Page 54 of A Fate Unwoven
Just in time for the royal funeral. A fresh wave of fear had Dimas clutching the edge of the table until his knuckles turned white. If Dimas turned the ambassador away, he risked offending the Verlondian queen and losing any chance of a treaty between the two empires. No, as ill-timed as it was, Dimas had no choice but to use this opportunity to show Verlond that entering into an alliance with Wyrecia was in their best interest, especially if it meant gaining access to the one mineral that could be used as a fail-safe should his Fateweaver become corrupt. He just hoped he could pull it off.
“Ready a room in the west wing in preparation for his arrival,” Dimas said. The west wing was where all visiting nobles stayed, and it would be filled once invites to the royal funeral went out. “If Verlond is willing to talk, then it’s an opportunity we can’t afford to mess up. Not if the threat of theHæstaturns out to be real.”
The last time the cult had surfaced, it had taken Wyrecia’s entire army, as well as reinforcements from neighboring lands, to defeat them. Of course, that had largely been due to the fact that the Furybringer had been leading theHæsta.Back then, they had channeled the Furybringer’s dark power to strengthen their forces. Surely without it, and with Lenora on their side, Wyrecia’s own armies stood a chance should they have truly reappeared?
There was too much to think about. Too many ways this could all go wrong. And almost all of them involved his Fateweaver.
It was hard for Dimas to not dwell on what had happened that morning with her vision. Despite what he’d told her, Lenora wasstillfighting the bond between them. His father would have punished her. Would have broken her spirit until she had no fight left. But Dimas had felt her panic, her fear, when his consciousness had brushed againsthers. She was already too close to losing control; one wrong move could push her over the edge and cause her to become mindlessly bound to her power.
The shadows were creeping into the edges of his mind again, less insistent than they’d been during his connection with Lenora, but still enough to make his head pound. He’d thought getting his Fateweaver here would be the hard part, that the shadows would no longer plague him, but it seemed they—and the cult he was almost certain was controlling them—weren’t finished with him yet.
“That will be all for today. You are dismissed.”
Dimas needed time to gather his thoughts. To practice his meditations with Iska and find out if she had found anything in her research. More than that, his fingers itched to pick up a paintbrush, to capture the memories of crimson against white snow, of theHæsta’s symbol.
Of a young soldier staring at the sky with unseeing eyes.
He would pour his feelings about the last few weeks into canvas. Preserve them in oils and charcoal. And when he was done, when the shadows darkening his thoughts had finally begun to recede, Dimas could only hope that’s where they would stay.
TWENTY-THREE
LENA
Lena was dreaming again.
This time, the ancient stone of the temple had been replaced by the forest. Even in sleep, her body relaxed at the sight of its twisted trees, their skeletal branches reaching over her like a shield of thorns. Frost coated the earth, mud crunching beneath booted feet that were not her own.
The body she was inhabiting sucked in a breath of ice-cold air. “We’re almost there.”
“How can you tell?” a voice asked from somewhere behind her. Lena didn’t recognize it, but to the girl whose memory she was reliving, it was as familiar as the sound of the wind whistling through the trees.
“I can feel them,” she said. “Their threads. They’re … getting stronger.”
“Incredible,” the voice said, closer now.
Lena urged her body to turn, to look over her shoulder at whoever stood behind her, but it was no use. Instead, she found herself looking through the trees, toward the shadows beyond, where the faint glow of threads flickered like stars on a cloudy night.
“We should get there before nightfall,” she said with a decisive nod, burying her chin into the fur of her cloak.
Finally, the other person came into view. A boy with a shock of dark hair, his eyes a heart-wrenchingly familiar shade of brown. Their father’s eyes, and the sight of them never failed to punch the girl in the stomach. “And if he gets there before us?” Her brother—Kælar—asked.
Lena felt a rush of fear. “He won’t.”
The girl was sure of it. She’d covered her tracks. Left no trace of their movements. There was no way the High Priest could know where she had gone.
And if hehad,well, she’d made sure the creatures of the forest would buy them some time.
Still, the girl’s fear would not fade. “We should keep moving.” Anticipation fluttered in her chest, and the threads in the distance flared a little brighter. “Come on.”
They walked the rest of the way in silence. Lena wanted to ask the boy more, to find out who he was, and who’s body she was inhabiting. Was it Venysa’s again? Or another Fateweaver this time? And what was it about this particular memory that made it so important?
The questions bubbled up inside of her, trapped behind lips she could not control. It was almost dark by the time the girl reached the edge of the forest, where a small village surrounded by a frozen lake came into view.
Home.
She stood there for a moment, drinking in the sight of it. The blacksmith’s hut on the corner, just a stone’s throw from the windmill. The gathering of wooden huts in the center, built around a square that had seen dozens of celebrations.
And at the farthest edge, half hidden beneath a canopy of snow-tipped branches, was the healer’s hut.
