Her hair streamed toward the ground and her upside-down eyes found Iseult’s. No emotion burned within, only pain.
Until suddenly Alma’s screams stopped, and a spark of what might have been rage swelled in her pupils. “It didn’t have to be this way. We didn’t have to be this way.” She straightened, arms yanking wide and her ropes dropping to the snow.
She attacked Corlant.
FORTY-FOUR
The Nomatsis who’d escaped had returned. Winds barreled out, fires ignited, and stone punched up from the earth.
Iseult didn’t know where they’d come from. She hadn’t sensed them hiding among the Purists, clothed in matching gray. She hadn’t felt their witcheries writhing inside their Threads until suddenly they were using them.
Paces away, Alma swiped at Corlant with a blade that hadn’t been there moments before. The steel connected; blood sprayed from a shallow wound across his chest. But he only laughed and grappled for Threads that he—and Iseult—could not see. He was a tick filled with magic and witcheries. Impossible to defeat, and any moment now, he would grab hold and drain. Any moment now, Alma would lose.
It didn’t have to be this way.
Iseult wondered if she should do something. She wondered if this niggling beneath her lung meant she should help Alma or help Corlant. The Threadwitch she could never be like or the man who’d given her the Void. The girl who had replaced her at her mother’s side or the father whose Threads shone with family.
We didn’t have to be this way.
Everything seemed to happen with sluggish confusion, softened by the snow and cusp between night and day. Like a funeral dirge played at half speed. Iseult caught every beat. Every failed attack from Nomatsis and Purists alike. Every shriek of the shadow wyrm as it stampeded onto the scene, shadows and icicles bleeding off it. Silver Threads blaring.
Flames heated Iseult’s back and wind battered her side. No one attacked her, though. Purists gave her berth; Nomatsis too. She remained untouched beside the fallen wall, snow piling around her feet.
That was when Iseult saw her mother. Across the way where flames burned and an Icewitch aimed shards at a Purist, Gretchya waited, no longer bound in ropes. In her left hand, a knife dangled. Clean, unused. Even now, she would not join the fight.
Because Threadwitches do not cause pain, Iseult. That is only for the Void. Only for people like you.
But Iseult wasn’t causing pain. She’d become as still as the stasis inside her. As still as her mother twenty paces away. Snow trickled between them.
Until pain snapped through Iseult—winds she hadn’t sensed coming. A Nomatsi with fury in his heart and a funnel of air to fell her. She stumbled forward, catching herself on the snow with bandaged hands. Without thought—with only cool reaction, cool completion to what this man had initiated—she rounded on him and attacked.
Her fingers, still in their bandages, closed around his Threads. Too far for the old Iseult to have reached, but new Iseult had read the diary, and new Iseult knew how to cover distances. More importantly, new Iseult was stasis through and through. No conscience to get in her way. Sever, sever, twist and sever.
Iseult squeezed and the man collapsed in an instant. If he screamed, she didn’t hear it. Not with the shadow wyrm feasting nearby. Not with Corlant and Alma still locked, somehow, in combat.
The man’s soul slid into her, a subtle drip like blood off the tip of a blade. She didn’t need her fangs, yet bit by brutal bit, his Threads cleaved. His power became hers. Her heart swelled. Her belly. Her brain. A warmth instead of the usual heat, and no pain against her ruined hands. If anything, the draining Threads soothed. She could stand here all day and do this.
Except now other Threads were shoving into her awareness. An onslaught of magics, of witches now turning their attention to Iseult as she claimed one of their own. Their Threads pulsed with battle, their eyes fastened on her face—on her bandaged hands still squeezing—and they abandoned their various fights to attack Iseult instead.
Iseult released the Windwitch. He still lived, if weaker, but she had enough power. She would use it to fight the witches now storming her. She would kill and cleave, severing each soul until there was nothing left but shriveled Threads.
And now here was the shadow wyrm, each leg lifting through frozen darkness. Half speed because the funeral dirge slogged on in Iseult’s brain. The monster aimed for Purists. It killed with no real goal in its beastly, Void-filled heart, and second by second, it careered nearer to Iseult.
For some reason, though, Iseult didn’t move. She should. She should fight and cleave and kill because Puppeteers had no conscience. Voidwitches did not care.
As a wall of murderous Threads bounded toward her, as a monster thundered her way, Iseult simply swiveled her head and found her mother’s eyes again. Green and gold and so familiar. Too far to see clearly, but forever etched in her brain. Mother. The woman who’d raised her. The woman Iseult had always believed she wanted to be.
Somehow she felt those eyes more sharply than the billowing flames or clawing winds.
Nearby, Alma shouted at Corlant. With hate and a rage so raw it needled through Iseult’s stasis and punctured the tiny corner beneath her lung. “I will die,” she roared, “before I let you take what I am!” Then Alma lifted her blade and turned it on herself. It moved toward her heart, listless and unreal. Just as Corlant bore down with unnatural height. Stretched out like a rag doll ripping at the seams.
And Iseult’s stasis punctured wider. It didn’t have to be this way. We didn’t have to be this way.
That was when the next attacks hit Iseult. Two at once with a punch of winds to break her in two. Hot, sudden, potent with rage. She flew, her spine cracking and the world melting into a blur of snow and smoke and Threads of violent gray.
She hit a wall, the stones ancient and unyielding.
Pain exploded through her chest and shoulder. Her palms shredded anew, and black silted across her vision, briefly erasing the battle—though not the silver Threads arcing her way. They shook with the screams of a monster ready to feast. She would break a thousand ways before it was done.
Iseult drew in her legs to stand, but her muscles wouldn’t cooperate. Not fast enough, at least. Each movement took a lifetime, each heartbeat stretched into infinity.
And there were the silver Threads. There was the monster’s maw leaking shadows. Ice sizzled over her. And in that moment, time stopped completely.
Later, Iseult would wonder how such a thing was possible. Later, she would assume she’d imagined the whole thing. But as it happened, there was too much time for thought. Too much time to pick apart where everything had gone so terribly wrong. And too much time to realize exactly what would happen the instant time resumed.
Alma would die, and she, Iseult, would die too.
It wasn’t her rage that had killed this time, though. It wasn’t her power of the Puppeteer breaking the world at its seams. Instead, it was stasis. Indiscriminate in its target. Cold in its indifference. By doing nothing, Iseult had chosen to do something.
And there was no way to logic herself out of that truth. Her numbness had a price, and now there would be no escape from these frozen jaws made of Void. No escape from the vengeful witches waiting just behind.
Iseult had no one to blame but herself. She’d lived with blood on her hands and she would die that way too. Payment for all her mistakes. Punishment for all she’d done wrong.