Sightwitch (The Witchlands 0.5)

“Because the glamour doesn’t reach inside the mountain.”

“But I don’t want to forget you, Ryber. Or … anything that’s happened. Please—can’t you change the spell?”

“No.” I twisted away to frown in the Rook’s general direction. I knew this would not go well, yet it was turning out harder than I’d imagined.

Because I didn’t want him to forget me either.

I hopped off the boulder, and grass blades scratched at my knees.

Kullen followed, leaping down in a graceful whip of wind. His shadow stretched long over the meadow.

“Is this why you made me write down what I remembered? You knew I would forget.”

“Hye,” was all I said before striding to the falls’ edge.

The Rook paused his cleaning to watch me stalk his way with Kullen fast on my heels.

“Then I won’t leave,” Kullen said, though it was less assertion and more plaintive beg. “I’ll stay here—”

“And do what?” I cut in. “This is no place for you, and an entire army is trying to find you.”

“A navy,” he murmured in a very Captain Kullen-like correction. Then, with sudden animation, he added, “You said ‘buried.’ That the memories would be ‘buried in a place I cannot find them’—which means they’ll still be in here. I just have to … to dig them up somehow.”

“You won’t be able to.” It took all my control to keep my stern Hilga mask in place.

“I will,” he insisted, and there was an edge to his voice I’d never heard before. A determination—a strength that could tame storms and summon cyclones.

“It’s time,” I said, motioning to the falls. To the river below. “You need to go before some Nubrevnan accidentally finds this place and I’m forced to kill him.”

He sniffed, a bitter sound. “You would never follow through with Rule 37.” He strode to the cliff’s edge, and though he scowled down at the sailors and ships, I do not think he truly saw them.

“Will we ever meet again?” he asked eventually, dragging his gaze back to mine.

I hesitated. There was one side of Lady Fate’s knife, one path that I could take in which I was certain we would meet again. The answers to healing Sirmaya might reside somewhere in that Paladin mind of his, meaning one day I would need to find him.

And if I was being honest, I wanted to find him.

But there is always the sharp, hidden side of Lady Fate’s knife, where what we want is not what we ultimately get.

“I … will try,” I forced out, groping for the right words. Then I bobbed my head curtly and repeated, “I will try to find you. One day, Captain.”

“Ah.” His shoulders relaxed. A warm breeze gusted around us—not from the summer’s day, but a charged wind. A happy wind.

Then Kullen flashed me his widest grin yet, and I couldn’t help but match it with my own.

Either he was getting better at smiling, or I was getting used to it.

“Good-bye, Captain,” I said with a small bow.

He lifted a fist to his heart and swept a bow so low that his pale head scraped across the grass. One bow for me, then a second for the Rook, who still splashed upon the shore.

“Safe harbors, Ryber Fortiza,” he declared as fresh, magicked winds furled in. The grass lashed and waved. “And safe harbors to you, the Rook.”

Then Kullen Ikray launched off the knoll, leaving me, the Convent, and his memories of us both far behind.





Y18 D261 — 87 days since I became the last Sightwitch Sister


MEMORIES

The doorway to the underground city waited before me. Once I stepped through, I was through. There would be no easy return to the Convent. Unlike the other passages, this door had been created to go only one way. Refugees who’d entered the underground city could not return for safety reasons.

I felt bound to the stone, unable to move, just as I had for the past twenty-five drips of my new hourglass.

So much had changed since last I’d been in Paladins’ Hall.

For one, I was finally clear-eyed, although I did not have the Sight like other Sisters. I still woke after dreamless nights, and I still slept after days in the Crypts with only ghosts to keep me company.

My eyes had silvered, I assumed, from being so close to the Goddess. Or perhaps because I had made a choice. I had chosen a path.

Skull-Face and the Death Maidens did not try to kill me anymore, though, so at least that was something.

Whatever those creatures were—strange extensions of ghostly memories or guardians created by Sirmaya Herself—I did not know. But now that my eyes were silver, they paid me no mind when I entered their darkened Crypts.

For two, the Rook had left me. Without warning or good-bye, he had flapped off the day after Kullen had departed, and I hadn’t seen him since.

All I could think was that his master was out there somewhere. The Rook King. A Paladin with a fortress in the blustery, windy mountains that I’d read about in Eridysi’s diary. Why the bird had lived all these centuries, why he had helped me in the mountain, I really could not guess—though certainly I tried.

For three, I knew at least some of the Paladins were alive and spread across the Witchlands. Maybe they remembered who they were, or maybe they did not. Perhaps, like Kullen, they simply needed a broken blade and shattered glass to trigger the memories from their past lives.

Either way, Kullen and the Paladins were important.

As were the Cahr Awen, that pair of witches who could heal the Wells and, I surmised, Sirmaya too.

I didn’t know how it was all connected, but the answers were out there. Not hiding in a record in the Crypts nor waiting to be summoned from a scrying pool. Nor even hoping to be flipped from Eridysi’s taro deck—which was my taro deck now.

With that thought, I couldn’t resist snapping over three cards. One last peek at the future, to see what might be coming.

Yet all I got were the same cards I’d always drawn the last few days: The Paladin of Hounds, Lady Fate, the Giant.



Kullen. Me. Change.

I had spent almost an entire week in Eridysi’s workshop, going over her inventions and notes. There was so much to be found! Little notes from Lisbet and Cora, perfectly preserved, as well as some of Lisbet’s prophecies that had been overlooked when Sister Nadya and the rest had assembled everything into “Eridysi’s Lament.”

Which, of course, was Lisbet’s Lament all along.

In the workshop, I learned about Threads and power and life before the Convent was cut off from the world, masked behind a glamour after the battle of the Twelve wrecked everything.

I learned that Tanzi was right: the rules were never meant to be Rules, but merely suggestions that we had added to and added to over the hundreds of years we’d been cut off. The Sisters, myself above all, had lived by the rules until they had caged us in.

With no change to shake us loose, we became lone Sisters gone lost.