighthouse in a jump that would have killed her if Aeduan hadn’t followed. Yet she’d known he would, and he had ultimately broken her fall.

  After, when she’d spared Aeduan’s life on the beach, her face had been cinched with pain and blood had bloomed on a bandage at her biceps.

  An arrow wound, Aeduan knew now, and one that somehow connected her to Corlant. To a foul Purist priest in his father’s employ.

  Aeduan’s breath loosed. His fingers curled over the arrowhead.

  He was left with two choices, two ghosts he could try to hunt: the girl with no blood-scent or the talers with no trail.

  Then the decision was made for him. He smelled his silver talers.

  Before Aeduan had abandoned his iron lockbox in the hollowed-out tree, he had spilled his own blood across the coins. For his own blood he knew; his own blood he could always follow. Yet until this moment, he’d been unable to even sense those stained coins—much less track them down and reclaim them. It was as if they had been hidden beneath salamander fibers, and only now could Aeduan smell them.

  There it was again, a slight tickling against his witchery, a lure bobbing atop a stream.

  Aeduan was sprinting in an instant, a magic-fueled speed that was twice as fast as before and not maintainable for long. But close. The scent of the talers was too close for him to risk losing it.

  Distantly, Aeduan noticed other blood-scents. Foul ones. Tarnished ones. Men were so rarely a threat to him, so he ignored them and charged on. Over a stream, through a thicket of shriveling morning glories, then straight across a fern-covered clearing.

  It wasn’t until a bear trap clamped shut just below Aeduan’s right knee, until iron teeth scratched against bone and the scent of his own blood gushed through the forest, that Aeduan realized he had charged directly onto a Nomatsi road.

  Idiot. Thrice-damned idiot. He might not be able to navigate Nomatsi roads, but he could certainly avoid them. Now, whether or not he wanted his body to heal, it would. He could not pick and choose when that part of his witchery awoke. If he was hurt, his magic healed him.

  Blood gushed, staining the pine needles and ferns to red and crawling outward in a lopsided sunburst to
where, mere paces away, his coins waited. A satchel full. No more than forty if he had to guess.

  Forty out of fifteen hundred.

  Aeduan considered the three coins glinting in the weak sun. They had tumbled from the sack, silver stained with brown. Taunting. Laughing at him.

  Two weeks of tracking the royal talers, and this was where the hunt had led him. To a clearing of bear traps, a ruined right leg, and too few talers to even buy a horse.

  Aeduan’s teeth ground, squeaking in his ears as he dragged his gaze down to the bear trap. His leg was a mess. Nothing was recognizable below the knee. His entire calf was torn to the bone, strips of muscle and flesh hanging free.

  Flies would come soon.

  There was pain too, though Aeduan could ignore that. After all, pain was nothing new.

  He sucked in a long breath, letting it expand in his belly. Roll up his spine. It was the first thing a new monk learned: how to breathe, how to separate. A man is not his mind. A man is not his body. They are merely tools so that a man may fight onward.

  Aeduan exhaled, counting methodically and watching his blood trickle out. With each new number and each hiss of exhaled air, the world slid away. From the breeze on Aeduan’s shinbone to the flies landing on hanks of muscle to the blood oozing outward—it all drifted into the background.

  Until Aeduan stopped feeling anything at all. He was nothing more than a collection of thoughts. Of actions. He was not his mind. He was not his body.

  As the last of Aeduan’s breath slipped from his lungs, he bent forward and gripped the trap’s jaws. A grunt, a burst of power, and the iron groaned wide.

  Slowly—and fighting the nausea that washed upward in vast booms of heat—Aeduan pulled his leg from the trap.

  Clang! It wrenched shut, flinging bits of flesh across the clearing. Aeduan scanned quickly around, but there was nothing else to avoid. He smelled corpses nearby, but corpses posed no threat. So he sat, witchery already healing him, one drop of blood at a time.

  It took so much energy, though. Too much. And darkness was creeping in.

  Yet right before unconsciousness could take hold, a smell like damp smoke tickled into his nose. Like campfires doused by rain. Against Aeduan’s greatest wish and will, his mother’s face drifted across his memory—along with the last words she’d ever said to him.

  Run, my child, run.

  * * *

  After stretching her Threadwitchery senses as far as they could reach, and upon realizing no other Cleaved or hunters or life of any kind lurked nearby, Iseult sawed herself free from the net.

  She hit the ground with a thump that she barely managed to roll into, then explored the area inch by inch. All signs pointed to a Nomatsi tribe having recently passed through. They’d made a sprawling camp in the woods, and judging by the traps and the tracks and the supplies scattered throughout, they had left in a hurry.

  Too much of a hurry to disable their Nomatsi road, yet whatever had sent them fleeing, it was gone now. So Iseult grabbed anything useful she could find, grateful she wouldn’t have to meet anyone. Wouldn’t have to prove she was as Nomatsi as they were.

  As she searched, she made a mental list of what she needed. Oil for my cutlass. A whetstone. More portable eating utensils. A larger rucksack to hold it all.

  She moved deeper into the camp, pausing every few steps. Stretching out her awareness and feeling for any Threads, for any living.

  It was the first lesson Habim had ever drilled into Iseult: to constantly—constantly—make note of who was around her. Sometimes he would follow her, just to see how long it took her to notice him trailing behind. Slinking in closer. Slipping a blade from his belt.

  The first time he’d done it, she hadn’t noticed until he was almost upon her. It was his Threads that had given him away in the end. Yet he hadn’t expected her to sense him at all, and Iseult had realized in that moment that she had an advantage.

  She could see the weave of the world. At any moment, she could retreat inside herself and simply feel who was around her. What Threads twirled where, which people felt what, and how it might or might not connect to her.

  She practiced that awareness. She became obsessed with it, really, and retreating into the weave every few minutes eventually became a natural instinct. Her range grew wider too. The more she reached, the farther and farther she found her Threadwitchery senses could go.

  By the tenth time that Habim had tracked Iseult through the Veñaza City streets, she was able to notice him a full block away—and then sneak into an alley before he could catch her.

  Today, in this abandoned campsite, Iseult moved no differently. Every few heartbeats, she sensed the texture of the forest. The placement of any Threads.

  No one was near.

  So piece by piece, Iseult found what she needed. Kicked under stones or hidden beneath grass—any forgotten item she deemed useful was stuffed into her satchel. Firewitched matches, a cooking spit, a ceramic bowl, and a tiny whetstone.

  But the best discovery of all was an abandoned reed trap in a nearby creek. Iseult dizzily dragged it free to find three graylings and a trout flapping inside. She scaled them. She cleaned them. Then she set out to find shelter against the coming rain.

  A lip of limestone was the first spot she discovered, and with the remains of a fire left behind, she deemed it as good enough as any for a campsite. Just in time too, for rain was slicing under the overhang, feeding the moss and vines that had crept inside the tiny shelter. Every few minutes, lightning cracked. Flashed over the washed-out campfire that Iseult now coaxed to life.

  Iseult cooked a grayling, her eyes unfocused as she watched the skin blacken. It wasn’t until she eased the fish off the fragile flame that she realized she’d lost her coins. For three cracks of lightning, she debated what to do.

  She could leave them wherever they might be. Except Mathew’s words whispered, There’s no predicting what might come, and money is a language all men speak.

  Fine. Back she would have to go. First, though, she would eat her grayling. Moist, delicious, fresh, she devoured it in seconds. Then she cooked and ate the second fish with a bit more care, a bit more attention to pleasure.

  Eventually, the rain eased to a drizzle, so after cooking the remaining two fish—for later consumption—she doused the fire and retraced her steps. All the way back to the bear traps.

  All the way back to the Bloodwitch.

  For several long minutes, Iseult examined him. He was clearly unconscious, stretched flat across the mud. His clothes were sodden and bloodied. His leg was a shredded mess.

  A thousand questions scurried through Iseult’s mind. Yet none were so bright as the command: Run.

  She didn’t move, though. Didn’t even breathe, and without Safi there to guide her, without Safi’s Threads to show her what she should feel, Iseult could only wonder why her lungs bulged against her ribs. Why her heart hammered so fast.

  The sack of coins waited at the clearing’s heart. Even with the rain having washed away parts of the scene, Iseult could make out what steps the Bloodwitch had taken. She saw tracks where he’d stumbled into the clearing from the west. Then came longer, deeper steps, where he had darted straight for the coins.

  He is tracking the silver, Iseult guessed, and though the why and the how of it eluded her, she couldn’t stop the certainty prickling down her spine. The silver talers were important; the Bloodwitch wanted them.

  As Habim always said, Use every resource available.

  Cautiously, Iseult entered the clearing. When the Bloodwitch didn’t stir, even with the soft squelch of earth beneath her feet, she walked more boldly. Upon reaching her sack of coins, she peered inside. They glinted up at her, just as she remembered, their double-headed eagles dusted with brown. Coated in blood.

  He must have tracked the blood.

  Next, Iseult turned to the Bloodwitch. A stained bear trap sat within arm’s reach, buzzing with flies. Hanks of skin and sinew clung to its closed claws. The Bloodw
itch had stepped right into it, and now he was healing.

  Dirt and dead flesh flowed from the furrows of his ruined muscle. It made an audible crunching and sucking sound atop the rain.

  It was incredible to watch. Inhuman, really, this gift to heal one’s body. The power of the Void. The power of a demon.

  Yet when Iseult glanced at the Bloodwitch’s sleeping, dirt-streaked face, she didn’t see a demon lying limp before her.

  She swallowed.

  Despite having faced Aeduan thrice now, this was the first time she was able to look at him. To see him.

  It was not what she expected.

  Perhaps because in sleep, there was no tension of muscles about to attack. No disdainful nose in the air. No predatory awareness to cloak his eyes.

  His face seemed peaceful, with his head tipped sideways and the lines of his neck stretched long. With his pale lips slightly open and his long, thick eyelashes fluttering on each breath.

  He was younger than Iseult had imagined. No older than twenty, if she had to guess. Yet he felt old, with his voice so gruff. His language so formal.

  It was in the way he carried himself too, as if he’d walked for a thousand years and planned to walk a thousand more.

  This young man had stalked Iseult through Veñaza City. Had smiled cruelly at her, his crystal eyes swirling red. Then he had saved her too, in Lejna. With a salamander cloak and a single phrase: Mhe varujta. Trust me as if my soul were yours.

  At the time, Iseult had wondered how he had known those words. How he had spoken Nomatsi like a native.

  But now … now she could see. With his rain-sodden clothes plastered to a chest that rose and fell, there was no missing the lean shape of him. He was muscled, yes, but not bulky. This was a frame built for speed.

  It was also a Nomatsi frame, just as the skin revealed through the tears in his breeches was Nomatsi skin. Pale as the moon.

  Mhe varujta.

  He wasn’t a full tribesman, though. His eyes were not folded as deeply as Iseult’s, his hair was not black as the night sky.