Page 77 of Sightwitch
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 wasmytaro 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.
I also learned about choice. Eridsyi had never been gifted with Sight, so she had made her own—just as I had done in the tomb and just as I was doing now.
You’ll understand once you’re Summoned? Well, I’d Summoned myself, and now Ididunderstand: paths do not come to you. You have to find them for yourself, and sometimes, you have to carve new ones entirely.
That knowledge alone has given me power indeed.
Twisting my neck, I tossed a final glance to a tiny flicker of blue high atop the end of a hidden bridge.
This wasn’t forever. I would be back for Tanzi and Hilga and the rest of my Thread-family. I would be back when magic was healed and Sirmaya was no longer dying.
“I love you, Lazy Bug,” I said. Then I pivoted back to the door.
It was time. I was ready, and before another drop of quicksilver could fall, I steeled my spine and walked out of the Convent, out of the mountain, and into my new life.
I was the last Sightwitch Sister, and I had work to do.
Tanzi Lamanaya
Y17 D319
Threadsisters
THESLEEPINGGIANT
Rtes dol Sirmaya
The Weapon of the Giant that Cradles Us When We Sleep
A recent excavation at an early Marstoki fortress in the Sirmayan Mountains revealed a shrine beneath the pri-mary structure. Inside and perfectly intact was a relief of the Sleeping Giant constellation with the wordsRtes dol Sirmayaunderneath. Sirmaya, a deity worshipped by the earliest humans to inhabit the Witchlands, roughly translates into “The Giant That Cradles Us When We Sleep,” whileRtes dolmeans “the weapon of.”
Overtop the stars were remnants of painted lines, mostly eroded by the ebb of time, a bow-like shape made across the constellation as well as across six adjacent stars.