Sightwitch (The Witchlands 0.5)

After two spirit swifts erupted from the scrying pool and landed at Lisbet’s feet, she walked to me—not to Nadya—and rolling onto her tiptoes, she whispered, “You should still go.”

Then she smiled so wide it hurt my chest to see.

When she returns, her already changing eyes will be silver through and through.


LATER

Cora is ill. Her brow scalds to the touch, and she complains that her throat aches.

“Just a winter cough,” Sister Leigh assures me. “I will keep her in the infirmary, and she will be fine in a few days’ time.”

Please, Blessed Sirmaya, let that be so. Only nine months here, yet Cora and Lisbet have grown more dear to me than I could have ever predicted. “Thread-family,” Cora said to me only last week, and I had to lift my hand to hide the tears in my eyes.





Y2787 D105


DREAMS

It is the day of the full moon.

I could not sleep all night. Lisbet did not return to the Grove, and though it is not unusual for those with powerful Sight to meet with the Goddess for longer, it worries me all the same.

Cora coughs and coughs. Leigh will not let me in to see her.

Which leaves me alone in my workshop to watch silver time drip past.

He will be at the Sorrow today. In three more hours, the girls’ father will arrive, but there will be no daughters to greet him.

“You should still go,” Lisbet had said to me.

So I will. ’Tis only polite, after all. Otherwise, he will worry and wonder and wait.

Oh, whom do I fool?

I will go to the Sorrow because despite Vergedi Knots and Arlenni Loops to fill my days, it is his face that fills my dreams.





LATER — 5(I think?) hours left to find Tanzi

Foxfire climbed the walls at all angles in this new space. It lent my dark skin a greenish sheen.

The Rook had already fluttered off down the wide hallway. The man, meanwhile, wheezed beside me.

“Thank … Noden,” he gasped. I spun toward him, knife slashing high.

It was instinct. My blood still throbbed in my ears from the escape—and from the fall too.

Only pure luck had kept me on the dull side of Lady Fate’s blade. How long until that luck ran out?

The man doubled over, coughing and complaining that his lungs didn’t seem to work. I gripped the knife hilt ever tighter. I didn’t know who he was nor how he had entered the mountain. Fleeing the wyrms together did not suddenly make us allies.

He glanced up at me, eyes watering. “You’re”—cough—“holding” —cough—“it wrong.” He waved weakly toward my knife.

I couldn’t help it. I glared. “It’s still sharp, isn’t it?”

“That angle … is easy to disarm.” Somehow, he looked even more awful than before. Like a cave salamander—one of the slimy ones that Tanzi and I always found in the subterranean streams.

He straightened, wiping at his brow. It spread the black oil farther across his face. “I’m not going to hurt you.” He lifted his hands defensively. “I did just save your life, after all.”

“I never asked you to.”

“Oh.” He huffed a ragged laugh. “We can go back out there, then. Try it all again, except this time I won’t grab you when you fall to your death.”

My glare deepened.

“Hmmm.” His hands fell. “Clearly humor is not your thing.”

I winced. It was too much like what Tanzi always said. Laugh, Ry! It’s funny, don’t you think?

At the thought of Tanzi, I lowered the knife—though I didn’t sheathe it.

Instantly, the man’s shoulders relaxed. He tried for a grin, though it was easily as terrifying as the one from before. Perhaps even more so, since now he looked like some skeleton-salamander hybrid.

“Sorry again. For the, ah …” He wiggled his fingers. “The touching. Earlier.”

I grunted. Then, with the briefest of eye contact, I said, “Thank you. For saving my life. Now walk.” I motioned in the direction the Rook had gone. It was the only way forward.

The man, to his credit, did exactly that. He turned on his heel, that awful grin still stretched across his face, and marched forward, if a bit haggard in his movements.

I counted twenty-three paces before the hallway ended and a workshop met our eyes, an expansive stone space with balconies and stairwells. Shelves lined the walls, while tables of all shapes and sizes filled the floor, each one littered with papers, books, and a hundred strange contraptions I didn’t recognize.

Every available inch of wall was covered in foxfire. Even some of the shelves, leaving the whole room to glow green.

“Noden’s breath,” the man murmured two paces away. His head tipped back to take it all in.

I couldn’t help but do the same. Whatever this place was, it was special.

The Rook squawked from a nearby table. The man and I jumped in unison, which set the Rook to chuckling.

Which in turn set the man to laughing and me to scowling. My annoyance was short-lived, though, for right as the man twisted toward me, lips parted to speak, I spotted blood on his chest.

“You’re hurt,” I said, and in a moment, without any thought at all, I’d sheathed the knife.

“It’s an old wound,” he said, glancing down and patting at his stained coat. “I had it when I woke up on the ice … Oh, wait. This one’s new.” He barked a laugh, as if delighted by this discovery, and poked the wound. A great thump of his finger, like he didn’t quite believe the slash across his chest was real.

His fingers hit the bloodied line.

A cry of shock and pain split his lips.

Then, before I could lunge forward or do anything at all, his eyes rolled back in his head and he toppled forward. So massive. A tree trunk tumbling over.

He hit the floor with a room-shaking thunk.

I darted over and crouched to one knee at his side. I tried to lift him, to turn him, to smack him awake.

But he was out. Completely unconscious, his skin growing colder by the second.

Now, I feel the need to assert here that under normal circumstances I would have helped him. Even as an Accidental Guest of the male variety, I would have stopped to help him had I not seen what I saw next.

What happened was that I knelt beside him, and my hourglass slung down against my knee.

The top half was empty. At some point, the last hour had run out.

Nausea swept over me. I yanked the glass into view—only to face a crooked line of broken glass.

I truly thought I might hurl.

The hourglass was broken. The bottom half had shattered, and the device had drained of quicksilver entirely. Not a single drop was left.

I couldn’t breathe. My thoughts sliced left and right, up and down, an incoherent jumble of questions and panic.

I must have smashed it in the chase, was followed by, That was the crunch I felt against the ice wall. Then right on that thought’s tail, I have no idea how much time has passed. I have no idea how much time is left.

I started cursing then. One swear word after the next, they fell from my tongue as I shoved back to my feet.