Page 33 of Thornlight

Thorn’s heart pounded in her palms. She could hardly find her voice. “Do the harvesters know? DidBrierknow?”

“No!” Noro’s head shot up. “No, I swear to you, Thorn, Brier doesn’t know. She thinks the lightning is simply that. We... the unicorns, the harvesters, the queen, all of us, we decided not to tell her until she was older.”

“But if she knew, maybe she wouldn’t have agreed to be a harvester,” Thorn whispered. She felt woozy. The world was changing too quickly, right before her eyes. “She’s got a nose for lightning, right? Maybe she would have been able to work out a way to free the witches. Or she could have helpedyoudo it.”

“The unicorns wouldn’t have been able to do a thing,” Zaf said, looking coldly at Noro. “You’ve grown weak since the Vale split. No, I broke free all on my own. It took decades and decades, it was like smashing through a mountain with a tiny hammer, but I did it. Whatever magic trapped us in those storms so long ago, I think it’s finally fading.” She narrowed her eyes at Noro. “No thanks toyourkind. Instead of helping us, you’ve been helping our killers. Letting yourself be bound to humans. Pah!”

Noro looked pained. “Without the Old Wild, we cannot resist them.”

“Oh, to thestormswith the Old Wild.” Zaf swiped a hand across her cheeks. “So it got scared away by the sky fire. Well, I’ve been scared too, and I’m still here. The Old Wild’s a coward. Do you hear me?” Zaf jumped to her feet and screamed to the skies. “You’re a coward!”

For a long time, no one spoke. Zaf crossed her arms and glared at the ground, biting her bottom lip.

Thorn thought,Maybe I shouldn’t say this.

Thorn thought, heart pounding,I wish Brier was here, so she could ask questions instead of me.

“How many of you are left?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Zaf whispered. “The skies are so quiet. Once, there were thousands and thousands of us. Now...” She laughed sadly. “I suppose I could be the only one.”

Bartos cleared his throat. He held his dirty soldier’s cap against his chest. “Maybe they’re all just hiding? Maybe some will break free, like you did.”

“Maybe.” Zaf’s voice was shaking. “I don’t even know who’s alive and who’s not. My mama and papa, my grandmum and grandpop. My cousins, my friends...”

Zaf turned away, ferociously rubbing her eyes.

Thorn tried to imagine what Zaf was feeling. She remembered seeing Brier on the balcony, afraid and hurting, with that awful black burn on her chest, and thought that whatever Zaf was feeling, it must be at least a hundred times worse.

She blinked hard, waiting until she could speak without crying.

“Queen Celestyna sent us to the impassable mountains to find more lightning,” Thorn said slowly.

Zaf nodded sharply. “That’s where I’ll go, too. I’ll help any stormwitches I can find, teach them how to escape their bolts, like I did.”

“But then what will we do?” Bartos was very quiet. He was sitting with his hat clutched in his lap, his eyes trained on the ground. “If whatever stormwitches still live start breaking free of their lightning, we’ll run out of eldisks. We won’t be able to fight the Gulgot. He’ll climb out of the Break at last, and darkness will flood over everything, even Westlin.”

“You’ll find other storms to make your precious metal killers,” Zaf said sharply. “Real storms, with real lightning. No witches inside them.”

“But what if ordinary lightning isn’t enough? What if it’sthe magic you carry that does the trick?” Bartos frowned, then looked up carefully. “What if... Zaf, what if we help you track storms and free whatever witches you can find, and then we all find a new way to fight the Gulgottogether?”

Zaf’s glare was so sharp it stung. “Witches? Helpingyou, our killers? That’s rich. That’s worse than rich. It’sstupid. How dare you even say that?”

“But if the Gulgot escapes the Break, he’ll devour us all—including you, and any stormwitches that still live.”

Zaf stewed in silence, her pale cheeks coloring pink, and then burst out, “There has to be another way to save the Vale, and I shouldn’t have to be the one to figure it out.Youshould do it. We’ve been helpingyouall this time, after all. We’ve beendyingfor years to save your miserable skins. Humans and witches, fighting side by side? We can’t... Ican’t...”

Zaf fell quiet, her bright blue eyes sparking silver with tears. Bartos miserably wrung his hat in his hand.

Thorn cleared her throat. Her head felt so heavy that she wanted desperately to lie down in her bed, cover up with a blanket, and think in silence for a good long while.

But her bed was far away. And she had a feeling that finding these answers would take something more than thinking.

She just didn’t know what yet.

“None of this matters if we die in a swamp,” Thorn said quietly. “We should help each other through this, and we should get moving soon.”

Noro shook his head. “The swamp will eat us alive the moment we set foot off this rock.”

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