Page 13 of A Fate Unwoven
Something in Lena’s soul sang at the sight of them. The muscles in her body strained as she fought the urge to reach out to them, to twist and bend them to her will.
Again, that strange whispering curled at the back of Lena’s mind, like mist before a cold dawn, just out of her reach. Ice-sharp pain spread along her wrist, crawling up her arm until she couldn’t think, couldn’tsee.The world before her swayed, flashes of snowy trees turning to the onyx walls of an imperial carriage.
And then a dark-haired boy with eyes like ice was sitting before her, his brow furrowed, mouth parting to form a single, horrifying word.
“Fateweaver.”
The moment was over as quickly as it had begun. Lena jolted away from the vision, and the familiar bleakness of the forest wrapped around her once more. Time caught up with itself in a flash of movement. The hunter’s shouts of surprise. The unnatural snarl of thewylfenas it launched itself at its prey.
There was no time to warn them now, but she could still help. The creature had listened to her before; surely it would do so again? And if it didn’t …
Then you shall make it,the voice she’d heard earlier said. Once more, pain radiated from the mark on her wrist as the urge to reach out and weave the creature’s threads pulsed through her.Their fates are yours to command. Simply concentrate on their threads, and—
No!
Lena gritted her teeth, her mind filling with the warnings from her mother’s tales. The Fateweaver’s existence was unnatural, her power believed by those loyal to the Lost Sisters to be a corruption of magic itself. Some of the oldest, most forbidden tales even spoke of a Furybringer, a Fateweaver who had become so corrupted by her magic she lost control entirely, creating a cult dedicated to growing her power and destroying everything in her path, and whilst there had been no Fateweaver like her since, Lena could not—would not—risk following in her footsteps.
With that thought, the threads in the air began to disappear, and the world came rushing back in a clash of panicked shouts and unnatural snarls. The soldiers were now swinging their swords wildly, swiping at a creature they had no idea how to fight, but it wasn’t fear on their faces.
It was disgust. Anger.Hatred.
The same emotion she’d seen on the faces of any Fist ordered to visit the Wilds. As if the frozen huts and hungry people—herpeople—were beneath them.
As if they didn’t deserve the same chances to survive as the imperials did, simply because of where they’d been born.
She could help them. But that look on their faces … Lena had seen it before, on the night a unit of hunters had raided the village Kelia Vesthir and her daughter had been passing. The night Lena had hidden in the forest and waited for a mother who would never return.
Whilst these hunters weren’t the same ones who’d taken her mother from her, they had still taken too many innocent lives.
Lena wasn’t going to let them take any more.
And so, with one final glance at the creature from her mother’s stories, Lena lowered her bow and left the hunters to their fate.
FIVE
DIMAS
His Fateweaver was trying to leave the empire.
Dimas’s blood thrummed with certainty as his carriage rolled through the Wilds, leaving the village of Forvyrg far behind. Ioseph sat to his left, his long legs tucked awkwardly to the side in an effort to make space for the carriage’s two new occupants. It was a tight fit; whenever Dimas shifted to try to get more comfortable, his arm or leg would brush against some part of Ioseph, and he’d be forced to turn his head to the side to hide the flush in his cheeks.
It was clear Finæn and Maia Æspen had never ridden by carriage before. They jumped at every bump, and their skin had turned a sickly shade. Neither had said a word since they’d left their home behind, to Dimas or to each other, but the tension between them was so heavy that the frozen wasteland outside of the carriage had begun to look appealing.
His Fateweaver—Lenora, Finæn had said—was somewhere out there. After they’d separated themselves from the angry crowd of villagers and taken shelter in Finæn and Maia’s home, the boy hadtold Dimas what he knew: that Lenora was planning to flee Wyrecia altogether and had set off for the trading city of Deyecia in search of someone she believed could help.
Ioseph had kept watch on a furious Maia as they’d talked. The girl had refused to give anything away, and given how hurt she’d seemed by her brother’s forwardness, Dimas was inclined to believe Finæn had been telling him the truth.
They’d just returned to his carriage when the image of his Fateweaver had flashed through Dimas’s mind, pulling him from the small village the Æspen siblings called home to the harshness of the icy forests. And before him, staring at something he could not see, had been Lenora.
She had looked the same as she had the first time he’d seen her: angry, fierce, as wild as the woods at her back. But Dimas had called out to her anyway, like the fool his father had always claimed him to be, and the Fateweaver’s attention had drifted from whatever she’d been staring at in that dark forest to land on him.
Something inside of Dimas had surged the second their eyes met. It was a different sensation to the one he’d felt when Næbya had given him a glimpse of his future Fateweaver; then, he’d been seeing Lenora through Næbya’s power. Butthis …this was the legendary bond between emperor and Fateweaver, as divine as his father had always claimed it to be. Even in its weakened state, it was like nothing Dimas had ever felt. And it had been clear from Lenora’s expression that she’d felt it, too.
For a moment, he’d forgotten about his failures. His Fateweaver had been rightthere,and everything was exactly as it should have been.
And then Lenora’s expression had shifted into one of such hatred, suchfear,that Dimas’s blood had run cold. Shadows had crept into the edges of his vision as he’d felt herpush,shoving at him with her mind, until the frozen trees and the angry flash of hereyes had vanished, leaving him hunched over in his carriage, nose dripping with blood.
He’d managed to wipe it away before Ioseph opened the carriage door. Still, the soldier’s eyes had narrowed at the sight of him, as if he’d been able to sense that something was wrong. Dimas had wanted to tell him everything. To share his burden with the one person he trusted with all his secrets. But Finæn and his sister had been standing at Ioseph’s side, their wrists bound, and so Dimas had forced a smile and kept his mouth shut.
