Windwitch (The Witchlands #2)v(22)

There it was again, a slight tickling against his witchery, a lure bobbing atop a stream.

Aeduan was sprinting in an instant, a magic-fueled speed that was twice as fast as before and not maintainable for long. But close. The scent of the talers was too close for him to risk losing it.

Distantly, Aeduan noticed other blood-scents. Foul ones. Tarnished ones. Men were so rarely a threat to him, so he ignored them and charged on. Over a stream, through a thicket of shriveling morning glories, then straight across a fern-covered clearing.

It wasn’t until a bear trap clamped shut just below Aeduan’s right knee, until iron teeth scratched against bone and the scent of his own blood gushed through the forest, that Aeduan realized he had charged directly onto a Nomatsi road.

Idiot. Thrice-damned idiot. He might not be able to navigate Nomatsi roads, but he could certainly avoid them. Now, whether or not he wanted his body to heal, it would. He could not pick and choose when that part of his witchery awoke. If he was hurt, his magic healed him.

Blood gushed, staining the pine needles and ferns to red and crawling outward in a lopsided sunburst to where, mere paces away, his coins waited. A satchel full. No more than forty if he had to guess.

Forty out of fifteen hundred.

Aeduan considered the three coins glinting in the weak sun. They had tumbled from the sack, silver stained with brown. Taunting. Laughing at him.

Two weeks of tracking the royal talers, and this was where the hunt had led him. To a clearing of bear traps, a ruined right leg, and too few talers to even buy a horse.

Aeduan’s teeth ground, squeaking in his ears as he dragged his gaze down to the bear trap. His leg was a mess. Nothing was recognizable below the knee. His entire calf was torn to the bone, strips of muscle and flesh hanging free.

Flies would come soon.

There was pain too, though Aeduan could ignore that. After all, pain was nothing new.

He sucked in a long breath, letting it expand in his belly. Roll up his spine. It was the first thing a new monk learned: how to breathe, how to separate. A man is not his mind. A man is not his body. They are merely tools so that a man may fight onward.

Aeduan exhaled, counting methodically and watching his blood trickle out. With each new number and each hiss of exhaled air, the world slid away. From the breeze on Aeduan’s shinbone to the flies landing on hanks of muscle to the blood oozing outward—it all drifted into the background.

Until Aeduan stopped feeling anything at all. He was nothing more than a collection of thoughts. Of actions. He was not his mind. He was not his body.

As the last of Aeduan’s breath slipped from his lungs, he bent forward and gripped the trap’s jaws. A grunt, a burst of power, and the iron groaned wide.

Slowly—and fighting the nausea that washed upward in vast booms of heat—Aeduan pulled his leg from the trap.

Clang! It wrenched shut, flinging bits of flesh across the clearing. Aeduan scanned quickly around, but there was nothing else to avoid. He smelled corpses nearby, but corpses posed no threat. So he sat, witchery already healing him, one drop of blood at a time.

It took so much energy, though. Too much. And darkness was creeping in.

Yet right before unconsciousness could take hold, a smell like damp smoke tickled into his nose. Like campfires doused by rain. Against Aeduan’s greatest wish and will, his mother’s face drifted across his memory—along with the last words she’d ever said to him.

Run, my child, run.

*

After stretching her Threadwitchery senses as far as they could reach, and upon realizing no other Cleaved or hunters or life of any kind lurked nearby, Iseult sawed herself free from the net.

She hit the ground with a thump that she barely managed to roll into, then explored the area inch by inch. All signs pointed to a Nomatsi tribe having recently passed through. They’d made a sprawling camp in the woods, and judging by the traps and the tracks and the supplies scattered throughout, they had left in a hurry.

Too much of a hurry to disable their Nomatsi road, yet whatever had sent them fleeing, it was gone now. So Iseult grabbed anything useful she could find, grateful she wouldn’t have to meet anyone. Wouldn’t have to prove she was as Nomatsi as they were.

As she searched, she made a mental list of what she needed. Oil for my cutlass. A whetstone. More portable eating utensils. A larger rucksack to hold it all.

She moved deeper into the camp, pausing every few steps. Stretching out her awareness and feeling for any Threads, for any living.

It was the first lesson Habim had ever drilled into Iseult: to constantly—constantly—make note of who was around her. Sometimes he would follow her, just to see how long it took her to notice him trailing behind. Slinking in closer. Slipping a blade from his belt.

The first time he’d done it, she hadn’t noticed until he was almost upon her. It was his Threads that had given him away in the end. Yet he hadn’t expected her to sense him at all, and Iseult had realized in that moment that she had an advantage.

She could see the weave of the world. At any moment, she could retreat inside herself and simply feel who was around her. What Threads twirled where, which people felt what, and how it might or might not connect to her.

She practiced that awareness. She became obsessed with it, really, and retreating into the weave every few minutes eventually became a natural instinct. Her range grew wider too. The more she reached, the farther and farther she found her Threadwitchery senses could go.