Page 6 of Witchshadow
“Say it.”
“I understand.”
He released her. She crumpled to the floor, scalp sore. Body broken. Her mind, though…
She lifted her gaze, a sneer settling over her lips.I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.“You are poison,” she whispered. “Twisted and hateful and poison.”
For the briefest flicker of a moment, Henrick’s face tightened. His brows pinched, as if Safi had hit some buried nerve, some forgotten shame. And as if, for a mere instant, he was indeed the fragile toad he pretended to be.
But the emotion vanished in a heartbeat, replaced only by thunder and rage. “No, Safiya.” He leaned close; spittle flecked her cheek. “I am the Emperor of all Cartorra, and this is what my power looks like.”
Four Days After the Earth Well Healed
The world at night is more forgiving. Just darkness and hazy shapes. No scars, no stares, no vibrant, waking Threads. Iseult’s mind at night is not so kind. She has scarcely slept in over a month. First because she was tracking Safi across the dangerous Contested Lands. Then because a Firewitch she’d cleaved had somehow haunted her mind.
But she has found Safi again, and the Firewitch’s ghost is gone. Presumably released into the Aether Well. Yet still, Iseult sits every night on this windowsill, awake while the world sleeps. Alone while the world dreams.
Four days she has been at the fon Hasstrel estate, surrounded by fon Grieg’s soldiers and servants. Grieg has taken over Safi’s family’s lands now that her uncle is imprisoned for treason, and his people bow low to Iseult. Treat her with the same respect they give Safi, the same respect they give Leopold.
Iseult knows the truth, though, for she can read what lies in men’s hearts. And theyknowshe can—it’s why they fear her. Why they shiver whenever they think she cannot see.
Movement rustles on the bed. Safi’s sleeping Threads brighten toward wakefulness. Then a groggy voice splits the cold, shadowy room: “When was the last time you slept, Iz?”
Iseult doesn’t answer. She had hoped Safi would not awaken, would not catch her sitting on this stone lip, staring at a cloudy sky and vague mountains upon the horizon.
“I’m the only one,” she says eventually, “who can sense if someone comes.” This isn’t a total lie, and with Safi’s magic half gone thanks to her creation of a Truth-lens in Marstok, Safi does not sense any omission.
“But Lev put up wards.”
Yes, the Hell-Bard has. Iseult can see them now, strands of golden warmth that curl across the bedroom’s crooked door and across the window too. Threads of protection that somehow coil out of the Hell-Bard’s noose on her command.
But Threads mean nothing to a Weaverwitch, and it takes Iseult no effort atall to bypass them. Like sweeping aside a curtain, she walked right through two nights ago without Lev ever noticing.
Iseult says none of this to Safi. Instead she murmurs, “Go back to sleep, Saf. Tomorrow will be a long day.” The Emperor will arrive from Praga, a hundred soldiers in tow and countless servants too.
Safi does not go back to sleep. She sits up in bed, and the faded Hasstrel-blue covers slink off. Her white shift glows in the night, her chin-length flaxen hair matted and askew, her Threads green with curiosity. “Are you nervous about seeing the Emperor?”
“Yes.” Also not a lie. “Aren’t you?”
“No,” Safi says, and she clambers from bed, the wood groaning, to cross the exposed stone floor. If her bare feet freeze, she shows no sign as she curls onto the opposite side of the windowsill.
Cold radiates through the ancient glass. Warmth radiates off Safi. And not for the first time, Iseult wishes she’d lit a fire when she’d awoken. Her fingers and feet are going numb. Her nose too.
“Our plan will work,” Safi insists, and her Threads give way to green conviction. She curls her bare toes against Iseult’s stockinged ones. “We have done everything exactly as…” A pause. A swallow. A flicker of pained Threads. Then: “Exactly as Mathew and Habim taught us.”
Iseult’s chest tightens. Her nostrils flare.Mathew and Habim.The men who’d raised Safi and Iseult, training them in the art of battle and the art of words and schemes… and who’d betrayed Safi only days ago in Azmir.
Iseult bends forward and pats Safi’s foot. “They thought they were doing the right thing, you know. We have to believe that.”
But Safi isn’t having it. Her knees quiver, and her Threads quiver too, with sapphire loss. With tan confusion. Then she hops off the windowsill, a burst of energy and eruption of muscles so she can pace the floor. This is her childhood bedroom, one of the only inhabitable rooms in this crumbling wing of the estate.
As she lists out the pieces of their plan—carefully crafted, meticulously plotted—Iseult’s mind wanders back outside to the clouds and the distant mountains, mere shadows against the night. She doesn’t like the plan she and Safi have made, but it’s the best they have. Eron fon Hasstrel might hang for treason any day now; the only thing keeping him alive is Safi’s promise to marry the Emperor.
And marry him she will, for what better way to get close to him than on a wedding night? What better way to claim power than to incapacitate him exactly as he has incapacitated so many, including Safi’s uncle? Including the three Hell-Bards who have become her Thread-family?
Safi will imprison an emperor exactly as he has imprisoned so many Hell-Bards, and then she will sit upon the throne, finishing the plan Eron and Mathew and Habim began twenty years ago. Except Safi and Iseult will have done it on their own terms, without bloodshed along the way.
And Iseult will follow Safi every step of the way because that is what a Threadsister must do. Because no one can protect Safi like Thread-family, and because this is all Iseult is ever meant to be: the one who completes what Safi initiates. The one who cuts the purse while Safi distracts.
