The raiders and monks on the river lurched forward. A heaving push, like an avalanche about to break. Thousands of fighters ready to destroy.

As Aeduan swung the buckler off the snow, Natan heaved again at Aeduan, strong and fresh and ready. He might have lost his buckler, but he was still a Carawen. Prepared for anything.

Aeduan deflected, buckler wrenching high—and arm juddering with the impact.

The battle jerked closer.

Another attack from Natan, and this time, when Aeduan blocked, Natan laughed. A crowing, vindictive sound. The same mocking laugh he’d flung at Aeduan every day when they were children. “I can keep going forever, Bloodwitch. But how long will you last, I wonder?”

Natan swiped, he swung, he sliced. Aeduan dodged, parried, and ducked, but each move was slower than the last. Each attack a hairsbreadth closer to connecting.

Then Natan drove his sword into Aeduan’s heart, cutting it in two. He wrenched the blade out, and like ice melting, Aeduan’s magic gave way. The battle slipped from his grasp. Noise battered against him, sudden and focused and plowing this way.

Natan jolted at the sudden upheaval. He glanced behind.

And Aeduan moved. He tackled Natan to the ground, sword flying wide. They rolled across the snow. Aeduan’s heart gushed, spraying Natan in red, but already the wound healed. Whether Aeduan wanted it to or not, his magic knit his heart back together.

And without that magic to push his muscles faster, he stood no chance. Natan grappled atop him, and no amount of bucking his hips or straining would get Aeduan free.

So he stopped fighting. He lay back on the snow, blood sliding down his chest—a distant pain, just as the snow beneath him was a distant cold—and watched as Natan laughed at him. Watched as he unfastened a cleaver from his baldric.

“I never thought to see you this way,” Natan said, echoing what Lizl had uttered only yesterday. But unlike her, he savored this moment. “I imagined it so many times, carving your head from your neck. And now here we are.

“You were always the best fighter—always claiming the best assignments, but who is the Abbot now? And who is the one about to die?”

As Natan spoke, as Aeduan lay there limp and gasping while blood-scent after blood-scent careened his way, his magic sensed a new blood shimmering above the rest. Speed and daisy chains, mother’s kisses and sharpened steel. It came from the cave, and it was not alone.

“How does it feel, knowing I will kill you?” Natan continued. “Knowing that your magic cannot save you now?”

She was so close. Almost here …

“I will do the same to that girl, you know. The ’Matsi smut claiming to be the Cahr Awen. I will carve off her head too.”

Then Aeduan saw her, a vague figure coated in ash and blood.

“And you cannot stop me. You cannot kill me—”

“No,” Lizl snarled behind him. “But I can.”

Her sword burst through Natan’s chest. The exact reverse of what Natan’s had done to Aeduan—into Natan’s back and out through the heart. Then just like Natan, she wrenched her blade out again.

Natan’s body toppled sideways, still spurting and warm, and Lizl offered Aeduan her hand. As she helped him rise, he spotted a new streak of blood on her cloak. It trimmed the edge, a perfect mimicry of what every Abbot wore—and of what Natan would wear no longer.

Behind her, a hundred monks thundered from the cave.

“Now you owe me four life-debts, Monk Aeduan!” Lizl lifted her voice above the raiders and the other monks barreling this way. She shoved Natan’s blade into Aeduan’s hand. “And a fifth one for this sword, plus a sixth for the rebels I’ve brought to save you.”

Then she turned to the monks behind her, pumped her free hand to the sky and roared, “For the Cahr Awen!”

The insurgents charged. A snarl of bodies and blades and blood that pumped with purpose. They rumbled past Aeduan, shaking the earth and the frozen reeds. And for a century, or perhaps only moments, he stood there, watching them leave while his heart stitched itself back together. While his blood—gradually, gradually—pumped stronger and his witchery finished what it had begun.

Once it was done, his lungs breathed fully. His heart boomed strong, and for the first time in his twenty years of existence, Aeduan knew who he was and what he had to do.

He straightened.

He joined the fight.

For the Cahr Awen.

* * *

Iseult’s footsteps echoed off the tunnel walls. Her breaths carved in and out. Steady. Trained for this, and bolstered by the power of the Well.

She was running. Again. Always running. The light from the valley, from the moon showed her the way, but when a bend in the tunnel stole that, she walked with arms outstretched. Straining to remember what had been here when she and Leopold had come this way.

Leopold, Leopold. She had left him. Curse her, she had left him and that guilt would crown her for the rest of her days—as would leaving Aeduan. Every few seconds, she looked back, praying she might see his face in the darkness. Praying she would hear Threadless breaths and know he had arrived.

But he did not come, and she kept moving. Until faint flickers of light glowed ahead, spurring her faster. She rounded a bend, reaching the fork in the path from before.

She slung to a halt. Even staggered back two steps. On the ground at the center was a candle—the candle Leopold had carried. Thanks to the magic within, the wax had not melted. The wick burned strong.

It was the bodies, though, that made Iseult’s heart drop low. Raiders and monks were locked in place, not so different from what Aeduan had done, except these people were held by stone. As if hewn from the tunnel’s granite, yet more real than any sculptor could ever produce.

Owl. Iseult had no doubt. The girl had been here. Both forks in the path, the one toward the Monastery and the other to the unknown beyond, were filled with stone fighters.

Threads skated into Iseult’s awareness, stunned and horrified. Confused and even relieved. Then a voice came, authority strong in her command: “Continue on!”

Iseult bolted for the tunnel out of the Monastery. She snagged the candle as she sprinted past, and right as the first Threads barreled into the cavern, she dove onto the ascending path. More stone monks, more stone raiders. She dipped and spun around them, accelerating even as the tunnel’s incline sharpened.

Then it became stairs, and though her breath scorched in her lungs, Iseult hopped them two at a time. The air sharpened, and frost glistened on the walls. The steps, though, were now layered in gravel. A clear line upward—as if an Earthwitch had come this way.

Iseult pushed her body even harder, and soon, moonlight and winter washed against her. She sprinted the final distance into the night.

Snow-dipped fir trees surrounded her. Wind kicked, and the first tendrils of dawn reached across the sky. Even here—wherever here might be—the sounds of battle and fire sang. Distant, though. Too far to sense Threads, too far for Iseult to even pinpoint a direction.

Except there were two sets of Threads near enough for her to feel, and they waited straight ahead. One set radiated brilliant green with the power of an Earthwitch, and the other bore a heart of churning, stormy blue.

Iseult reached Owl and Leopold in seconds. They waited ahead beside two piles of boulders, and at the sound of Iseult’s feet, Leopold whirled about. Then his Threads ignited with such pure relief, it hurt Iseult’s eyes. Meanwhile, Owl’s Threads tinged pink with delight, while the girl herself, filthy with dirt, grinned ear to ear in a way Iseult had never seen before. Such happiness. Such warmth.

Iseult almost wept at the sight of her.

No, she did weep. Tears flecked from her eyes, and she realized she had been wrong before. Back at the sky-ferry. The warmth in her chest was love, for this strange child who was not a child at all.

“You were slow,” Owl said, and before Iseult could process what that even meant, Leopold reached Iseult. Without warning and with one arm in a sling, he pulled her into an embrace. She was so startled, she did not resist it—and his Threads, such icy relief, such sunset happiness and mossy concern, briefly veiled the world around them. “I lost you on the river,” he said. “I could not find you, and I thought it was all over.”

No, Iseult thought, pulling back. I left you. She would confess that to him later, though.

“We have to go,” she told him in Cartorran. “Raiders and monks are coming this way…” She trailed off as the meaning of the scene suddenly sifted into place. Owl. Leopold. Together with two heaps of stones behind them.

“What are you doing?” She put the question to Leopold first, then in Nomatsi for Owl.