He nodded slowly, his eyes locked on hers. “But it might be a difference that will get us all killed. She’s capable of that, you know. She’s so deeply caught up in what’s been done to her—what I’ve done to her—that she could turn on us in a second.”
“I know that. The others know it, too. But we accepted that risk from the first. No one knew what she would be like if she came back. Not after a hundred years of being wedded to that tree—as an aeriad, as whatever she was or is. We took the risk that she could do what was needed. And she can, Railing. She can! She can destroy the Straken Lord.”
“We think she can, but we don’t know. We don’t even know if she will try. It doesn’t matter what she tells us. Look at her. She’s not even human anymore.”
She grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him so close that his face was almost touching hers. She could see the rain running down his forehead and cheeks. She could see the blush from the cold reddening his skin.
“Whatever she is, you have to find a way to make her do what is needed. No one else can do it but you. No one else can even get close to her. She may hate you, but she talks to you and she watches you. Have you seen how she looks at you? There’s something there, Railing.”
He stared at her, voiceless, lost.
She released him and stood up. “I have to steer the ship so it won’t crash and burn. Maybe you should do what you have to do, too.”
Then she turned and walked away and did not look back.
Railing sat where he was for a while, thinking through what Mirai had said to him, his mood alternating between acceptance and rejection. He could see what she was attempting to do, how she was reminding him none too subtly that he was the one who had to find a way to make sure Grianne Ohmsford did what they all knew was needed. It didn’t matter how he felt about her now that he had brought her back. It didn’t even matter if he felt guilty about it. The Ilse Witch was here and she wasn’t going away. What he couldn’t do—what she was telling him she wouldn’t let him do—was to throw up his hands and retreat into the mire of his despair over what he had wrought.
If nothing else, her words impressed on him anew that a large part of what he was struggling so hard to accomplish was not only to get Redden back from the Straken Lord but also to find a way to keep them all safe. He was the one who wielded the wishsong’s magic. He was the one who carried the ring bestowed by the King of the Silver River. He was the one on whose shoulders rested the responsibility for keeping them alive.
And as Mirai had pointed out, he was the only one the Ilse Witch might heed.
The Witch had come with him, after all. Though she hated and despised what he had done to her, she had come nevertheless. She was a creature of pure malice, and she was eager to seek out and destroy any enemy, but particularly the Straken Lord if for no better reason than to eradicate the last traces of what he had done to her. Find the Straken Lord. Engage him in battle. Destroy him and reap both relief and satisfaction.
There was no consideration for Redden’s fate, no interest in it at all. Saving him would be nothing more than a by-product of her efforts to get at Tael Riverine. Railing had tried several times to explain why she should feel otherwise, but the Ilse Witch cared nothing for the brothers and their suffering. The Ilse Witch spared not a single thought for the lives of mortal creatures, no matter their claims of family history shared with her. All of that was dead and gone to her. All of that belonged to someone else.
He climbed to his feet and, without pausing to think further on it, walked forward toward the bow where the Witch sat huddled in her gray robes in the pouring rain. She did not look up as he approached or glance back when he slowed, hesitant to come any closer without acknowledgment.
But then her hand lifted, and she beckoned to him, sensing his presence.
Unable to do anything else without appearing as frightened as he felt, he moved forward and sat down beside her.
“Don’t get too close to me,” she said out of the shadow of her cowl. “You don’t want to breathe the air I exhale.”
He looked down at his hands, rain dripping off them. “Are you alive now? Are you a living creature?”
Her laugh was harsh and bitter. “A fair question. I have asked it of myself. Am I? I breathe air. I move about. Is that enough?”
“You have thoughts and the ability to reason? You can see the truth of things when others speak to you?”
She turned her head slightly, part of her ruined face peering at him from out of the shadows. “My thoughts and my reasoning and my truths would burn the skin from your body should you study them too closely, Valeboy. They would burn you like acid.”
He was silent for a long time. “I am sorry I had to bring you back,” he said finally. “I did not know it would be this way.”
“Yet here I am.”
“My brother, your great-nephew, your own flesh and blood, is in the hands of the Straken Lord and will die if I do not free him. I did what I had to.”
Her hands, gray and gnarled, clenched before her like great claws. “Even though, by freeing him, you doom me?”