And would not claim it now, for the undertow protected its own. Nubrevnans respected the sea; the empires did not. Vivia respected the sea; these intruders did not.
Cannons fired, sopping and rusted yet propelled by iron that begged to be used, and somehow—though she didn’t understand it—propelled by fire too. Vivia heard their eruptions, a vibrant call that shivered through Vaness and laughed atop the sea. Yet the cannons didn’t aim for the Dalmotti ships, but rather sent their iron right past. Warnings of what might happen if the Dalmottis did not flee. Promises of violence and death the flaming iron would gleefully claim. That it wanted to claim, but that somehow Vaness kept leashed.
Or did she? As Vivia forced her own eyes to see, not as an undertow but as a human, she found Vaness before her on planks slick with algae and gray with time. Her nose gushed blood, her head slumped. How she still stood, how her arms still reached, Vivia had no idea.
And she discovered with a drooping wrench of horror that she was faring no better. Her own posture had crumpled, her own arms shook like the deck beneath her, and the longer her eyes clung to Vaness’s face, the more darkness swept across them. She couldn’t do this forever. If she did, then the water would take her completely. She would lose herself entirely to the undertow—and rather than allow the Dalmottis to leave, it would drag and drown and feed. It didn’t care that Baile’s Blessing would be caught too, that the Nubrevnans it respected would sink and die. What was one life compared to the civilizations it had lived beside?
No, Vivia thought. Then harder, a word to rip up from her stomach: “No.” She loved the tides, she loved the sea, and she loved this echo of Stix that seemed to live within them, but they could not have her. They could not have these people, Nubrevnan or Dalmotti.
Vivia released her magic. Like blocking a waterfall, one moment she was filled with rapids she could not swim against. The next, she was empty and still. A riverbed drained dry. Her heart boomed and rain still drizzled. The ghost galleon still thundered beneath her feet. And when Vivia twisted her focus left, right, her muscles protesting as if she were made of the same decayed wood as this galleon, she found the rest of the undertow’s navy. Already, those ships capsized anew, though their ancient cannons still fired—and kept on firing even as the waves swallowed them plank by plank.
But the Dalmottis were leaving. Not the Lioness, for the sea had eaten her, bones and all, yet the rest of the fleet now sped toward the horizon, where a rainbow did indeed split the misty sky.
So as Vivia and Vaness once more sank into water that was quickly rising above their knees, Vivia pulled the Empress to her. “Come back,” she said, pumping her words with the same authority she’d heard in the undertow, the same bass line the iron had responded to so well. “Come back to me, Vaness. Come back.”
FIFTY-TWO
Iseult was in the Hell-Bard Loom again. It looked as it always had. Gray, gray, endless heaving gray. And there were the ghosts. There were the Hell-Bards she’d so foolishly thought she could control—and so wickedly thought she should control. They swarmed her exactly as they always had, singing the same refrain they’d always sung.
Except that this time, when they came, she did not fight them. Their voices clawed, their ghost hands pierced. And she let them. No trying to fight what crashed against her. No trying to rule what should not be ruled.
Yet no letting them rule her either. They would crush her if she listened too closely. If she gave them the notice they so desperately craved. Just like her own rage, just like all those feelings she’d kept shuttered away for a lifetime: too much and you would drown. But too little, and you would shrivel away.
I see you, she told each face that grappled in. I understand. But I am not you. I am me, and I must be set free.
And that was all it took. Acknowledgment. Acceptance. Then every shadow face reared away. Hundreds of them, thousands, all crowding in and wanting to be seen. Yet none tore her away—not when she looked them in the face and repeated, I see you, I understand.
Iseult wasn’t sure when her dream-self began crying. They weren’t the stunned tears of too much emotion from a secret corner broken wide, nor the bereft tears from a daughter wrapped in the Threads that build. These were tears of relief, tears of joy.
Because she really, truly understood now. This was stasis. This was what Threadwitches were meant to do. All the emotions of the world around them, yet never seeing their own—of course they had to keep themselves apart. Otherwise the weave of the world would overwhelm them. But somewhere over the generations, simple separation had become denial. Pale-knuckled, viciously fisted denial in a way that no human could ever sustain.
People were meant to feel.
And people were meant to dance, as Iseult had danced with a prince on a balcony unseen.
I see you, she told the ghosts over and over. I understand you, but I am not you. She lost all sense of time, of ghosts, of tears. Yet with each acknowledgment, she was carried farther through the Loom. A current of ghosts to take her where she wanted to go. A raft atop waves she could neither swim with nor swim against.
Until at last, she reached the person at the center of it all.
He wasn’t expecting her. That much was clear. His spirit stood unguarded at the center of a simple basin. The edges of this space—the only real space in the Loom—blurred into gray nothing beyond. The ghosts couldn’t enter here; they clustered and clawed on all sides like faces pressed against glass.
“Father,” Iseult said. “I have come for you.”
Indeed, Corlant crooned, and instantly, his ghost form solidified. When he lurched around, she found—as before—that his one remaining eye was healed here.
He grinned at the sight of her, an expression that had become so familiar in her childhood. One she now understood was filled with centuries of hate and with, tucked deep inside his own secret corner, centuries of fear.
She wondered what his old smile might have looked like. The one before his Paladin memories had awoken. The smile of a man who’d loved a Threadwitch.
“I thought you would be wiser.” He twirled open his hands. “This is my space. I made it.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “I guessed you were Portia a long time ago. Though I do wonder why you lied.”
“Because if I had not, the Six would have killed me. I died that day, but not forever like the Exalted Ones. And so I have lived a thousand years, growing stronger with each incarnation. And oh, Iseult.” He clucked his tongue, his forehead trenches sinking deep. “It will hurt you so much more to die here than it would have in the real world.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I’m afraid it will.”
Then, before he could react or guess what she might do, she opened her hands. Unlike before, they were not healed in the Dreaming. Instead her palms were rough with scars—scars she had earned. An eternal reminder of the choices she hadn’t made.
Living, living, she thought, breath and living. She turned toward the ghosts, clustered and desperate outside the basin. Threads that heal, Threads that thrive. Then again, though this time she sang it aloud. “Living, living, breath and living. Threads that heal, Threads that thrive.”
Each soul required its own caress, its own reminder of life. So many Hell-Bards had been dead a hundred years. A thousand. But she gave each soul the magic it had lost, the Threads that had been erased.