The moon gleamed down, no longer full but bright enough to see by. A perfect hour for Threadwitching. A perfect hour for a Voidwitch with sparkles of Aether in her blood.
Alma’s body lay shrouded beneath a pale sheet upon the ground. Iseult had brushed away the previous night’s snow. Nearby, the spring Iseult had once gazed into burbled into the quiet winter night.
On a bare stone, Eridysi’s diary lay open to the page about reanimation. Owl had left the diary for her beneath their spruce tree, along with a single mountain-bat claw. The length of her old moon-scythe blade and just as sharp, it now rested atop the weathered page. Iseult had already imagined ways to fasten it to a handle. Crude but deadly, just like Owl.
Iseult walked in a slow circle, unwinding a strip of gray thread her mother had given her. First a circle around her, then zigzags across Alma’s still form. And as she walked, she tugged at the broken Threads within herself. Little severed beacons meant to draw Alma’s soul into life.
All the mistakes Iseult had made—so many—and all the relationships she’d lost. It didn’t have to be this way. We didn’t have to be this way. Like drawing poison from a wound, she pulled out each splinter that had festered too long beneath her left lung. Round and round she walked until the entirety of the gray thread was gone.
Then she began anew, except this time with magenta thread. This time with thoughts of love and memories of affection. The times she and Alma had played with dolls made of straw, had climbed an oak tree and gotten stuck in its branches, had discovered eggs hatching and tens of tiny turtles waddling toward a marsh. Every instance in which they had acted not as rivals but as the sisters they could have been.
And finally, Iseult draped sage-green thread over Alma’s body, envisioning what she wanted for Alma’s future. The friendship and connection they could share—and would share once Alma’s Threads had returned.
Because this would work; it had to work. Where Portia had only ever used gray, had only ever tapped into the Threads that break, Iseult was drawing on all three Threads. Life contained love, loss, and growth, each powerful in its own unique way.
When at last all the threads were unfurled, and all the Threads poured forth from Iseult’s being, she whispered the words all Threadwitches used when focusing their magic: “Bind and bend. Build and blossom. Family fills the heart.” She’d never gotten those words to work before, but this time …
This time was different.
Iseult smiled up at her goddess. The night smiled down, washing her in silver light. She might not be like Safi, golden and gleaming and good, but that didn’t mean she was only destined for darkness. It didn’t mean she had to live in shadow.
After all, the moon shone light too.
Iseult turned away from Alma’s body. There was nothing more to do but wait for the Threads to work.
“Come,” Gretchya said, stepping from the trees. A tension hugged her muscles, a tautness in her arms as if she wanted to offer Iseult her hand or an embrace, but, as was the curse of all Threadwitches, still did not know how.
And if Iseult was being honest with herself, she didn’t mind. It wasn’t as if she had become an expert at this new stasis overnight. If anything, she felt more awkward and unsure than she had before. But maybe one day, she and her mother would figure out some way to show they cared. Maybe one day, this stiffness between them would grow into something comfortable.
Maybe.
“Your Threadsister claims to know a good spiced-wine recipe.” Gretchya rubbed the cold off her arms. “It will be ready soon, back at camp.”
Iseult grimaced. “S-Safi’s idea of good is relative, Mother.” She paused. Swallowed. “Yes, it’s better than what Habim used to make, but that isn’t saying much.”
Now Gretchya grimaced. A stiff and awkward expression, but an attempt all the same. “Then perhaps I should make it.”
Iseult nodded. “And we’ll save a mug for Alma.” She gave the Thread-wrapped sheet a final glance and offered a final prayer to Moon Mother, who had been watching over Iseult all along. Not Trickster, not Wicked Cousin, but the goddess who did indeed look out for her own, just as Alma had told her.
Iseult joined her mother at the edge of a silver fir, and side by side, they entered the night. Stasis through and through, in their fingers and in their toes.
TRICKSTER
The Rook King gazes down at the body, covered in so many threads and Threads. It has been a long time since he has returned a soul permanently to its body, and even longer since he has returned it to a body dead this long. He hasn’t attempted such magic since Sirmaya became the Sleeper. He isn’t sure it will work without Her there. But he also knows he would do anything to see the shadow-ender happy, and so he will at least try.
Not that she will ever know. Or see him again as an ally. His work is done, his plan set in motion. There will be no stopping the Lament now.
The weasel squeaks at him as she curls tightly around his neck. She is pleased with her work, and he nods. “I am pleased with your work too. You guided her well.”
Preening on a branch nearby, the Rook huffs. So needy, he seems to say, but the Rook King only sends him a sideways smile. “You were once the same.”
He pets the weasel, enjoying how she purrs. Enjoying the sensation of reciprocated love. Perhaps he should bind dying souls into animals more often. After all, it is the closest he will ever have to friends. Am-lejatu, she had called him. The life-sleeper. He wishes it were less true.
He kneels and rests a hand over the dead girl’s forehead. A cold cloth and threads hardened to ice pierce against his palm. Portia has always used this pose to claim Threads. He uses it to give them back.
His eyes close. “Save the bones,” he murmurs, exactly as he’d done once a thousand years ago. “Save the bones. Lost without them, have no home. Wrapped in twine to keep them grounded, trapped in time and moonlight crown’d them.”
Nothing happens.
And he sighs. It was worth trying, but now he feels foolish. A grown man trying to raise the dead with a song from a child’s tale. Yet as he pushes to his feet, the clouds part. Sirmaya’s silver sheen flickers down, and one by one, the Threads offered up from the shadow-ender slide first into the physical threads. Then those threads dissolve into the sheet, into the body.
The girl stirs. Another little hedgehog saved, and the Rook King glances at the moon. Although She is gone from this world, Her help still comes at a price. “How else do we keep balance?” She used to say. “For every light, there is a shadow, and for every shadow, a light.”
It is all too painfully true, and he is still paying for a shadow he’d cast a thousand years ago. An accident, a misstep, a misunderstanding that ultimately ruined the goddess they all loved so dearly, even the Exalted Ones.
He doesn’t make it back to the cover of trees before Little Sister materializes before him, stepping around a silver fir and into the clearing. She has her mountain bat with her, though the beast hides within the forest, silent despite his size. The bat cannot hide his silvery, immortal Threads, though—or his stench.
“I remember you now,” she says in her child’s voice. “You made me very sad.”
“Which one?”
“All of them.”