Countdown to Witchlight
Only 56 days until the book hits shelves and e-readers and headphones everywhere! So be sure you’ve finished your reread, pre-ordered the book (US links here, UK links here) and are emotionally ready for the EPIC CONCLUSION coming your way!
I’ve got a lot of Witchlands content coming at you in the next eight weeks, and that means a lot of Witchlight early access chapters!
So scroll down to get reading, and stay tuned for more goodness in your inboxes soon. 😌
Chapter 17
Safi knew she needed to finish packing. She’d gotten the map; she’d handled her Hell-Bard captain; all that was left was to gather her travel clothes for the night’s departure. And eat—she should probably eat.
However, all Safi was actually able to do was to stagger through the lodge toward her bedroom. Tears over Caden had accumulated in her skull. And worse, always worse, the Cahr Awen were being noisy.
Relentlessly noisy, but in an incoherent way that resulted from a hundred souls mashing together with no single language and no real grasp on reality. It was like having a beehive for a skull. They buzzed, they droned, they never wanted to sleep.
Tonight, they were especially rattled. Do something seemed to be their message—but that was as much clarity as Safi could glean from them.
And gods below, her head hurt. All she wanted to do was curl onto her bed with her velvet band across her eyes. Surely the souls would quiet eventually, and maybe, if she was lucky, she could get a few hours of sleep after that.
Unfortunately, Safi didn’t reach her door before Monk Evrane cornered her. So close, Safi thought, gazing at her nearby square of Hell-Bards.
“Excuse me,” Evrane said, holding a satchel the size of two fists. “I have a healer’s kit here that Iseult requested. But she is not in her quarters. Perhaps I can give it to you?”
“Of course,” Safi forced out. Be polite. Don’t cringe. “That’s very helpful of you, Monk Evrane. Thank you.” She tried to move past.
But the monk cut into her path. “I thought perhaps Iseult was injured, but now I suspect you are the one who is actually hurting.” Then she quickly added, “Your Imperial Majesty.”
Evrane was a woman accustomed to titles and royalty, and as such, she hadn’t once tried to cross the barriers of Safi’s crown since joining them. A wall had come up around Safi that only Uncle Eron and Caden seemed comfortable enough to cross. And Iseult, of course.
Although, to be fair, Safi did avoid Evrane as often as she could, giving the woman no opportunities to even pass within her imperial cage. Safi’s brain hurt all the time. She didn’t want Evrane nagging her precisely as she was doing now.
Liar, her magic nudged. You know that is not why you avoid her.
“No pain,” Safi lied, “I am fine.” Her voice didn’t sound convincing—and Evrane clearly didn’t believe her, because for once, the monk pushed against Safi’s cage.
“Are you injured?”
“No, I’m fine.” Her magic scratched at her spine. Lie, lie, lie.
And Monk Evrane nudged once more: “I can ease pain, you know. Or craft you Painstones that will help whatever it is that ails you.”
Painstones. Safi had tried one of those a week ago. It hadn’t helped at all.
“Or,” Evrane continued, advancing a single step closer and dropping her voice, “I can help you fall asleep.”
Ah. Now they had gotten to the crux of the matter. “It’s the Cahr Awen souls, Monk Evrane. All the souls that are trapped inside me from the broken Threadstones. They . . . push.” Safi dug her fingers into the left side of her forehead, as if this motion might somehow explain how it felt. “It hurts and makes sleep difficult.”
“Hmm,” Evrane agreed, as if all of this made sense to her. “I cannot relieve your burden, Your Imperial Majesty, but I can attempt to dull the pain—and I can certainly give you enough relief for sleep. That is . . . if you will allow me into your quarters?”
Safi swallowed. She didn’t want Evrane in her quarters. She didn’t want Evrane talking to her in this voice accented by Nubrevnan. Most of all, she didn’t want to open her eyes and meet the dark Nihar irises she knew were standing right there. Inescapable.
Safi swallowed a second time. Then, after several seconds of only taut silence to fill the hall, she twisted away from Evrane. “All right,” she said, finally letting her eyes open. “You may come inside.”
Safi didn’t bother to remove her day’s clothes, filthy though her shirt was and even filthier the gray breeches. Even her boots she kept on. The flames in her hearth rolled heat through the room and flickered orange light over a tall, many-paned window with a desk beneath it and a wide canopied bed several paces away—a bed onto which Safi now flung herself.
“Do what you will,” she said with a flip of her hand toward the monk who’d followed her. Then Safi closed her eyes and waited. She couldn’t look at Evrane closely. She couldn’t.
Evrane didn’t move for several seconds, and Safi could easily imagine the indecision the monk must feel. She adhered so strongly to formality. To ritual and station, to bows and titles and of course, the holy adulation she afforded both Safi and Iseult. All her life Evrane had dreamed of finding and supporting the Cahr Awen, now here was the chosen pair. Now, here were all the Wells being healed one by one.
But in the end, Safi was still just a girl with a headache who hadn’t slept in so very, very long. And in the end, Evrane was a healer witch.
Safi heard when Evrane moved: a slight clinking of belt buckles and blades, a soft swish of her white Carawen cloak as if she pulled it back from her shoulders. Safi felt the weight of the monk easing onto the mattress beside her.
“It is your head that hurts? Anywhere else?”
“No. Just the head. And . . . well, the neck in turn.” Safi was careful to keep her eyes clenched shut. Evrane was very near. Nearer than she had been in the hall. Nearer than she had been since returning to Safi’s company a month ago.
Almost as near as her nephew had been during their brief encounter inside a mountain.
“I cannot draw out the souls that cause the pressure,” Evrane explained, lowering her voice to a gentle intimacy. “I will do what I can to dampen the pain by reducing the swelling in your brain—only by a small amount, of course. But it should help relieve the pressure. And then I will send a sleeping wave through your body. Will that be all right, Your Imperial Majesty?”
Again, Safi nodded. It was all she wanted; it would make her days so much more bearable. It would make the pain and the pressure more bearable too, since they were not a burden that anything could relieve other than healing the final Well.
Which I am about to do, she reminded herself—and reminded the souls in turn. In a few hours, I am going to do what you want.
But that didn’t appease them. It never appeased them. They were bees trapped in a barrel, and now they simply buzzed worse than before.
“I will touch your head,” Evrane said. “But my hands are cold. I am sorry.”
“Cold is good,” Safi murmured, and it was true. Sometimes, when the weight of her blindfold wasn’t enough, she would tuck cold stones beneath her velvet wrap so they pressed against her eyes.
Evrane’s hands laid upon her, and ah. There was the wave, like a sweet tide on the Jadansi. For several minutes, as pain dripped and dropped out of her skull, Safi felt as if she were back in Veñaza City. Back beside the sea forever lapping against the wharf where Mathew’s coffee shop lived.
It made her throat choke up. Made her entire rib cage ache. How long had she and Iseult been gone? Could she even measure how much their lives had changed? They would never get a place of their own now. They would never get to escape and simply be.
Despite Safi’s best efforts, she was less free now than she’d ever been. She had a crown upon her head—and it weighed almost as heavy as these souls trapped inside her. Meanwhile Iseult had a power so vast, she was stuck forever on a knife’s edge, afraid that if she moved, the knife would cut and kill all she loved.
At some point, Safi wasn’t sure when, tears started to slide down her cheeks. And although she knew where the tears would lead her . . . although she knew she would have to wipe her cheeks eventually . . .
Safi opened her eyes and looked at Evrane. The monk’s hands were on Safi’s brow—no longer cold—and the fire behind the monk lit her hair into a silvery halo.
“He’s not dead,” Safi said in Nubrevnan, and there it was. The words Safi was afraid to say. “He’s not dead, and I saw him.”
For several seconds, Evrane did not move. Her gaze was fastened on Safi, her pupils large and unfocused while her magic still floated through Safi. Then Evrane’s eyelids shuttered halfway. She breathed, “Oh.”
Her hands withdrew. The caress of her magic did not. “How do you know?”
“I saw him inside a mountain,” Safi said simply. “It was filled with ice and winds and shadow, and although he was scarred and . . . and . . .” She motioned to the right side of her face, to where burns had changed the prince into someone almost unrecognizable. “I knew him in an instant.” I knew his eyes, so very much like yours.
“He isn’t dead,” Safi repeated, more forcefully this time. “Merik still lives.” She pushed upright, a wobbly movement that sent Evrane grabbing for her and shoving pillows behind her back. But Safi didn’t need pillows. She felt better than she’d felt in days. Perhaps, she thought vaguely, because this was a pressure that needed releasing too.
“I don’t know where he is now, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I don’t really understand what I saw or how Merik came to be there. For a time, I thought maybe I’d dreamed the entire thing. Except, I know . . .” She pressed at her stomach. Then her chest. “I just know in the very core of my magic that it wasn’t a dream. Merik’s alive, somehow, and he’s out there.” She waved ineffectually toward the window, as if Merik were merely on the ramparts. As if he might turn up at any moment, scarred but still himself.
Evrane nodded slowly, a thoughtful triangle forming between her brows. It was clear she didn’t understand what Safi was saying—and how could she when Safi didn’t understand it herself? But it was also clear she was overjoyed to learn her nephew lived. Safi didn’t need to be a Threadwitch to spot this.
“Thank you for telling me, Your Imperial Majesty.” A pause. A swallow. “I will . . . will send word to all my contacts so they may search for him.”
Safi exhaled a soft Hye. Then she added: “And I have already asked all the spies in Henrick’s . . . or rather, in my vast network to search for him too. Hopefully we can find him. Hopefully you can see him again.”
Evrane didn’t answer. Her thoughts currently lived in another place, her fingers splayed across her lap like sea stars in a tidal pool. She looked older than she was. And tired. Neither monk nor healer witch, but simply a woman who’d lost too much.
Then, as if watching the tide rise up—as if watching the sea stars climb back into the waters they knew best—Evrane’s demeanor changed. “Sometimes I marvel at how selfish grief can be. Are we sad for those we lost? Or are we sad for what we did not remember to do?” She fastened her dark Nihar eyes onto Safi, and with the same gentleness from before, she eased Safi onto the pillows.
Then she laid her hands on Safi’s forehead, and the soothing, salty tides swept into Safi anew.
“I know you hate your uncle, Safiya, and I suspect that in many ways, Merik feels the same way toward me—and likely Aeduan feels it too, for I raised him with as much harsh care as I gave Merik. But in the end, nothing can change that we do the best we can with the tools we have. Sometimes we use our tools wisely. Sometimes . . .” Evrane shook her head. “Sometimes our best is not enough.”
The tides swept in more strongly, but they were not drowning waters. Nor rough and stormy. They were gentle currents meant to carry Safi’s floating body out to sea, where healing and sleep awaited.
“I hope that I see Merik again one day, if only so I may tell him that he has turned out far wiser and far fiercer than I could have ever dreamed he would be. Now sleep, Safiya, and dream of peace in your mind, peace in your body.”
Safi sighed. Her muscles softened. And there it was: the true sleep that had eluded her for days.
The last thing Safi heard before she sank under was: “Thank you, Light-Bringer, for this gift you have given me tonight. It was the reminder I needed that the path I am on is true.”
Chapter Eighteen
The moon was fully risen by the time Iseult navigated the Nomatsi trail again. She did not return to the hunting lodge, but instead made her way to the ancient tower with its altar inside. The pack weighed heavy on her back, but it was steady. Comfortable, even.
She scanned the tower, full of shadows. A world of black and white. Snow still skated languidly down, and a barely perceptible wind whispered by every few seconds. But something was wrong. Something had changed since Iseult had come here with Safi that morning.
There were the supplies, tucked into the darkest corner with the blanket above. Snow had once more banked around the crates.
There was the altar, only ten feet away. Still, silent, timeless.
There were the crumbling walls and broken staircase and winter trees beyond.
Iseult shifted her weight, splaying her toes in her boots, trying to find warmth. The pack shifted with her. She should add its supplies to the organized crates in the corner. Open up the leather and catalog exactly what Alma had given her.
But Iseult didn’t move. Instead, she eased the pack off her back, letting it land directly behind her. A bulwark against cold—and against the strangeness still huddling around her.
There were no Threads here, so she did not fear humans. And she didn’t fear animals, since they, like men, avoided this place. Of course, there were ways to hide Threads. Ways to travel that even a Threadwitch could not see . . .
Wind pulled at her hair as she withdrew Eridysi’s diary from a leather pouch at her belt. She always kept it with her, for its words were too precious, too dangerous to ever leave untended.
Iseult lowered to the snow-covered earth, folding her legs beneath her before lay the diary on her lap. She closed her eyes. She slipped into the Dreaming.
It was so easy here, in this old tower where the walls between this world and the Old Ones’ were thinner. She only had to imagine the Dreaming, and suddenly she was there. The night hazed around her. The edges of her vision blurred into gray nothing.
“Leopold,” she called. “I know you’re here. Show yourself.”
She sensed his emergence before she saw him. A heaviness where her periphery smeared—a slowing of time that made the snow drift differently, as if gravity no longer operated by the same rules.
She turned toward him and found he was not Leopold at all, but the purest distillation of his Paladin form. He stood at the tower’s entrance, a ghostly figure. Almost insubstantial, yet also many people at once, many genders and many races before all the incarnations of his Paladin soul finally settled into the version Iseult knew best: Leopold fon Cartorra.
Except now he wore the Rook King’s silver crown, and his cloak was black and bulky, adding breadth to what she knew were lean shoulders.
“This is a welcome surprise.” His voice and Threads indicated it wasn’t welcome at all. “I did not think I would see you again, Dark-Giver.”
“Don’t c-call me that.” It was Iseult’s title as the Cahr Awen, but Leopold always made it sound insulting. She rose to her dream feet while her physical body remained behind. “Where are you? I know you must be near.” The last time she had seen Leopold in person had been here, after he’d stabbed Corlant in the back.
Leopold paused at that altar now, inspecting the precise spot where his blade had cut through Corlant’s spine, as if he were an artist looking upon his work. “Is it so strange to want to see how the Cahr Awen fares?”
“Yes.”
“I have spent a thousand years trying to heal the Wells. Give an old soul this . . . pleasure.”
“Except you were the one who betrayed the Six. Oh yes, I’ve read the diary in full now, Leopold. Eridysi writes that you betrayed the Six so that the Exalted Ones knew of your plans. The Six were going to kill the Exalted ones, but you warned them. And so the Six failed.”
“And Eridysi was wrong. I was not the betrayer, Iseult.” A pause. A contemplative twirl of Leopold’s Threads as he motioned toward the altar. “I was, in fact, the one who ensured the Exalted Ones were slain.”
“Portia was not slain.”
“Was not, but now is.” He smiled, and although he didn’t add it, Iseult could practically hear him saying: Because I slayed her. She was in Corlant’s body, and I killed Corlant so you would not have to.
“Why are you here, Leopold?” Iseult spoke more forcefully now. “Why are you in this tower, lurking so I’ll find you? I w-want an honest answer. None of your charm or lies.”
“Ah, but charm is a prince’s only weapon, remember?”
“And you are not a prince anymore.”
He laughed. A twinkling sound that clashed with the brutal frustration in his Threads. “I am here because it would seem that you and Safiya are leaving. Abandoning all the forces Dom fon Hasstrel and Monk Evrane have assembled for you.”
Iseult wanted to recoil. Wanted to gasp. How does he know? Who has he told? But she clung to her Threadwitch training. She was stasis through and through.
“It will be a march to your death,” Leopold continued. “If you travel east, just the two of you, you will not survive long enough to heal the Well. You will not even reach Poznin, for that matter. The Raider King is not a man to be trifled with. He is the greatest strategic mind of the last millennia.”
Iseult presented a thoughtful silence. One breath. Two. Then she said coolly: “I’m surprised you would say that about someone who isn’t you.”
A snort and a flash of Threads that, for once, actually matched the amusement on his face. “Why do you think I made him my general? I know what my strengths are, and they are not battlefield tactics. Meanwhile, Ragnor has both knowledge and experience that span generations.”
“So why not kill him?” Iseult flipped a dismissive hand. “Why not use a-all your sneaking and shadowy tricks to eliminate him, Leopold?”
Another snorting laugh, this time with Threads of violet disappointment. As if Iseult was a particularly slow pupil. Against her will, heat burned in her chest.
“Trust me, Dark-Giver: I have tried to kill him, but he has accounted for every strategic possibility—including assassination. So only brute force will get you through his armies.”
“Brute force,” Iseult repeated. “Meaning people will die. Countless people—on his side and ours. Don’t you care about that at all?”
“Not particularly.” Leopold opened his arms. The black of his clothes smeared like wings. “Either we lose thousands of lives now or we lose the entirety of the Witchlands when Sirmaya dies. Tell me which sounds preferable to you.”
“Funny how you never put your life at risk, though.”
A sneer carved down Leopold’s handsome face. His Threads however remained placid and unperturbed. “You have no idea what risks I’ve taken. I have done nothing but help you and Safiya. Please recall who found you in Tirla, all alone. Who reunited you with your Threadsister in Cartorra. Who gave you an army, that you foolishly set free—”
“Because Hell-Bards are people, not tools.”
“—and who killed your father so that you would not have to.” Leopold strode toward Iseult, closing the distance between them until all she could see was his face. All she could feel was the icy core of his Threads, crackling with static and cold. He had a Paladin’s Threads. Overwhelming in power and violent in their intensity.
“Everything that has gotten you and Safiya this far—it has been my doing.”
“No.” Iseult cocked up her chin. “It has been your manipulation. Because you work forever behind the scenes, never willing to take direct action. Why is that, I wonder?” She canted toward him. Closer, closer, until only inches separated them in this cold, hazy place of nothing. “I think you avoid direct action, Leopold, b-because then, if you fail, you can absolve yourself of any blame.”
The silvery core of his Threads dilated. The sneer carved deeper down his face. But Iseult wasn’t finished yet.
“Tell me, Leopold, how many Cahr Awens have you nudged along and given armies to over the last thousand years? How many of them failed and died because you refused to ever work with them directly?”
“I will not let you and Safiya go alone to Poznin. I will not let you leave this lodge without an army.”
“And what will you do to stop us?” Iseult motioned to her body, still seated in the real world with the diary upon her lap. “Stopping us would require you to act, and I don’t think you’re capable of it.”
“Do not underestimate me, Dark-Giver.”
“Do not underestimate me, Trickster.”
The sneer fell away. In its place, a smile curled across Leopold’s lips, like an asp coiling to strike. His Threads folded outward in a meteor shower. “Trickster,” he purred. “Yes, that is what you so love to call me. But what is it the Nomatsis say? May the Moon Mother light your path, and may Trickster never find you.
“Well, I’ve found you. And I have acted in a manner that is quite direct and not at all conducted behind the scenes.” Now Leopold was the one to motion, although not toward Iseult but rather to the dark corner where her supplies awaited.
They were not so dark now.
“Enjoy the flames, Iseult. They burn so brightly in this ancient place of memories.” Leopold backed away. The charge of him receded, his body fading like smoke into the sky.
Iseult lurched out of the Dreaming, her body crudely trying to remember how muscles connected to ligaments connected to bones. Heat billowed, orange and blue, fed by the fuel of Iseult’s and Safi’s supplies.
They were all on fire.
Somehow, while Iseult was distracted in the Dreaming, Leopold had ignited the crates, and now they all burned.
Iseult half crawled toward those flames, toward the smoke and heat billowing above it all. She didn’t think to cover her mouth or face, nor did she think to protect herself in any way. Not until she made it five steps over and suddenly remembered what was inside the crates.
Firepots.
Iseult flung herself around. She crossed five steps in only two bounding leaps. Then she jumped, headfirst behind the altar.
The first firepot exploded. A mere stutter, a mere crack! before the rest of the cataclysm joined in.
Fire, heat, noise, and stone. It convulsed over Iseult, rippling with power and rage. She was midair, reaching for the snowy banks behind the altar—when the force of the explosion slammed her down. Right into snow and stone. She lost all hearing; she lost all sight; she lost all sensation in her limbs, her lips, her skin. She could do nothing but lie there, facedown and limp, while heat and shockwaves boiled across her.
She thought of how Safi had described being trapped beneath a flame hawk. She thought of earthquakes and Sirmaya and all the power of a Firewitch contained inside a single clay pot. Inside fifty clay pots.
The tower burned.
Iseult burned with it.
Until suddenly she was being moved. Someone was rolling her over. Then tugging her to him. There was so much smoke, her eyes streamed. She coughed and gasped. She couldn’t see her savior, but she knew who he was anyway.
He had no Threads.
“I’m here,” he told her—or at least, she thought he told her that. Everything was echoey and vague. Fire and smoke swirled like Threads. Her body hurt where Aeduan held her. As he carried her step by steady step out of the tower.
Then it was not fire, but snow.
It was not smoke, but starlight.
Cold air beat across her. Aeduan solidified into sharp specificity: fire-flap across his face, eyes glittering like bloodied ice. He walked and walked until the tower became nothing more than a distant torchlight. Until they were beside a stream, frozen save for one patch where ice had not laid claim. There was no light to create reflections upon the black, burbling surface.
Here, Aeduan eased Iseult down. She had, by now, reclaimed her senses. Reclaimed her mind too, and a thousand questions crowded in: Why is Aeduan here? He should not be home yet. What will this do to our plans? What can we do if we have no supplies?
But there was only one question that really mattered in this immediate moment. She coughed and scrubbed ash from her eyes. “Where is he? Where is Leopold? F-find him, Aeduan, before he can get away.”
Thank you for reading! As you can see, the stakes are rising and things are about to get VERY real and VERY urgent for our Cahr Awen.
See you again soon, DenNerds!
💚 - Sooz