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CHAPTER FOUR

I used to paint, sometimes.

When I came to the Salt Keep, I’d had a few of my paintings with me—little doodles I’d done in my notebook to pass the time. I did one that night, of the sea and the cliffs, the sight so beautiful I couldn’t resist capturing it however my little hands could.

The Sightmother had found it the next day, as the Sisters went through my belongings before I began my tests. She had held that notebook for a long time, staring down at the paper with her blindfolded gaze.

“What is this?” she asked me.

“It’s the ocean,” I said.

“No,” she said. “It is paper.”

Her magic shredded the parchment in seconds. I hadn’t known then that the sight of those shards of paper swept away into the ocean was one of the last things I would see with my eyes alone. Maybe that was why I still dreamed of it, sometimes—those painted scraps of color, fluttering away like butterfly wings, so easily consumed by the world.

Nothing but paper, just like the Sightmother had said.

I came out of the water gasping. The rush of cold air was a slap across the face, making what was already disorienting a shock to all senses at once.

Some Sisters claimed that they didn’t mind the sensation, but I was sure they had to be lying. After fifteen years of traveling through the pools, it still never got any less nauseating. Or maybe I just hated the way that it yanked me into my past in the moments between threads.

I took a moment to right myself against the rocks. I dragged my fingers through my hair, pushing it away from my face. I rose on shaky legs and tried to take stock of my senses.

It was hard, because there were so many of them.

Crowds could be difficult for those of the Arachessen. With eyes, one could only take in so much information at once. Without them, we had no such limitation. We felt everything at the same time. And here, it was overwhelming.

The Sightmother’s instruction had been remarkably accurate. I had arrived not far from their encampment. I was several miles north of their last target, Vaprus. Since much of Glaea’s land was harsh and the Pythora King’s warlords were more than happy to hoard resources for themselves, civilization tended to cluster in city-states with long stretches of empty wastelands between them. In the south, that land consisted of rocky, barren plains.

I followed the sensation of the crowd. I crept to the edge of the rocks, where cliffs began to give way to flat earth.

Just beyond the rugged stone, the conqueror’s encampment spread out before me.

There were so many of them that for a moment, the sudden existence of so many auras overwhelmed me. How many—hundreds, thousands? Thousands , I settled on. Every one of them vampires. They felt different than humans, like a chord struck at a different tone, a minor note against a major, every shade of color just a little off.

Immediately, I knew the encampment was extensive. I reached through the threads to examine it and found tents that were elaborate and firmly rooted to the ground, meal carts that had been spread out, soldiers that appeared to be quite content to stay where they were. Their exhaustion was obvious, even from this distance, as they continued to erect tents at the edges of the camp.

They’d only just gotten here. And it seemed like they intended to stay, at least for a few days. Why they would do so here instead of remaining in whatever city they had last taken over was beyond me, but I was grateful for the time. I needed to find this seer, remove them, and insert myself.

I crept down closer to the encampment, remaining in the rocks for cover. Vampires had fantastic eyesight and even better senses of smell, so I was careful to stay far enough to avoid either my movements or my scent giving me away. Still, I managed to get close enough to map out the boundaries of the camp.

While all individual presences were unique, in such a large group the warriors’ all blended together, more similar to each other than they were different. I sensed the same emotions across them all—determination, exhaustion. All familiar feelings. I’d been around a lot of soldiers over the years. It was actually a little strange that these ones felt so similar to their human counterparts. Then again, maybe war was universal, no matter whether our blood ran black or red.

Halfway around the camp, I froze.

I recognized him immediately. In a sea of grey, his soul was dark, bruise-bitten red. None of his men’s mundane weariness. No, his was steady, intense— angry . The kind of anger that knocked the breath out of my lungs.

His tent was one of the largest, near the southern edge of the encampment. He stepped out of it and straightened, looking out over his men.

And then he turned right to me.

I stopped breathing, falling back into the shadows of the rocks. One silent step backwards. Two. Three. Surely I was too far for him to see or scent, even with his superior senses. And yet…

For a long moment, he stared into the darkness. Right at me.

Then he turned around and went back into his tent.

It took two days of watching and waiting to find the seer.

It was overwhelmingly likely their seer would be human—someone who drew from a god of the White Pantheon. So I kept up my watch most carefully in the daylight hours, when the vampires retreated into their thickly-shrouded tents and the encampment went quiet.

On the second day, she made an appearance.

She emerged when the sun was high in the sky. She had a tent near the edge of camp, not far from the conqueror’s. She was indeed, as I’d suspected, a human. Older—perhaps in her mid-sixties. Her presence was firm and aged as worn-down stone. I couldn’t tell which gods she worshipped. Then again, it didn’t really matter.

She carried a little bag with her. Flowers peeked out from it. I could sense the weight of wax candles in the sack, too. She was leaving to pray.

I followed her, far behind when she was closer to the camp, then venturing steadily closer, very slowly, as she grew further and further away from it.

Soon, we were half a mile from the camp, at the edge of a rocky lake, and I was mere strides away from her.

And then, as she started to kneel down to place her tokens, I made my move.

I envisioned an invisible thread drawn taut between us, a single thread connecting our souls, and stepped through it. The world withered around me and reformed. In half a breath, I was right behind her, my dagger halfway to her back.

Before I could strike, she turned around. It was such an abrupt movement that it made me stagger a little, repositioning in anticipation of a strike. But she didn’t move for me. She just stared. Up close, I could sense the wrinkles in her face. The wisdom of her eyes.

“I see you,” she said.

“Does it matter?” I replied.

She let out a vicious laugh. “Probably not. Funny, how I spent my entire life peering into the future and never thought that my end would come at the hands of one of you fucking cultists. Well, I’m not one to fight fate.” Her lip curled. “But I will fight you. ”

I knew better than to underestimate a sorceress, even one who seemed so nonthreatening. I lurched away before she struck, the swell of light at her hands lunging for me, filling my nostrils with a burning tang where it struck the grassy ground instead.

But magic or no, it was an easy fight. I strung threads around her, slipping through air to evade each of her attempted blows, and it only took a few minutes before I got behind her, my arms around her neck. SNAP , as my leg swept hers out from under her, twisting her knee until it gave. She let out a cry of pain. I didn’t let her slump, holding her tight to my chest.

I shouldn’t have hesitated.

And yet I couldn’t help but ask, my face against her gray, wiry hair, “Why? Why are you helping him?”

She scoffed. “You’d think that a child of your goddess would understand that the world looks awfully different depending on where you stand. Or maybe they took your eyes so you wouldn’t see that.” She turned her head just enough to look at me. I felt her smile, poison sweet. “How old were you? Four? Five?”

I didn’t answer, and perhaps my silence alone told her—or perhaps her magic found the answer my lips refused.

“Oh, you were a late one,” she laughed. “No wonder you’re so desp?—”

I drew the blade across her throat. Her blood was warm and salty over my face. Her final breaths sounded like the burble of a rising brook.

I let her slump to the ground, the dry dirt gulping down the crimson like long-awaited rain.