Aeduan passed the second bowl to Owl, but the child only looked at Iseult with confusion. She had a bruise on her left cheek. New and purple. More fury swept through Iseult.
“Drink it,” she whispered. Then she demonstrated, sipping as best she could. Some leaked down her left cheek. Greasy from whatever fish had been boiled.
“She’s lucky,” Evrane commented, still watching Owl from across the fire. “If not for that collar, I would have to put her to sleep.” Her smug smile slid to Iseult. “The dark-giver knows how much fun that can be.”
Aeduan grunted, but if in amusement or annoyance, Iseult could not say. His Threads were once more unreadable, once more masked by avian shadows. Evrane’s Threads, however, were easy to interpret. She enjoyed taunting Iseult, just as she had enjoyed keeping her bound by nightmares at the Monastery.
Iseult kept her face blank as she swallowed more stew. She was stasis on the outside. Cold enough to make even her mother proud, while inside, she burned. These usurpers had chosen the wrong targets. They had imprisoned the wrong girl. Iseult was not the weakling of old. She didn’t cower, she didn’t break.
And she didn’t forget.
When she’d finished her food, Aeduan reclaimed her bowl and Owl’s. Like Iseult, the child had spilled soup down her cheeks. Iseult moved to wipe Owl’s face, but Evrane knocked her arm aside before gripping Owl by the hair. She tipped back Owl’s head and moved to stuff the wool gag back in.
Owl screamed.
And just like that, Iseult’s outward stasis crumbled. The fire in her chest erupted. The rage of the road, the rage of the Puppeteer. “Stop.” She leaped to her feet, hands clawed even as her wrists were bound. She would take Evrane’s Threads and she would destroy them. She didn’t care whose body this was, didn’t care what damage she caused.
Aeduan grabbed her. A rough slinging of his arms around her torso before he wrenched her away from Evrane. Brutal, hard, but Iseult could be brutal and hard too. She turned her claws on his face, her fingernails on his flesh. But he was stronger than she, and in mere heartbeats, he had her pinned to a tree.
The tree she’d been tied to before, while at the campfire Owl wept, her tiny body dry-heaving against the wool. Evrane laughed and laughed.
“She’s choking.” Iseult grabbed at Aeduan’s chest. She didn’t fight him this time, didn’t resist the arm he pressed into her throat. Instead she simply begged. “Please, the child can’t breathe. Help her.”
“She’s fine,” Evrane spat, and she dragged Owl toward the ash tree. In moments, she had the girl tied up again. Still, Owl choked and cried.
Meanwhile, Aeduan simply watched. Simply waited. Only when the other monk was seated at the fire again did he show any reaction or make any move. Without releasing his hold on Iseult, he bent sideways and tugged at the wool in Owl’s mouth. He didn’t remove the gag entirely, but he pulled it far enough forward that Owl’s chest and throat relaxed.
“Thank you.” The words squeaked from Iseult’s throat, cracked and quiet—and in Nomatsi. She still burned inside, but it was a weaker flame. A dying flame. She settled into Aeduan’s grasp. Her head lolled against the tree, bark rough against her scalp. “Thank you,” she repeated.
For half a moment, Aeduan stilled against her. As if he understood her words. Suddenly, Iseult was not tired at all. She was taut as a Heart-Thread, her vision shrinking to pinpricks upon his blue eyes.
“Aeduan.” She stood taller against his grip. “Te varuje, Aeduan. Te varuje.”
Pale consternation rushed up his Threads. He frowned.
“Te varuje,” she said again, urgency in her voice and in her posture as she tried to lean toward him. “I told you that at the Monastery, and I know you remember. I know you’re in there—”
He shoved her. Hard enough to break off her words. Hard enough to send stars across her vision. Then suddenly the wool was back in her mouth. Too fast for her to evade, too rough for her to resist.
Iseult choked as Owl had. Her eyes watered, her nose burned, and silt grated down her throat. She could do nothing but try to breathe and keep her supper from coming back up—all while Aeduan refastened her to the ash.
“I told you,” he said when he was done, her bindings so tight she could already feel the blood leaving her extremities, “I do not speak that language.” Then he turned as sharply as Evrane had and joined the other monk at the fire.
SIXTEEN
He did not know why he had listened to the one called Iseult. He did not know why he had helped the child by loosening the wool in her mouth. After all, pity was an emotion he had abandoned long ago, and mercy he had lost even before that. There was no space for such weakness when one was all that stood between the world and chaos.
Though chaos had still won in the end.
He had no name—or rather, none that he remembered. It had been lost in the dark water of a thousand years, and history had successfully erased it. When he had come into this new world, others had called him Monk Aeduan, so Monk Aeduan he had become.
Yes, the first Aeduan still wrestled inside of him, swimming toward the surface. But that man would never survive. He would tire eventually, then fade away.
As the new Aeduan sat beside the campfire, he watched the girl called Iseult. Even bound to a tree and helpless, he could see there was fight in her posture, fury in her heart. She only ever had gentle words for the No’Amatsi child, though.
It reminded him of someone else. Someone from before the world had ended. The one they’d all loved, even as they’d betrayed her.
This is not her, he told himself. This is just a girl whose body you will one day claim.
He had to wonder if Corlant saw the resemblance too. If perhaps that was why the man was so obsessed with her, for the priest’s fascination certainly went beyond mere familial interest.
But no. Corlant was obsessed with Iseult because she was half of the Cahr Awen. She and the other girl were the only people who could end the way Corlant lived … and the way Aeduan lived too.
“You are awfully calm,” said the older woman who was now called Evrane. She sat across from Aeduan. The fire morphed her face until she looked almost as she had all those years ago. “Without the Threadstone, she is useless to us.”
“There is no reason to panic.” He gazed steadily at her, inhaling the strange angles and curves of her blood. He had gotten used to this body’s magic. It was powerful, it was useful.
And strangely, he found Evrane’s scent soothing. Crisp spring water and salt-lined cliffs. It belonged to the first soul who had worn that body—it was too pure, too tame to be the Old One’s.
“No reason to panic?” She snorted. “It took him centuries to make those stones.”
“And we have waited a millennium. He will not give up so easily.”
“I hope so.” Her voice came out softer than usual. A sure sign she was worried, perhaps even frightened. “As long as they exist, we are at risk.”
Who is the weakest now? he wondered, though he preserved his silence. She was too quick to anger, too slow to cool off. Even a thousand years in darkness had not robbed her of that.
So Aeduan drank his soup. It was disgusting. Easily one of the worst meals he had ever eaten. He might not remember his name, but he remembered good food. Cinnamon-spiced lamb and white-ginger veal. Wine from the south and beer from the north. More fruits and flavors than most people would ever encounter in a lifetime, he had feasted on daily.