Soulwoven (46 page)

She wasn’t breathing.

Litnig struck down as hard as he could with his legs, and he hurled Ryse up onto the crystal.

Make her breathe,
he told the souls around him, and he pushed them out and they flooded into Ryse’s chest and pulsed once, twice, and then she was coughing up water and gasping in air.

Litnig turned and dove back to the bottom of the river.

A black robe fluttered in the current, over near the stand of tall green plants.

Leramis.

He tookherfromyou stoleherfromyou showedyouup she doesn’t want you
it’s
hisfault hisfault hisfault it’s all his fault—

Litnig linked his arms around Leramis’s waist. The necromancer’s shorn head bobbed lifelessly in the water, bleeding from a gash that began on his forehead and stretched along half his skull.

If he wasn’t dead already, he was close.

Litnig tightened his grip and bunched his legs to push for the surface.

The water shivered. The River shifted toward the crystal slab.

And then Litnig and Leramis were no longer alone.

Two people in black clothes floated gently toward the river bottom. Their faces, lit from below by the glow of the heart dragons, looked timeless, frozen at an age not much beyond Litnig’s. One of them was male. Long onyx hair streamed from his head in the current of the river. His eyes were sallow and dark. Litnig didn’t think he’d ever seen him before.

The other person in black was the red-eyed woman.

Litnig let go of Leramis. He didn’t have a weapon, but he had his hands and his teeth, and he had the River.

Enoughenough it will be enough to getthem crushthem hurtthem killthem—

Litnig kicked off the bottom. With the souls in his blood, he felt like he was swimming through air. The woman laid a hand on the arm of the man who was with her and nodded.

Litnig got little further.

The man’s shadowy eyes filled with the same wine-red glow the woman’s had shone with in Eldan City. The man himself swam toward Litnig. The water swirled behind him in a delicate confusion of whorls and bubbles and eddies.

Litnig jerked to the right to avoid the man’s first blow.

The next strike was harder to dodge. The third grazed Litnig’s temple. The man was blindingly fast, even underwater. Thousands of souls whirled in a cloud around his body. His shin smashed into Litnig’s ribs. His knee punched into Litnig’s stomach. His fist set Litnig’s nose gushing blood again.

Litnig tried to hit him back, but he was too slow.

The man grabbed Litnig’s arms and threw him to the bottom of the river hard enough to jar his teeth. Litnig tried to get up, but the man landed on top of him and crushed him into the sand.

The woman floated to the river bottom. The glow of the heart dragons set her silhouette glimmering with white light. Her hair trailed behind her like a thick, living mass of pearl.

Litnig’s blood pounded through his temples. His ribs ached. His chest felt hollow.

Behind the woman, a coil of souls spun from the River and coated Leramis’s chains. The souls pulsed. The chains broke apart. The necromancer floated upward and downstream.

The woman with the red eyes swam closer and pressed two fingers against her lips, then against Litnig’s. Litnig tried to bite her, but the man just wrenched his face harder into the sand.

The woman pointed upriver and smiled.

Water began to force its way into Litnig’s nostrils.

The man on top of him ripped him from the sand, punched him in the gut, and slung him toward the surface of the Lumos. The River of Souls faded. The man and the woman swam toward the heart dragons.

Litnig broke the surface. His arms and legs thrashed wildly. He sucked down shallow gasps of air.

You’re all right,
he told himself.
You’re all right.

His body felt like it had been run through a meat grinder.

The current dragged him downriver. He clawed his way back to the sloping crystal boardwalk and grabbed a jagged piece of it.

On the other side of the Lumos, a large crystal building was on fire. Its face had been broken inward, like it had been struck with an impossibly large sledgehammer. Sh’ma
were
running toward it in droves.

Litnig gathered his strength and pulled himself halfway out of the water. He recognized Tsu’min standing about thirty yards upriver. The flame-haired Sh’ma was facing four of the red-coated guards from the palace. His hands swam with turquoise fire.

Three other Sh’ma stood closer to Litnig. They wore shoulder wraps of green, white, and gray, and they had oversize brown cloaks thrown over their heads. They faced six guards in red coats.

No one moved. The red coats and the brown cloaks stood and stared at each other, as if each side was afraid to make the first strike.

Litnig’s friends and his brother lay scattered around their feet, bound but safe.

Except for Ryse.

Ryse was just in front of Litnig, still chained and coughing up water, inching painfully slowly toward Leramis. The necromancer’s black robe had caught on a broken piece of the boardwalk. His body bobbed mindlessly in the Lumos’s current. His head floated just above the water. Blood streamed from the wound on his scalp.

Litnig took short breaths and clung to his little chunk of crystal.

Ryse’s robe was so wet it had turned almost gray. Her hair was plastered to her face. She wrenched herself toward Leramis with the same desperate energy Litnig had seen on the
Rokwet,
leaving a damp trail behind her.

When she drew close to the necromancer, she pressed her forehead to his. Her eyes went white. She whispered something—a prayer, maybe.

Leramis remained unmoving.

Ryse screamed something that was not a prayer.

Litnig felt a pang of guilt.

I could’ve saved him—

Ryse’s chains disintegrated. She grabbed Leramis by the robe and hauled him from the Lumos. She pressed her hands against his chest.

And then she bent down and placed her lips on his.

She repeated the motions a second time, and a third, and a fourth. The necromancer vomited up a stream of water and began to breathe.

“Ryse,” Litnig whispered hoarsely. “Ryse, the heart dragons—”

But either she didn’t hear him or she didn’t process his words. She crouched over Leramis, watching the Sh’ma in their standoff and the fire across the Lumos like a cornered animal.

Litnig took as deep a breath as his lungs would let him.

“Tsu’min,” he croaked. “The heart dragons—”

Tsu’min moved.

Bolts of light appeared in the air before him and sailed through the chests of two of the red-coated guards he was facing. The other two guards neutralized the weavings, but Tsu’min’s hands blew past their weapons and into their bodies before they could move.

They dropped motionless at his feet. Litnig saw the brown-cloaked Sh’ma dispatch their foes as easily. Three throats were cut in a heartbeat. One guard was kicked through a crystal wall.

Why…
The thought was hazy in his mind. He could feel his consciousness slipping.
Why not…earlier…

The three cloaked Sh’ma and Tsu’min dove into the river as one.

Ryse jerked upright. Her eyes darted to the Lumos.

“No,” Litnig heard her say.

A fountain of water shot from the heart of the river.

A gust of hot, heavy mist followed it. The wind roared thick and triumphant in Litnig’s ears. Some final catch gave in his chest.

The last thing he saw as he succumbed to the darkness was Tsu’min Nar’oth, swimming toward him.

A bloody cut split the Sh’ma’s chin.

And his eyes had narrowed to slits.

FIFTY-THREE

The night smelled of lilac and cinnamon. Stars speckled the blackened sky. Warm breezes stirred the air. The moon hung heavy in the south.

Cole fought the urge to fly at a big, fuchsia-haired Sh’ma with his bare hands as it dropped his brother’s unconscious body into a long canoe.

“Hey!” he shouted instead, but no one was paying any attention to him. Two brown-cloaked Sh’ma loaded sacks into the canoe’s black innards from a low, round building near the edge of the Lumos. Tsu’min talked quietly to Quay. Everybody else was moping around by the water, looking depressed.

For the past two hours, Cole had skulked wordlessly through the crystalline back ways of Soulth’il. After the river had exploded, the Sh’ma had pulled themselves from the water, freed him and the others, dragged Litnig onto land, and prodded everyone into following as they moved north under the nearly full moon. The big Sh’ma had carried Litnig across his shoulders the whole way.

Cole had limped behind.

“You are heading north. These replace what was taken from you.”

A turquoise-haired Sh’ma handed Cole two daggers in plain leather sheaths. She was just taller than he was, green-eyed, and freckled. She would’ve been beautiful, if her eyes hadn’t been cold as the night sky.

“Thanks,” Cole grumbled, and the Sh’ma caught him with the same you’re-not-fooling-anyone look he’d used to get from his mother.

Truth be told, Cole’s days in the White Forest had shown him little to love about the Sh’ma. They could burn, for all he cared.

They might,
said
his conscience, but he studiously ignored it.

The Sh’ma were handing out weapons and talking to the others as well. Cole didn’t care. He stepped into the black canoe and sat near his brother, and he began arranging Litnig so that he was lying more comfortably. Litnig had a nasty-looking shiner growing under his left eye. His nose was the size and color of a rose pear. Dried blood covered the bottom of his face. Every few seconds, he twitched.

The canoe rocked as someone else stepped into it, and then Dil was dripping water from the edge of her cloak onto Litnig’s face and rubbing the blood off with her thumb. Cole dipped his sleeve into the river and laid it over Litnig’s bruised eye.

Dil gave him a reassuring smile.

He did his best to return it.

As he and Dil worked over his brother, he heard other voices speaking in Eldanian and Sh’ma. The canoe rocked frequently. A mast went up. A large black sail unfurled. The wind gusted sudden and sharp from the south.

And then the sail filled, and the canoe began to move forward, northward, upriver.
The last outbuildings of Soulth’il slipped by.
The brown-cloaked Sh’ma melted into the moonbeam shadows on the forest shore.

Cole was tucking a spare bedroll underneath Litnig’s head when someone squatted down beside him. He saw a scuffed black boot out of the corner of his eye and knew the foot within it would belong to Quay.

“They still have to call the dragon into the world,” the prince said. “We’re going to try to stop them.”

Cole snorted and helped Dil undo another bedroll to spread over Litnig’s body.
“Us and whose army?”

Quay didn’t respond. The southern wind grew stronger, until the sail was taut and humming. The canoe sent spray flying from white-capped waves as it plowed a furrow in the river on its way north.

“I need you to do me a favor,” the prince said.

Cole came up rolling his eyes, ready to remark that he was just about fresh out of favors.

And then he saw something on Quay’s face that scared the hell out of him.

Fear.

“Dil, you too.”

Dil stopped dabbing at Litnig. Her eyes shone dull yellow in the moonlight.

“I need you to stay alive.”

Cole took a deep breath.

“The other Sh’ma
are
staying behind,” Quay said. “I don’t know exactly what that means, but it’s not a good sign. Someone needs to tell my father what’s happened, and what he’s up against if we fail. Leramis and Ryse have other loyalties. So do Tsu’min and Len. You two are the only ones I can trust with this.”

Quay’s eyes flicked toward the shadowy shore,
then
returned to Cole. “I’d send you now, but you’d never make it through the White Forest without help that Tsu’min isn’t willing to give.”

Cole could feel the warmth of Litnig’s body against his legs. “You didn’t mention Lit.”

“I know.” Quay ran a hand through his hair. It had grown long and unkempt, and there was
stubble,
of all things, on the prince’s once impeccably groomed face. “I don’t know what to make of him anymore. There’s something off about him, Co—”

“He’s my brother.”

Quay looked at Cole.

And for once in his life, Cole didn’t look away.

Quay pulled his hand from his hair. “Of course,” the prince said quietly.
“Litnig too then.”

Quay fell silent. The canoe swung around a bend. The wind followed it. Its mast just cleared a white tree limb that hung shining over the water.

Cole sighed and rubbed his temples. “If you don’t come back with us,” he muttered, “someone will probably just chuck us in prison.”

If we’re lucky,
he added to himself, but there was no point in telling Quay or Dil that.

“Don’t underestimate my father,” Quay said. “And give him this.”

Quay reached into his shirt, tugged on something that came away with a tiny snap, and dropped a small silver ring into Cole’s hand. The band was set with an oval of white jade and tied to a leather cord. Cole had seen rings like it before. Nobles gave them to one another to celebrate births, or birthdays.

Cole looked up from the ring and found Quay staring at him. The prince produced a tiny metal cylinder from his shirt pocket and pressed it into Cole’s palm. The cylinder was just large enough to hold a small piece of parchment.

Quay closed Cole’s fist around the ring and the cylinder.

“Don’t lose them,” he said. “And good luck.”

And then Quay was gone, off toward the back of the canoe, probably to give the others
their
marching orders.

Cole leaned against the canoe’s dugout inwale and shut his eyes. The wind tickled his face. Spray misted on his hair. Dil sat down next to him and wriggled her head under his arm. He smiled and hugged her close.