Moments later, Aeduan’s mouth was covered. His nose, his eyes. His everything. He could not see, he could not move. And it did not take long before darkness swept in.
* * *
She chose me.
She chose me.
Impossible.
Gretchya had entered the fight and chosen to save Iseult. Yet even as Iseult watched her mother fling up her blade, a tiny figure against a monster wreathed in shadow, her mind could not accept it.
She chose me. She chose me. Impossible.
Then her mother bellowed with a voice to shred and to break, “No one touches my daughter!” And a tiny sliver of truth cut into Iseult’s heart.
Not impossible.
The sliver cut deeper. It curved beneath her left lung and latched on.
And the shadow wyrm seemed as surprised as Iseult. As if the same word—“impossible”—sang through its mind too. Cyan speckled over silver Threads, and it paused its attack. Mouth open and shadows near enough for Gretchya to touch.
Even the winter coiling off its body seemed to pause. There was only Iseult and Gretchya and this monster.
Except it didn’t look so monstrous now. Tucked beneath the shadows were two eyes, dark as a new moon and just as fathomless. And tucked within those eyes was understanding. It knew what mothers were; it recognized what Gretchya had dared to do, and perhaps it was even a mother too.
It was all the time Gretchya needed. With hands that had carried Iseult and guided her, had fought for her and endured, she hauled Iseult to her feet. Then she braced an arm behind her daughter’s back and together, they limped away.
The shadow wyrm let them. Though whether by choice or by circumstance, Iseult would never know, for now the concerted efforts of the Nomatsi witches had turned on it. Now it had new targets to keep it busy, new people on which to feed.
“Alma,” Iseult tried to say, but her throat had rusted and the battle was too loud. New winds, new flames, new screams from a shadow wyrm to drown the world in its pain. Gretchya had already aimed them toward the other girl anyway. To the body, now lying upon the snow while Corlant leered.
Blood, blood, great swaths of red stained the white and stained the crumbled stones.
“Her Threads linger,” Corlant said. He turned his bruised eye first on Iseult. Then on Gretchya. Then onto the chaos unraveling around them, as if he’d only just noticed the wind and flame, the stone and ice, the water and fury ripping across the encampment.
Snow still fell.
“Take her Threads.” Corlant returned his focus to Iseult. Somehow, he didn’t have to yell to be heard. “She cannot resist you now.”
Iseult didn’t respond. Instead, she slid to the snow beside Alma while Gretchya dropped to Alma’s other side. Blood streaked over their clothes, snow seeped into their knees. Alma’s knife’s hilt, embedded in her chest, shivered and quaked with ragged breaths.
“I’m sorry.” Iseult clutched at the edges of the wound with bandaged hands. The blood soaked into them. “I’ll find you a healer.”
Alma laughed. A sound filled with more emotion than Iseult had ever heard. Alma’s eyes, unsteady and half closed, found Iseult’s face. “We didn’t … have to…”
“Stop talking,” Gretchya said curtly. Her stasis had returned, though tears gathered in her eyes. “We will find help—”
Alma’s eyes closed. Her belly shuddered. “Be.” A final spurt of blood, and she died. The clouds parted. Moonlight peeked through, small pinpricks on Alma’s face. As pale in death as she had been in life.
“A pity,” Corlant said, his voice a cold font in Iseult’s ear. She hadn’t noticed him crooking in, hadn’t sensed his Threads throbbing. “Now she is dead, and no one can save her.”
Iseult’s fingers tightened in her bandages, clutching at the knife hilt. Snow melted into Alma’s blood. “Now she is dead,” she repeated. “And no one can save her.”
With those words, the final dregs of Iseult’s stasis toppled to the snow. Dust, ash, swept away on winds and flame, the walls she’d built to hold everything in could no longer contain the truth. Thousands of secrets she’d stuffed away for years.
Years and years and years. Everything she’d never wanted to face and never wanted to feel. Even now, her first instinct was to frantically push it back in. Stasis, stasis! In your fingers and in your toes!
But there was no more space to hold it. Not now that Gretchya had chosen to save Iseult. Not now that Alma was dead. Iseult had refused to move in time, and worse—so, so much worse—Iseult had refused to be the one thing Alma had so clearly always wanted: a friend. A sister.
And in that moment, Iseult realized she had been wrong. For eighteen years, she’d had it so backward. Her mother had feelings. Her mother felt love. And so had Alma. Of course they both had. They were human.
And Iseult was human too.
But just as Iseult had wanted to take Owl into her arms and tell her everything would be all right, Gretchya hadn’t known how. Her own mother had been a Threadwitch with love buried deep beneath stasis, just as every mother before her had been. An endless, icy cycle because Threadwitches were not meant to feel, were not allowed to display. So Iseult had become exactly the same in turn, alongside Alma. Isolated, cold, alone but always wanting.
Oh, how much Iseult had never seen, had willingly turned her eyes away from. No one had rejected her; she’d simply rejected herself. Now, she was caught in this moment, and just as Gretchya had warned, there could be no coming back from it.
She had done something irredeemably wrong because she was a monster and it was all she could ever do. Where were her gods now? Where was Wicked Cousin to intervene? Where was Trickster to step in and reanimate a little hedgehog? Where was Moon Mother to wash away her pain?
You tell too many stories, Aeduan had said, and it had been true. Iseult had clung to old tales that always ended happily. That always saw the heroine win because it had been easier than feeling. Or looking at the truth. But now there would be no perfect ending. No grand adventures for the rest of Alma’s days.
Reanimation. The word slithered into Iseult’s mind, sly as an assassin in the night. It might have been Esme’s thought, it might have been her own. Either way, the word came again: Reanimation. Eridysi had described the magic in her diary—in the pages Iseult had read only a day before. Portia had been so close to true restoration of life. All she’d lacked was the power of an Aetherwitch.
An Aetherwitch who could see Threads instead of simply feel them. Who could assess the nuance needed to reattach life to a corpse growing cold.
Iseult’s heart gave a sigh. Perhaps it was simply the familiarity of the logic she’d always relied on, but in that moment, a plan settled into place.
“Reanimation.” The word jumped from her tongue, directed at Corlant though her gaze skipped to her mother. Tears had left streaks on Gretchya’s cold-flushed cheeks, though still she kept her features blank.
Trust me, Iseult thought at her. I will fix this.
She pushed weakly to her feet, her bandages stained entirely to red, and looked square in Corlant’s face. “Reanimation was in the diary. How did Portia do it? You told me you remembered everything.”
A hint of shock in his Threads, a hint of the lines upon his forehead. Then Corlant tipped back his head and laughed. A full-throated howl at a cloud-clotted sky. No moonlight now. Nor sun nor even flame. Only shadow.