I didn’t mean to speak.
I rubbed my chest. It hurt fiercely. Maybe I’d eaten something too acidic at dinner. The vampires kept me well-fed, but since they didn’t quite know what humans ate, it was often with hilariously mismatched collections of random food. Lately there had been a lot of oranges.
“You’re familiar with him,” Atrius said.
“He’s a warlord. Everyone is familiar with him.” I gave Atrius a weak smile that, I hoped, was charming. “This is why you’re very lucky to have a local guide.”
He looked unconvinced. “Hm.” Then he rose. “Meet me two hours before dawn, later tonight. I need you to seer on this.”
I rubbed my chest again. It burned fiercely. Those damned oranges.
“Alright,” I choked out, standing.
He eyed me. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re acting strange.” He paused, then added, “Stranger than usual.”
Weaver fucking damn him.
“Tell your men to stop feeding me buckets of oranges,” I snapped, striding to the door. “It’s bad for digestion. Maybe protein! Protein would be nice!”
I left him standing there and huffed my way over to my own tent before he could stop me.
Later that night, I was brought a beautifully roasted quail.
“He wants to see you after you’re done eating,” Erekkus told me.
The quail was delicious, but for some reason, every bite tasted like ash.
Atrius and I walked in silence beyond the boundaries of camp, hiking through sandy plains until we reached a little pond. We didn’t talk, save for Atrius asking, “Was the quail better than the oranges?” to which I replied, too shortly, “Yes.”
My chest was still burning though. Gods help me.
He didn’t say anything else after that. We drew the sigils together in silence. I caught the rabbit and did the bloodletting. I whispered prayers to the Weaver, and he leaned against a dead tree trunk and watched.
“Vasai,” he said, as I settled cross-legged in the sand. “I intend to move soon. Any information is—”
“I know.”
My voice was tight. I regretted my tone the minute the words left my lips. I didn’t know what was wrong with me tonight. Showing all kinds of things I shouldn’t.
The night was damp and foggy. The mist clung to my skin, indistinguishable from the faint sheen of sweat. The heat of the fire licked at the tip of my nose.
With eyesight, the flames would have been too bright to allow me to see the corpse of the rabbit, flesh melting, lick by lick, in the flames. But the threads allowed me to see it perfectly. The rabbit’s open eyes ran down its cheeks like cracked eggs.
“Your heartbeat is fast,” Atrius said.
I gritted my teeth. Suddenly, I understood acutely why he had been so short with me the first night I helped him. It was unpleasant for someone to see things about you without your permission.
“I’m focusing,” I muttered.
Normally, starting a Threadwalk was like walking into a lake, step by step, allowing the water to accept you with each one.
Tonight, it was like my toes touched the water and froze.
The tension pulled tighter in my muscles. My heartbeat quickened another beat.
Weaver damn this.
I gritted my teeth. I did not walk into this Threadwalk smoothly.
I leapt into it like hurling myself off a cliff, crashing into the water below.
21
The water was blood.
I was drowning in it. I drew in a gasp, and it pooled in my lungs, burned in my chest. The impact of my body hitting the liquid hurt, the force of stone against flesh. The threads blurred past me.
I was falling.
Falling past them.
Falling into this sea of blood.
Move, Sylina. Move move move.
I thrust my hands out just in time.
Pain ripped through my palms—but I’d caught a thread, barely, against what felt like an avalanche of pressure pushing me down. It took all my strength to pull myself up as the thread ate into my palms.
My head broke through the blood. I drew in a choked gasp of air and wiped it from my face—or tried to, while my palms bled, sliced open from the razor-sharp thread.
Center yourself.
But it was difficult to do that here, with the world swirling in chaos. An overwhelming sensation of… nothing, smallness, helplessness weighed down on my shoulders. I managed to get my feet positioned on the thread, but my entire body reviled the idea of taking a single step.
Enough. My inner voice sounded so much like the Sightmother’s, a single harsh command.
I walked.
Every step was labored, difficult, as if fighting against harsh wind. The mist grew thicker. The blood around my feet rose with the slow inevitability of an incoming tide. The dread in my heart rose, too, beat by beat, step by step.
Show me something, Weaver, I whispered.
Her words were distant, intangible, like a collection of sounds of the wind.
Perhaps you do not wish to see.
I do, I insisted.
The Weaver did not believe me. I did not believe myself.
But the mist thinned, revealing silhouettes of strange, broken shapes; first as distant flat grey, and then— Bodies.
All of them were bodies. Bodies twisted and broken beyond recognition. Bodies impaled on stakes or smashed between ruined buildings. Bodies burnt like the rabbit I had sacrificed for my Threadwalk, eyes running, skin peeled.
I wavered on the thread, nearly falling. The fear beat in my veins like a drum.
Something nudged my foot. My eyes—I had eyes here, I had never known anything else—fell to my feet. They were small, bare, dirty. My sister lay there, blue eyes staring at me wide and unseeing through tendrils of blond hair, clutching at her stomach, blood bubbling between her fingers.
It’s all going to be alright, she whispered.
I snapped my head up.
Not my sister. Just some person another version of me knew a long time ago.
I need the future, I told the Weaver—told myself. Not the past.
The threads intersect, the voice whispered, a teasing caress at the crest of my ear. This is the nature of life.
No. I didn’t accept that. I was a daughter of only the Weaver. I was a Sister of only the Arachessen. I had a task to complete.
I kept walking, chin up.
Show me more.
The silhouettes around me, limp like abandoned puppets, sprang back to life, floundering as if traveling backwards in time. Waves of vampire warriors surrounded me, moving in skips and lurches, fragments of many different moments in time.
The battle was vicious. The vampires were more skilled, obvious even in these shattered flashes—but the Vasaians were numerous, throwing themselves at their aggressors like lemmings over a cliff.
The blood around my ankles rose and rose. More red than black.
My heart pounded rapidly. I kept walking, step by steady step, but at this point, I wasn’t choosing to, nor could I have stopped myself.
Death was everywhere.
The mist rolled in and out. A violent crack of silent lightning, and it all went dark.