Page 9

CHAPTER NINE

M y feet touched glass water, perching on the top but not breaking through. It was dark. Mist surrounded me. A single silver line stretched out before me, flush to the smooth surface of the water, disappearing into the mist.

I walked forward, heel to toe, remaining on the silver line. It was shockingly cold against my bare feet, and a little painful, as if sharp.

The mist grew thicker, and then dissipated.

Now cliffs surrounded me, stretching endlessly into the sky. The water rippled and shifted. The air was thick with the scent of blood. It trickled, too, down the faces of the cliffs, pooling in the water. The path before me narrowed, narrowed, narrowed, until stone squeezed my shoulders.

I knew this place. This was Alka.

Good. The right path.

Give me something more, Weaver, I whispered.

I reached out my presence in all directions. My palms pressed to the stone, searching for cracks and weaknesses.

Another step.

My left hand pushed through the stone. Blink , and the rock gave way to thick, soupy mist. The threads split before me—one continuing forward through the cliffs, another veering off into mist .

I changed courses, following the second thread.

Blink , as the cliffs shattered and fell away.

Before me was a moon, full as a silver coin. Step , and red and black dripped down its surface, trickling into the water. The distant cliffs of Alka drowned in it.

Show me another.

Another thread before me. I stepped off my path and onto this one. Shift , and the moon became a crescent, clear in the sky, bloodless. The cliffs loomed beneath it. Ivy slowly crawled up their sides, rising from the water, red-black flowers blooming over the stone.

I kept walking, and time shifted, moonlight falling over the stone. Bodies tumbled from the cliffs and into the sea.

More , I whispered.

Another thread before me. I stepped onto it. The cliffs fell away. I saw a man before me, dripping in opulent silks, kneeling in a pile of bones. He looked up at me and smiled, blood spilling from between his teeth. He collapsed beneath the crescent moon.

In the midst of a seering, you couldn’t question what you saw. Your ability to think critically ceased—you could only absorb and observe.

I thought of Atrius. Thought of the Bloodborn.

Show me something more, Weaver, I asked the goddess.

You are not looking in the right direction, she whispered.

I stopped short.

It was rare that I heard the Weaver’s voice in my sessions. Her voice sounded like little more than a distant echoing breeze. Yet, it drew my entire body still, a chill rising to my skin.

Slowly, I turned around.

Darkness. The same thread, running backwards, extended into mist.

I walked this path.

The mist didn’t dissipate. It just grew thicker, and thicker. Each of my steps grew labored, painful. The thread here was sharper than ever, as if I walked on the polished edge of a blade. My bloody footprints remained perfectly formed in the water behind me.

It was cold, and growing colder, and colder, until my breaths came in little silver puffs, my bare arms covered in goosebumps. The sky had gotten inky dark. Stars surrounded me, so bright and bulging I felt like I could reach out and grab them.

I was now walking uphill, though the surface of the water remained perfectly still. The mist cleared enough to reveal jagged, snow-capped peaks, stained red.

These did not look like the mountains of Alka. It was warm there, and the mountains weren’t tall enough for snow.

No, everything about what I was seeing seemed… foreign. Like I was peering into a world a universe away from my own.

The mountains shifted, encircling me. The stars grew larger. The moon, full and round, slowly rose from beyond the horizon line, so big it stretched across my vision, a shadow falling across it with each step I took.

An eclipse.

Blood slicked my feet now. I was fighting hard to go so deep into the threads. But I had the overwhelming sense that I was seeing something important. I would not turn back.

Another step, and I crested the peak of the mountain. The moon was now a glowing, black circle, monstrously large, unavoidable as an all-seeing eye.

And there, right in the center of that circle, was Atrius.

I recognized him immediately, even from this distance. He was younger, yes, and his back was turned to me, but his presence was unmistakable—even though that, too, was a little different. Brighter, maybe. More hopeful. His hair was a bit shorter, flying out behind him against whips of wind. He had no horns.

Beside him was another man who wore matching armor to his, though more ornate, and a circlet upon a head of silver-streaked, ash-blond hair. I wasn’t close enough to hear what they were saying, or see what they were looking at beyond the ridge of stone.

I forged ahead and nearly stumbled—my feet were so bloody now that I slipped on the thread. Frantically, I righted myself. When I lifted my head again, a gasp ripped from my throat.

A goddess stood before them.

She was beautiful—more than beautiful. She was a natural phenomenon, something so entrancing, so otherworldly, that her mere existence left you changed. Her eyes were pits of star-speckled darkness, her hair long tendrils of ebony ink, her body dips and curves of silver.

My heart beat faster.

The fear set in slowly at first, sneaking in beneath the amazement until suddenly, it was as strong as the jaws of a python around a rat. It constricted, tighter, tighter.

The goddess’s face was as big as the moon. She smiled, blood dripping from her lips, but it was a horrible, furious expression—the last thing one sees before death.

I was so afraid I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. The thread cut deep into my feet, so deep I swore it touched my bones. I couldn’t move, though.

This was dangerous, to be stuck in a vision. Dangerous to fall from a thread. A voice screamed this at me in the back of my head, but my body wouldn’t move.

I just stood there as the goddess rose into the sky, laughing down at us with cruel anger. A wave of pain, of betrayal, of grief rolled over me, so strong it left me gasping for air.

In the distance, Atrius’s companion was nothing but black blood in the snow, and Atrius was on his knees beside him, bowed and broken.

Despite the distance, I still heard his voice so clearly, cracking with desperation:

Wake up, my prince, he begged. Wake up. Wake up.

“ Wake. Up. ”

I started awake, and tried to lurch upright on instinct, but couldn’t because a firm grip held my shoulders down. Atrius leaned over me, serious and perhaps just a little bit annoyed. Sweat plastered my clothing to my body. The fire, nearly encroaching on my toes, blazed high, a wall of light that silhouetted Atrius’s form.

“Why did you wake me?” The words came out in heaving gasps.

“I know the signs of a seering gone bad.”

He released my shoulders and rose, leaving me to push myself to my hands and knees, wincing as my bare feet touched the gritty sand. The wounds were deep.

“We’ll get you healing for those,” he said, nodding to my feet. Then he added, after an awkward beat, “Your feet.”

“I know what you meant,” I said, irritated. I rubbed my temple, which throbbed viciously.

I did not mourn my eyesight. But… all the darkness of traditional sight made it difficult to shake away nightmares. What I had seen in the vision… that smiling face followed me back to the land of the mortals. I suspected it would follow me for days.

“Here.”

Atrius handed me a canteen. I was so parched I didn’t even question it—just grabbed it and gulped down mouthful after mouthful of water. When I was done, the canteen was empty, and I was still gasping for breath. I let the canteen fall to my lap. My hands were shaking.

I could feel Atrius’s eyes on them.

“So?” he said. “What did you see?”

“Give me a moment,” I muttered, rubbing my head. “I need to sort through it.”

It was hard to process visions while within them, floating in a semi-conscious dream state, incapable of truly questioning anything. Now, I rifled through the images and tried to string them together.

I’d seen Alka. The full moon was bloody. The crescent moon, much less so—and the bodies falling into the sea under that moon were of Alka’s men, not Atrius’s.

As far as visions went, it was actually a surprisingly useful one. But useful didn’t help me here.

Because did I actually want to help Atrius conquer Alka?

No. Of course not.

I hadn’t thought this far ahead. I couldn’t claim that I saw nothing. That was clearly untrue, and it would mean Atrius would probably kill me and run off to go find a more useful seer.

I could make up something. Something truly nonsensical .

Or…

“The full moon,” I said. “Move for Alka under the full moon.”

It was an impulsive, risky lie. But I was not about to help Atrius kill hundreds or thousands of my kin. Besides, Alka was a difficult territory. There was a reason why Atrius was unwilling to move on it without the help of a seer. If he failed here, it could be enough to stop his progression completely.

And if he still managed a victory… seering was unpredictable and hard to understand. I could weave a story for him, build myself a net of reasonable doubt.

Atrius seemed dubious. “You’re certain?”

“I’m certain.”

“I want to know what else you saw.”

Content that my single lie would be enough, I told him the rest of my journey truthfully—of the king, the rocks, the mist. I even drew what I recalled of the arrangement of the channels for him. He wrote down all of this in a beaten-up little leather notebook that he withdrew from the pocket of his jacket, often stopping me to make me repeat descriptions verbatim.

I had to appreciate his thoroughness. At least he respected the art of seering more than I expected him to—understanding that it was about general interpretations, not questions and answers.

When I got to the end of the vision about Alka, I paused and observed him. He was finishing writing the last description I had fed him, sitting cross-legged in the sand, his head bowed over his work—leaving those horns on full display.

He didn’t have those in my vision.

I shivered against a breeze.

He finished writing, and his eyes flicked up to me. “And?”

A single, expectant word. He knew there was more. Nothing that I had described to him would rise to the intensity that would’ve left me twitching in the dirt like I was.

I could tell him that was it. I would maintain another secret card in my hand, but he would know I was lying, and I would have to deal with that mark on my trustworthiness later.

Or I could tell him what I saw and see what his reaction taught me .

“I saw one more thing,” I said.

He waited.

“I saw you.”

Still, no reaction.

“You were younger,” I went on. “You had none of your… physical abnormalities. You were on a mountain, with another soldier.” I thought about the scene again—with the added context of what I knew now. “Another Bloodborn vampire, I think.”

Atrius’s presence had gone very, very stoic. Utterly unreadable, like a wall of steel. It was rare I saw anyone capable of stilling themselves like that.

“The two of you were on a mountain peak,” I said. “And you went before a goddess.”

Nyaxia, I realized now. It had to be Nyaxia.

“Nyaxia,” I corrected myself. “And she?—”

“That’s enough.”

Atrius rose abruptly. The stillness of his presence shattered into cold anger.

“Never do that again,” he said.

Atrius did not raise his voice. But that was only because he was not the type of man who needed to. The quiet carried his threat, and his rage. Enough to shiver up your spine like the tip of a blade.

“ Never do that again,” he repeated. “Do you understand?”

“What?” I asked. “Seer? You asked me to?—”

“Do not seer about me.”

And this was the stab, sharp and brutal.

“I—” I started, ready to weave my web of sweet apologies, but Atrius shoved his hands into his coat pockets and turned away.

“Erekkus will get you ready to leave,” he snarled as he walked away, leaving me on my knees by the bonfire. “Don’t try to run. I’ll find you. Be back at camp by sunrise.”