Page 157 of Witchshadow
“No.” Stix wagged her head. “We’ll only take what we need.” She walked to Kahina’s side, her own bare feet rolling over tide-worn gravel, and together, the Paladin of Hawks and the Paladin of Foxes walked into the sea to help their queens as the Sleeping Giant—the goddess at the heart of everything—wished for them to do.
It wasn’t a true kiss. Or Vivia didn’t think it was. Later, she would agonize over that distinction, but during the panicked moments while it happened, while she pressed her lips to Vaness’s and shared every remnant of breath in her lungs, while the Empress crushed her lips back and drew in air like the drowning woman she was, Vivia saw it only as a way to save the Empress and buy them more time beneath the waves.
Because the undertow’s song wasn’t finished with Vivia yet—Become us, become us and attack.It sounded like Stix. Vivia didn’t know how, she didn’t know why, but it was as if her Threadsister were right beside her, pumping her fists and urging her on.
Vivia had wished Stix were near to save her only moments ago, and now it felt as if she really were. Become us, become us and attack. Go, Vivia, go.
The iron needles on Vivia’s arm pulled back, leaving only the Empress’s fingers, stronger by the heartbeat. Then the Empress herself pulled back,nothing more than a shadowy shape swept in gold. Vivia’s sinking feet brushed a long-forgotten hull. Kelp reached for her ankles.Become us, become us and attack.
Yes,she replied, and in that moment, she sensed Vaness do the same. Like a scale glinting in a tide pool, something flashed in the Empress’s eyes. Something that Vivia spotted despite the shadows, despite the crude light of a rising dawn. Iron had summoned Vaness, and she too was answering the call.
It was like the Origin Well all over again, but a hundred times stronger. As if the very Threads between Vivia and the Empress had thickened into roots that could not be broken. They no longer belonged to themselves, but to the elements they commanded.
Vivia lifted her arms; Vaness raised hers. The sea obeyed, the iron obeyed, and the sunken ship obeyed.
Whirlpools formed around Vivia and Vaness as water was displaced. As sand that hadn’t moved in decades sloughed off a keel long dead. Iron creaked, a higher-pitched descant to the groan of wooden ribs—just as Vaness’s magic seemed to sing atop Vivia’s undertow. Water lifted and moved, hands to raise a ghost ship while iron reassembled into the ghost cannons it had once been.
A galleon, Vivia recognized. Perhaps even Dalmotti all those years ago.
Now it was Nubrevnan. Now it belonged to the seas that had always lived here, to the undertow that had outlived nations. It remembered more than Vivia’s human mind could conceive, though her tiny brain tried to stretch and warp and absorb as the water flushed into her, flooded through. It had seen continents grow and shorelines fall. It had tended corals large as cities and fed every life that had ever flickered. It had caressed and nurtured and killed and destroyed.
As the galleon lifted, it carried Vivia and Vaness higher and higher, eventually angling to avoid theLionessas that ship sank lower and lower.
She lost all sense of her body. Like her brain, she became a vessel for the water. Shebecamethe water, exactly as it desired. And she would swear, again, that Stix was somehow right beside her.Go, Vivia, go.
The galleon rose, lifting Vivia’s head above the water’s surface, then her neck, her chest, her legs. Water sluiced off of her, dawn air crashed in. Distantly she sensed other ships rising, carried by the water. Two, three, fourteen, the undertow lifted fallen galleys and half-galleys, sunken carracks and longships shed here by different empires over decades of a war that had never claimed Nubrevna.
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 itwantedto 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 thatBaile’s Blessingwould 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 theLioness,for the sea had eatenher, 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 sheshouldcontrol. 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 amnotyou. 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.Thiswas stasis.Thiswas 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.
