Chapter 5, Witchlight
Fissures in the ice always follow the grain...
Chapter 5
They left when the full moon was at its peak. It was when the legends said Noden was at His strongest. Certainly Vivia’s magic was. The Jadansi practically screamed at her as she, Vaness, and Cam carefully trekked to the magic door. Little Fox, do not leave us! Use us! Take us! Carry us with you into the mountain!
Vivia exhaled against it. No, she thought, while aloud she said: “Draw your weapons.” The jungle around them thrummed with salted heat and cicadas. So loud, she didn’t hear the sound of steel ringing when she unsheathed her cutlass.
She exhaled again, this time more forcefully as she shifted the weight of a pack on her shoulders. Food, healing supplies, water—three days’ worth was within. Hopefully it would be enough for whatever waited ahead.
Because they were doing this. The water couldn’t stop Vivia; nor could fear. Weeks of being trapped in Noden’s Gift, and now she could finally move, flow into a new riverbank, return to the plateau she’d always called home.
The magic door shimmered before them. No guards because Shanna had summoned them away for a shift change. The new group of twelve would arrive soon.
The noises of animal life shifted almost imperceptibly. The ferns thickened. The doorway glowed like the Jadansi under moonlight, silvery blue and wavering. “It’s bigger,” Cam said quietly.
“We can still turn back,” was Vaness’s reply, left hand kneading at the Witchmark on her right.
“No.” Vivia’s grip tightened on the cutlass, and with her free hand, she checked her collar. Her buttons. But all were in order. There was no reason to stand here simply staring. “I’m going in.”
“No!” Cam barked at the same time Vaness hissed: “That is not what we agreed upon.”
And it wasn’t, but Vivia also had never actually planned to let Cam go through first. The boy had no magic and his comfort with a blade was nonexistent. So before he or the Empress could actually stop her, Vivia leaped through.
The magic took hold, sudden and staggering. Like diving into a frozen lake, all the breath punched from Vivia’s lungs. All thoughts punched out of her mind. Even her soul seemed to depart momentarily as she was torn apart . . .
Then assembled again.
She almost toppled to her knees. She definitely dropped her cutlass. It clanged on stone as cold air wept against her, damp and ancient. She rubbed at her eyes, blinking.
It was a cavern—which she’d expected based on Cam’s descriptions. But hearing versus seeing . . . Well, it had sounded like something out of a child’s tale, and now that child’s tale was real.
The cavern before her could have held the entirety of Queen’s Hill inside it. Twice. And all of it was filled with fibrous strands of ice that looked like veins across a dying body. Some of the ice was a pure, almost glowing blue.
And some of it was black, as if cleaving.
Yet this was not the explosive cleaving Vivia knew, so much as the gradual, unabating kind that her spies said swept across the lands northwest of here.
Sheer dread rolled through Vivia. A feeling she recalled from the first time she’d seen the Sentries of Noden. How can such things exist? she’d asked her mother. What magic can make something like this possible?
Noden’s magic, her mother had replied. Anything is possible with a god on your side.
At the time, Vivia had thought her mother meant that Nubrevna was divinely chosen. Now, though, she had seen too much of the world to believe such things. And she had met the enemy and befriended her.
It was hard to see Nubrevna as holy if that in turn made Vaness un-holy.
You’re thinking in circles, she thought. Get up. Keep moving.
A flash. A frizz. Cam stumbled through the doorway. “We”—gasp—“made it.” He doubled over. His sword clattered to the granite next to Vivia’s.
A heartbeat later, Vaness arrived too. Her flail swung. Her eyes bulged with incredulity, and like both Cam and Vivia, she gulped in air as if she were drowning. She, however, didn’t lose her weapon.
Cam was the first to recover from the journey. He leaped up and whooped. A boyish bound, an effusive sound. One that the Empress immediately cut off. She lurched at Cam, grabbing his arm. “Hush,” she snarled. “This is a place of silence.”
Vivia absolutely agreed. Cam’s cry hadn’t echoed, so much as pinged and plowed, skittering off their platform and vanishing into the abyss beyond—where she was almost certain the ice was now responding. It cracked. It groaned. It oozed frozen air this way with tendrils of white fog to drift toward them.
Vaness dipped closer to Vivia. “This is not how it looked when I was here,” she whispered. “There was a storm raging—an actual storm, with lightning. And there were winds and rain. And rocks fell while the ground shook.”
“It looks like I remember it,” Cam inserted, his voice now a whisper too. “But the ice—that’s new. It wasn’t there before. Not like this, anyway. It was confined to the Sightwitches’ tombs.”
Cam had described those tombs. A place where Sightwitches went instead of death, so their goddess could take back the magic she needed.
Vivia retrieved her cutlass. She sheathed it, and noted that while Cam did the same, the Empress did not. Her flail remained a flail.
Vivia tiptoed to the edge of the platform surrounding their magic door. It was twenty paces long, and beyond was nothing. Only darkness and black-veined ice. “That’s where the spirit swifts live,” Cam whispered, joining her. “Or at least, where they used to be.”
She nodded but didn’t answer. Cold coiled off the strands of ice. Threatening. Hungry. Certainly no starry bird creatures flew there now. No magical beings made of pure Aether.
Vivia was almost glad not to see them. This place was already too disquieting and uncanny.
“Which way do we go?” She looked at Cam. Then motioned to the two paths that carved from their platform. One ascended sharply with rough-hewn stairs. The other hugged the cavern wall and remained blessedly flat.
“Give me a second, Majesty. It’s . . . well, the cavern’s the same but different.” The boy started muttering to himself, striding toward the flat path. “Me and Ry came in over there . . . which means that’s the way to the Convent. Then Ry took us . . .” He screwed his eyes shut.
And Vaness, who still stood beside the door where magic could radiate around her, frowned at Vivia. Her nostrils flared in a way that said: Should we not have figured this out before we stepped inside?
Vivia frowned right back. It wasn’t Cam’s fault the space had filled with ice since he’d come here two months ago.
“That way!” Cam flung up a hand, eyes springing wide. “The door to the Convent is that big shadow over there, and we went left outside of it. So the under-city must be between here and that shadow.”
“Except there is nothing between here and that ‘big shadow over there,’ Cam.” Vaness sounded fully furious now.
“No, no. There is! I swear it, Imperial Majesty. It’s just blocked by that column of ice.”
“And how,” Vivia inserted before Vaness could fume any more, “do we remove the ice, Cam?”
“I . . . don’t know.”
“Fine.” Vivia kept her eyes on the Empress, warning. “We will determine that when we reach it. Let’s move.” She checked her pack. Checked her cutlass in its sheath. Then set off without checking if the others followed. Because of course they did, Cam with a noisy bounce in his stride and Vaness with lethal silence.
No one spoke as they moved onto the narrow path overlooking the abyss. The outcropping of granite was only as wide as Vivia’s left arm was long, so she kept herself pressed as closely to the cavern wall as she could. She didn’t look down; she looked only straight ahead. And Noden’s breath, it was cold. Her fingers were soon numb from clutching at the wall.
For thirty paces she moved this way, until she reached a column of ice she would have sworn hadn’t been there a few minutes before. She slung to a stop, staring at the cold curling off it. At the fathomless blue of it striated with black. Vivia could fit around in theory, but it would be tight.
And it was a long way down.
Infinitely long, if Cam’s stories were to be believed.
Vivia wished suddenly she’d thought to include a rope in her sack of supplies. Such an obvious thing to bring, yet she’d been so fixated on after the mountain—on Lovats and her father . . .
What a stupid, foolish oversight for a woman who wanted to be queen.
“Let me go first,” Cam whispered, carving through her thoughts. Without waiting for approval, he wiggled past his queen and shot ahead. He reached the ice. He skirted easily around, graceful and lithe—if still too noisy. Then he reached the other side and offered a hand back. “I can help from the front, and maybe Her Imperial Majesty can help from behind.”
Vivia swallowed. Shame spun through her. Stupid, Little Fox. She made herself nod. Made herself give Cam her right hand and offer Vaness her left.
Cam pulled. Vaness pushed. Vivia scraped ahead, and the ice blazed ineffably cold against her.
The abyss looked somehow too close and also too unreachably far. Maybe she did see stars down there. Maybe she did see spirit swifts.
She stepped again. Her foot planted on the granite just past the ice. One more step and she’d be on the other side.
The ice attacked. An explosion outward of tendrils and shards. It surged over Vivia’s outstretched arms, over her legs and her face. Come, come, the ice will hold you. Come, my daughter, and sleep. It thrust into her ears, her mouth, her eyes.
Vivia screamed. Or maybe that was Cam, maybe it was Vaness. There was no telling what was what. The ice claimed everything. Cam tried to wrench Vivia to him, but she was frozen down. She was trapped.
“RUN!” she heard Vaness shriek, and abruptly, iron sheered upward. It cut the ice. It released Vivia’s limbs and Vivia’s brain. “RUN!” Vaness shrieked again, and now she was shoving at Vivia from behind.
They both toppled onto the other side of the column.
Already, the iron was buckling. Already the ice was clambering around its edges and reaching for Vivia and Vaness. It ignored Cam entirely. Not that Vivia noticed that in the moment. All she had mental space for as she staggered after her young first mate was the ice. The stone. The quaking that built beneath her feet. Come, my daughter, come. Come, come, and find release.
They reached a door. It was not a magic door, but rather an archway into darkness. The big shadow, she thought distantly as Cam towed her straight into the shadows, that goes to the Convent.
But Vivia didn’t want to go to the Convent. She wanted the magic doorway to the under-city. She tried to swivel back. To see if the ice still hunted or if maybe she could carve a way through the ice and to the under-city door.
But she ran into Vaness, who gripped her tight and shoved her back into shadows. Ice lurched behind the Empress, a glowing blue tidal wave that sang of sleep and hunger. That filled the doorway Vivia had wanted to rush back through.
It crunched, it built, and finally it sealed them in completely.
“Your iron,” Vivia gasped. “Can you use it?”
The Empress shook her head, lifting her wrists to reveal no iron shackles. No iron flail or shield. “Gone,” she answered. “We are trapped here in this darkness.”
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Safe harbors!
💚 - Sooz