Page 167 of Witchshadow

Nothing happens.

And he sighs. It was worth trying, but now he feels foolish. A grown man trying to raise the dead with a song from a child’s tale. Yet as he pushes to his feet, the clouds part. Sirmaya’s silver sheen flickers down, and one by one, the Threads offered up from the shadow-ender slide first into the physical threads. Then those threads dissolve into the sheet, into the body.

The girl stirs. Another little hedgehog saved, and the Rook King glances atthe moon. Although She is gone from this world, Her help still comes at a price. “How else do we keep balance?” She used to say. “For every light, there is a shadow, and for every shadow, a light.”

It is all too painfully true, and he is still paying for a shadow he’d cast a thousand years ago. An accident, a misstep, a misunderstanding that ultimately ruined the goddess they all loved so dearly, even the Exalted Ones.

He doesn’t make it back to the cover of trees before Little Sister materializes before him, stepping around a silver fir and into the clearing. She has her mountain bat with her, though the beast hides within the forest, silent despite his size. The bat cannot hide his silvery, immortal Threads, though—or his stench.

“I remember you now,” she says in her child’s voice. “You made me very sad.”

“Which one?”

“All of them.”

He watches her glide over the snow toward him. She has always moved with an animal grace; it is especially strange in this child’s body. She pauses before him, on the opposite side of the stream. Cold, midnight waters trickle between them. “‘Stones in motion,’” she quotes. “‘Tools cleft in two. The wyrm fell to the daughter made of moonlight long ago. He just did not know it yet.’ Well, he certainly knows now, though I wonder why you killed him in the end.”

He sniffs. “I had to ensure the job was done.”

“Liar.” She laughs, a sound that echoes with who she’d been a thousand years ago. It makes his heart hurt to hear. “But that has always been your problem, hasn’t it? Keeping secrets. Playing a game without sharing the rules. Tell me, Trickster—”

“Do not call me that.”

“—is it hubris that makes you this way? Or is it that deep down, you are so lonely you want to be caught. That you have always wanted to be caught, just so someone would notice you are still here.”

His teeth grind in his ears. “So you have come to gloat, have you?”

“Not entirely.” She sighs and extends an open palm, watching as the snow lands upon her skin. “I have come to persuade. You have always controlled people sideways. Manipulating and guiding, but never directly confronting.”

“Spoken like an Earthwitch.”

“But in the end, no human can truly be another’s puppet—and no human can truly be a puppeteer. You would have been better served telling them the truth, just as you would have a thousand years ago with the Six. Withme.”

He glares at her now, unable to maintain his careful cool. She has always had this effect on him. “I was not the one to betray you, Saria. The Lament was wrong. The one who turned on five was never me.”

“No,” she says with a sad smile. “I don’t think it was.” Her hand finally falls, and she turns away from the Rook King, away from the dark, whispering stream between them.

“I tried to give the Cahr Awen an army,” he calls after her, more bitter than he wants to be—and certainly more bitter than he wants Saria to hear. “I tried to give them soldiers that would keep them safe, but they rejected my plans in the end.”

“You mean they rejected you.” She glances back with her glittering teardrop eyes. “Just as She once did. Because you love no one but yourself and you will always be alone.” Then, as she strides away once more, leaving tiny footprints in her wake, a soft song ripples across the clearing:

“Never trust what you see in the shadows,

for Trickster he hides in darkness and dapples.

High in a tree, deep underground,

never trust when Trickster’s around.”