“That’s a tight fit,” Captain said, and I flinched.
I’d forgotten he was here.
Frowning, I sheathed my knife. “You don’t have to fit,” I told him. “You can leave now, Captain. You flew me here, and now … You can leave this ‘nightmare place’ and find out where you came from.”
Eyes thinned, he glanced from me to the door. Then back to me again. “It doesn’t look very safe in there. What if you get hurt?”
“My Sisters will help,” I said, though I had no idea if it was true. Nor did I care. Time was moving forward while I stayed still.
“I can take care of myself,” I added, lifting my arm. “Come on, the Rook.”
After a sympathetic cluck in Captain’s direction, the Rook obeyed. A flap, a swoop, and his weight bore down on my forearm. Then hop, hop, hop he reached my shoulder.
“Will I see you again?” Captain asked, and I made the mistake of meeting his gaze. Of taking in his face.
“Wounded” is the only word I can think of to describe it. His ribs bowed in, out, each breath short and rasping.
All while snowflakes danced around his head.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly.
“I could wait for you.” His eyebrows crooked up in earnest. “Then we could leave this place together.”
I shook my head, a single curt movement. “I’m not sure I’ll be coming back, Captain. I …” I glanced at the Rook. Then at my toes. Anywhere to avoid meeting his sad, sad eyes. “I’m not sure what I’ll find inside here or how long it will take me. You should leave, while you have the chance.”
Then, because I had no choice, I turned away from him. “I’m sorry, Captain. I have to go now.”
“Oh.” The word was more sigh than tangible sound, and a whip of cold air kissed my shoulders as I strode away.
“Good-bye,” I said, and I did not look back.
When I reached the ice, I bent low. A dip of my torso, a slouch of my spine, and I ducked into the ice.
The last thing I heard before the passage swerved left and the ice swallowed me entirely was a gentle, “Thank you for saving me, Ryber Fortiza, and I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
Navigating the ice took all my concentration and all my flexibility. The path leaned and dipped, warped and contorted.
Within ten paces, the Rook had to abandon his spot on my shoulder and hop his way through. Another twenty paces, and the ice narrowed so tightly I had to squirm sideways, suck in my stomach, and shimmy onward.
The black shapes hovered, unmissable with my gaze aimed straight into the ice, and I had the strangest sense that the black lines tendriling outward were reaching for me.
Fortunately, the squeeze lasted only fifteen sideways steps. Then I popped into a room of such crystal perfection I could do nothing but stare for several long, shivering heartbeats.
The ice spun upward like a snail’s spiral, and a pathway, smooth as glass, arched around the edge. Every few paces, an ice-clogged door honeycombed into the ice.
A crack erupted behind me. I jolted around, certain the ice had somehow moved. Certain the passage had collapsed behind me.
But it was just the Rook, shaking loose from the ice and clacking his displeasure. A frosty moment later, he resumed his perch atop my shoulder—and I resumed my journey forward.
Though I did wonder how the Rook had managed to make so much noise.
I quickly forgot my confusion. Up my feet carried me, careful at first in case the ice was slick. All was fine, though, and within one loop, I was running.
Then sprinting flat out. My arms swung, and I pumped my knees higher, faster. Around, around. Up, up.
My exhales came in sharp, cloudy gasps, and the Rook’s talons dug deep to hold on. It hurt. I didn’t care. I was too close to care about anything except slamming my feet, one foot after the next.
Had the Rook not stabbed his beak into my ear and screeched, I would never have noticed the gap in the ice. It was an open door.
I skidded to a stop, hand slinging out to wrench me back the other way.
My shredded palm tore anew.
“This … way?” I panted, and at the Rook’s acknowledging purr, I shoved inside.
Except it wasn’t the right way at all. I had entered a tiny cube room, where two shadows floated in the ice directly before me. Small shadows. Child-size.
Then, gouged out of the walls on either side of me were two holes, each my height and deep enough to hold me.
Before I could ask the Rook why we were here, he bounded off my shoulder with a squawk and landed beside a tattered book and a hand-size gold leather pouch.
Clearly, whatever these items were, he thought I needed them. “Fine,” I huffed, trying to catch my breath.
I yanked up the pouch, but before I could snag the book, my eyes landed on its cover.
Diary of Eridysi Gochienka
My fogging breaths broke off. All I could do was stare, hand outstretched. Body half crouched.
Eridysi Gochienka.
That was the Eridysi of legend, and this was her diary. Yet I felt no interest or elation at the sight of it. All that came was a vast shoveling horror.
For if this was her diary, then this place must be her tomb.
And if this was her tomb, then I knew what the shapes in the ice were—and I knew exactly why time was running out. The Sisters had been called for sleeping, and I had to reach their tombs before it was too late.
My muscles erupted with power. I snatched up the diary and pouch, and, abandoning the Rook, I charged out of the room and onto the spiral once more. Somehow my feet knew where to take me. Or perhaps it was Sirmaya, leading me the rest of the way.
The spiral blurred around me. I lost track of the cold, of the diary and pouch still clasped in my hands—of who I was at all. Everything shrank down to what I knew waited ahead.
After an eternity of running, I reached a gap in the ice large enough to barrel through. The spiral kept rising, but I knew this was the branch I needed.
I veered through it, and moments later, another cube faced me. This one, though, was large enough to hold a hundred Sisters.
Large enough to hold all the people I’d ever loved.
Then there they were. Each and every face of each and every Sightwitch who had filled my days. The ice hadn’t covered them entirely yet—not all of them, at least. Some still had enough of their faces exposed for me to recognize them.
Over there was Ute, and beside her was Birgit. There were Rose and Trina and Margrette. Oriya and Fazimeh.
And there, in the farthest corner, was Hilga … with Tanzi right beside her.
I hurried to my Threadsister, a numbness rushing over me as I scanned the ice. There had to be a way to clear it. A way to dig her out—to dig them all out.
I rushed past Ute, then Birgit. They looked so peaceful with their eyes closed. Nothing like the images in the scrying pool.
Still, I had to try to break them free.
I reached Tanzi and dropped the diary and the pouch at my feet. “Wake up,” I whispered. “Wake up, Tanz. I’m here—just like you asked. Please, wake up.”
Nothing happened.
So with hands that trembled out of control, I unfastened my knife. It was the only tool I had for breaking the ice; it would have to be enough.
“Wake up,” I said, louder now and, with my arm rearing back.
I stabbed the ice.
A shockwave tore out. It threw me backward, yanking me to the ground with mind-crunching power.
My head banged the ice. The world went black, and for a moment, I simply lay there.
Lost. No sound, no sight. I was stripped down to my barest nothing, and it took all I had to simply cling to consciousness.
I thought perhaps I had died.
But then my breath returned, aching and weak, followed by a flickering haze of glowing blue.
Last came sound. Words from throats I knew.
“She is dying,” croaked Sister Rose.
&
nbsp; “The Goddess is dying,” said Ute. And Trina and Margrette and all the rest. “The Goddess is dying, the Goddess is dying.”
Then loudest came Hilga’s stern tone. It cut straight to my heart, and tears scorched in my eyes.
“Join us,” Hilga said. “Join us in sleep, Ryber. Sirmaya needs us. We must give her our power so she can heal.”
“But I have no power.” The words cracked over my lips, and with a grunt to rattle even the Sleeper herself, I thrust myself up.
The Sisters’ eyes were open now, mouths moving. “She is dying, Ryber. The Goddess is dying.”
Only one Sister did not speak. The one I wanted most to hear from.
“Come,” Hilga declared, her silver eyes locked on me. “You do not need the gift of Sight to help our Goddess. You have your own unique strength, and she needs that just as much as she needs our magic. So come, Ryber. Sleep and help heal Sirmaya.”
“Yes,” I said, voice firmer this time. I pushed through the pain that echoed in my skull, and I stood.
One crude step became two. Then six.
I reached Hilga, who smiled down at me. “You came just in time,” she said. “There is space beside me.”
It was true: between Tanzi and Hilga was a gap in the ice exactly my size. My Goddess had been waiting for me all along.
A matching smile split my face. I had made it. I had reached Sirmaya, I had reached the Sisters, and now we would sleep and help our Goddess heal.
That was what all the storms and earthquakes had meant. That was what all the black lines in the ice were.
When the sky splits and the mountain quakes,
Make time for good-byes,
For the Sleeper soon breaks.
Sirmaya was breaking—she was cleaving, and when she did, the world as we knew it would vanish. Of course I would give her what little power I had to keep that from happening.
Yet as I reached the hole meant for me, I glanced one last time at Tanzi.
And I stopped. Her eyes were open, huge and determined. She was not smiling. Her mouth worked and moved against an ice muffle.
Then the frost that silenced her crackled off. “No,” she rasped. Then harder. “No, Ry. Don’t do it.”
“Tanz.” I heaved toward her. My boots scratched over something; I didn’t look down. I just pressed my hands against the ice.
Against my Threadsister. She was so close, yet out of reach.
“Listen to me, Ry.” Each word Tanzi said seemed to take great focus, great strength. “You can still … live. You don’t have … to be here.”
“But I want to.”
“Freedom, Ry. It takes … all … my force of will to reverse this ice long enough to speak to you. I wish I had never stepped inside the mountain, but you … You don’t have to. Walk away, Ry. Save Sirmaya from beyond—” She broke off as a shard of ice scraped downward.
It clamped over her left eyelid, forcing it shut.
“No, no, no.” I grabbed at the ice. Tried to heave it back up.
“Leave it,” Tanzi said, voice strained. “Listen to your Lazy Bug.”
I ignored her. Any exultation I had felt before was lost now. Replaced by the need to free Tanzi.
She didn’t want to be here. I saw it in her eyes—her silver, silver eyes. I had to get her out.
Behind me, Hilga shouted, “No! Leave her, Ryber! You must sleep now!”
Meaningless words. I yanked harder at the ice.
“It won’t work,” Tanzi gritted out, and somehow, though all the Sisters shrieked at me, her voice rang the clearest. “It’s too late for me, Ry, but not for you. The Rules were never rules, don’t you see? Too much time alone, and we lost ourselves—”
“No,” I snarled. “No, no, no, Tanz.” Yank, rip, yank.
The ice wouldn’t budge, and Goddess—Tanzi’s face was so cold. It was as another slice crawled down and snapped her right eye shut, that a sharp heat ignited in my foot.
I finally glanced down. A thousand pieces of shattered steel met my eyes.
My knife.
Just like that, I gave up. All fight drained from me in a single, downward swoop. If steel could not break this ice, then my fingers certainly never would. A choking sob gathered in my chest. I sagged into Tanzi.
Behind me, Hilga still shouted, “Hurry, Ryber! Get into the ice! Hurry!”
“Don’t,” Tanzi insisted. She shouted too, but her words were so tight. Pained, even. “We are not enough to heal her, Ry. Her magic is being used up too fast. But there is another way—”
Ice clawed over Tanzi’s mouth. She choked. Sputtered.
She wasn’t the only one. All of the Sisters broke off. All of them were now fully sealed in the ice.
And all I could do was lean against the ice and cry.
Useless. Helpless. I’d come so far, only to find this.
I was too late.
My family was in the ice for sleeping, and there was nothing I could do except join them. I could finally be like everyone else and sleep. Unless …
Unless I didn’t.
There is another way. That was what Tanzi had said.
All of us, the Sisters and beyond, we existed because Sirmaya slept and dreamed at the very heart of our world.
A world I’d never actually seen, filled with people like Captain and Dirdra and the Threadwitch and all those Nubrevnans on the shore. If there was a way to keep them alive—to keep the world from ending—could I truly step into the ice and hope my power was enough to heal the Goddess?
No.
The answer was no.
Perhaps, all those years ago, I had not found my way to the Sorrow to join the Sisters, but rather, I had found my way there to save them.
“Ah,” came a gentle rasp. My head jerked up.
It was Tanzi. A sliver of her mouth was still exposed, and somehow she had opened her eyes behind the ice.
She smiled then, crooked and restricted, but so Tanzi. So perfect.
“Silver eyes really suit you,” she said, and then the ice finished its swaddling. Her eyelids sank shut.
She slept.
Y2787 D338
LATER
I did it. I entered the doorway and I reached the Rook King’s court atop Sirmaya’s mountain.
Nadya waited in the cavern and watched me go. “May Sirmaya protect you,” she whispered.
Then my feet crossed the threshold, and I was sucked into a blizzard made of fire. A burst of such intense power that it both scalded and froze at once. It sucked the air from my lungs and flipped my stomach straight into my skull. I felt stretched. I felt crushed. I felt made of starlight and molten stone.
Then, in a blink, it was over. I was there. In the matching doorway Saria had carved on the cliffside above the Rook King’s palace.
At this high an altitude, there was no escaping the sun—nor its fierce glare upon the snow. Worse, my legs collapsed beneath me from the sudden sense of weight. Of existence. Of mountain cold to gust against me.
Footsteps crunched on the snow, and then a warm weight dropped over me. It smelled of tallow and wool. “These will protect your eyes,” came the Rook King’s low voice, and I felt his hands slide around my head.
A strap tightened, and tentatively I opened one eye. Horsehair goggles, I realized, and when I tipped up my chin, I saw that the Rook King wore a matching pair. With the hood of his black cloak towed up against the wind, the only part of his face that showed was a grin.
“You did it,” he said. “Well done.”
I nodded, a breathy laugh falling from my tongue as he helped me rise. “I did, didn’t I?” My words puffed with steam. “I built the door, Your Majesty, and here I am. I cannot believe it worked.”
“I can.” He offered me his arm and waved to a path cleared down the mountain’s snowy side. “Will you join me? As I said in my last message, the general wishes to discuss defense of the doorways with you.”
I nodded with far too much excitement. I had been ready for months to confer directly
with the general, and I’d already told Nadya that it might be several hours before I returned.
“Let us go,” I declared, and I allowed the King to guide me into the evergreens. His rook, which I hadn’t noticed skulking in the trees, flapped over and settled on the King’s shoulder.
I still didn’t like that bird. It was far too human-like in its gaze.
We tromped past snowdrifts tucked behind stone walls, built just for that purpose, and we wove left and right around branches bowed low beneath the white. Not once did the wind stop its howl, and despite my added layer, I shivered and shook.
We had cold at the Convent, but this was a new level. Colder even than the deepest corners of Sirmaya’s underground.
I had visited this mountaintop fortress once before, but it had been late spring then. The snow had not lain thick across the crags and peaks, and the people had not been mounds of shapeless wool with only horsehair goggles to reveal them as human.
Each person we passed in the woods bobbed at the knees and tapped their fur-covered brows with a mittened hand. The Rook King always returned the gesture, an aura of absolute respect rolling off him.
Gone was the sense of outsider. Here, in his own realm, the Rook King felt as he had when I’d first met him: a man who wanted to stop the ceaseless death caused by Exalted Ones unchecked. A man who loved his home and his people.
Down, down we zigged and zagged toward his dark palace on the cliff. The wind carried the sound of soldiers and horses in training: the clash of metal, the jangle of tack, and hundreds of voices—women’s and men’s—shouting as they worked.
The Rook King’s army was the smallest of all the Paladins’, but no one doubted his was the fiercest. Trained in this harshest of lands, his soldiers were led not only by the King, but also by a general known across the Witchlands as the best of the best.
He was, aside from the Sightwitch Sisters, the only person on the continent who knew what the Six intended, and though it had irked me to go all these years without an introduction, I was too giddy over the door to care today.
We crossed a low drawbridge slatted over a moat filled with snow. Yet we did not pass through the main gate. Instead, we skirted the yard, using a corner tower to reach the battlements.