“Same thing. You’ll die if those lines keep spreading, Safi. Show me your neck. Has it reached your chest?” She pawed again for Safi.
Again, Safi retreated. “Iseult, there’s no time. I made it this far without the doom claiming me. I’ll make it the rest of the way.”
And how far is that? Iseult wanted to demand, but logic held her tongue. Safi was right; like everything else, the doom would have to wait.
“I must enter the Dreaming,” she said. “The place I told you about, where I first saw Esme. It’s the only way I can stop what’s coming. But I’ll be exposed when I do. I know you can’t protect us from a hundred soldiers or Corlant’s storm, but—”
“Oh?” Safi interrupted, eyebrows bouncing. “I’m offended you would doubt me, Iz.”
Iseult’s nose twitched. She tried for a smile. Safi might be performing, but Iseult appreciated the gesture all the same. “I’ll be as fast as I can. Stay safe.” Then before Iseult could second-guess or check either horizon for the enemy, she darted back to the stone table.
A clumsy rip with her teeth, and the bandages came free. Cold cut across her brutalized skin. She hadn’t seen the full damage until now, and in the dim light of dawn’s edge, she could only make out wrinkled, puffy palms.
They throbbed. She ignored them, homing in on the Threadstones. She couldn’t see the Threads bound to them. That power belonged to the Aether; her soul was chained to the Void.
“You should move,” she told Esme, and the weasel needed no urging. With animal grace, she leaped to the snow and aimed for the door. I will keep watch, she seemed to say. I’ll return if I see anything.
Iseult nodded absently. No time, no time. Snow dotted the rubies now. Soon they would be covered. She draped her ruined palms over the cold stones and closed her eyes exactly as Eridysi had described. Exactly as she had tried so many times to do.
In and out, in and out. Each breath froze her lungs. Each moment brought a storm and Hell-Bards nearer. If only the tower had been farther away. If only she’d found another old place.
No, she snapped at herself. She had to focus. The Dreaming was so near. All she had to do was enter it.
Inhale, exhale. Safi, Safi, Safi. Inhale, exhale. Alma. Inhale, exhale. Gretchya.
Then it happened: the sounds around Iseult changed. Gone were Caden’s wheezing breaths and the creak of wind through winter trees. Gone was the wet cold of snow, replaced instead by the dry cold of the Dreaming. She’d done it. She had crossed the wall between worlds.
And this was not the gray, shifting, living world of the Hell-Bard Loom, but rather the Dreaming that overlaid reality. That allowed her to move around within, to see people and Threads exactly as they truly were.
Iseult’s dream-self smiled. Then laughed—loud and full, a wild frizzing in her chest that had wanted freedom ever since she’d first spotted Safi on the snow. She was finally in the Dreaming. After two weeks of trying and failing, all it had taken was finding the right location. She glanced at Safi and Caden, their Threads undampened by the Loom’s control. They were luminous and alive.
Next, she turned her attention to the horizon, a mere glimpse above the tower’s fallen walls. Threads blazed like beacons to the north, green as pine trees with a single focused goal: pursuit. And worse—far worse—was Corlant’s storm. It seethed to the south, silver Threads spun from stolen power. Brighter than the shadow wyrm’s had ever been and convulsing with countless shades, countless magics. He would be unstoppable when he arrived.
Iseult just prayed that she would be too.
FORTY-NINE
Safi paced the stone tower in a loose perimeter. Each squint through a crack or a hole revealed only forest, wind and snow.
Darkness coiled off Iseult at the tower’s heart, tendrils thick as river eels. Safi kept her distance—not merely because of the hoarfrost crackling around her Threadsister, but because those shadows and ice reached for Safi whenever she got too near. Like a hundred little vines to drag her down.
She rubbed her hands together as she strode and tried to remember what gloves felt like. She had no weapons, no shield. Her fists and fingers were all she possessed if the Cartorrans arrived.
When the Cartorrans arrived.
She also tried to recall what life had been like before she’d become a Hell-Bard. Before she’d had this strain tugging inside her chest. Iseult had been right: the doom was coming. And quickly. Compounded by the blizzard or simply a result of traveling too far from her chain, she couldn’t say. And it didn’t matter. The result was the same in the end.
“There’s … something,” Caden said, slouched against the only spot where snow didn’t reach. A corner tucked beneath all that remained of the second floor. “Something we need to discuss.”
“Now?” Safi asked. She tried for a smile. “Could we save the chat for when death isn’t right outside—”
“Now.” His head lolled back against the stone wall.
And Safi frowned, veering away from her circular path to join the Hell-Bard in his darkness.
“I will fight as best I can, but…” He swallowed. Tried to sit up, face tightening, but he’d lost too much blood and he couldn’t resist when Safi knelt and pushed him back down. His wound spurted. “Please find Zander and Lev. If you can. Even if it’s just bodies, I’ll die easier knowing—”
“No one is dying.” Safi shot back to her feet, head wagging. “That’s not an option. It’s never an option. Plus, Iseult will be done in the Dreaming soon, and she’ll be able to track their Threads—”
A squeak broke through the tower. Safi’s gaze lurched toward the weasel, racing toward her. It clawed up her body with ease, and just like with the old crow, a sensation of words, of meaning cut through Safi’s mind.
Person. Here.
Then the weasel shared an image of Henrick fon Cartorra. He wore simple hunting clothes, forest green draped in snow, and were it not for the crown still clutching his brow, he might have been no more than a weary soldier. He moved with a comfortable stealth Safi had suspected, but never seen.
And he was right outside the tower.
“Is he alone?” Safi asked the weasel, but she knew the answer well before the creature shoved her frozen nose into Safi’s cheek.
More soldiers, she showed. Dressed like Henrick, circling through the trees. Approaching without noise and with swords clasped tightly.
“Cow piss and goat shit,” she snarled. “Henrick is here.”
“I am,” said a voice behind her, and when she spun about, hands rising, she found him stepping lightly through the tower’s ancient door.
* * *
There was a logic to Iseult’s plan—haphazard though its assembly had been. And as wrong, wrong, wrong as the final impetus was. But it was as if the last two days had slowly contributed a scaffolding of ideas and knowledge.
First, she knew that Corlant wanted the Threadstones more than anything. So badly, in fact, he’d been willing to trek all the way across Cartorra to claim them from a capital filled with soldiers.
Second, she knew that Threadstones possessed power, and as a Weaverwitch, Iseult could take that power. She could cleave the Threads bound to stones and absorb them as her own.