Witch's Pyre (Worldwalker #3)(87)

Lily looked down at her feet as they walked. “Is this going to be a problem?”

“It already is one,” he said through a mirthless laugh. “Walltop soldiers look at Outlanders like they’re no better than rats, and Outlanders hate Walltop for watching from on high while they died.”

“Let me get this right. The ranch hands and the below folk hate the Outlanders, the Outlanders hate Walltop, and Walltop look down on all of them?”

“Exactly,” Rowan replied. “At least they agree on one thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“No matter how much they hate each other, they hate the Woven more,” he said bitterly.

“Do you?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Even still?” she asked. He nodded, his lips tight. “But it was all Grace. She was controlling them,” Lily persisted.

“I know it might not make much sense to you, but telling my people it wasn’t the Woven, it was Grace using the Woven, doesn’t change much. It doesn’t change what we went through.”

“But they’re intelligent—”

“That makes it worse, Lily. Not better,” he said in a choked voice. His eyes turned inward to watch a dark memory, and Lily stifled what she was going to say next. Telling him that the Woven had suffered even more than the Outlanders wasn’t what Rowan wanted to hear. He couldn’t hear it, actually, no matter how loudly Lily shouted it. The Woven were his enemy. His hatred for them was in his blood. It was handed down to him from generations past and was as much a part of his makeup as his dark eyes and clever hands. Somehow, she had to find a way to get him past that, or they were going to die.

“Then let’s hope the Hive will be enough to get all the different factions of my army to work together,” she said.

“The Hive is more than enough.” He looked hopelessly at the night sky. “More than we can handle.”

They slowed to a halt. “Is it that bad?” she asked.

“It is. We don’t have the numbers. We’re about thirty thousand. They are millions.”

“Most of them are Workers, though. I can protect you from them. I did it before—”

Rowan shook his head, cutting her off. “So instead of the odds being a hundred to one, it’s still twenty Warrior Sisters to one of us,” he said. “I might be able to take twenty Sisters in battle. Caleb, Tristan, and Una probably could, too, but the rest of your army can’t be counted on for those kinds of numbers. The ranch hands have never been in a real battle before. A lot of them are going to desert as soon as they see the Hive rising.”

“Not if I make them stay and fight,” Lily said quietly.

“Possessing them would keep them in the battle, but it won’t keep them alive for long,” he warned. He was right, of course. Lily knew she couldn’t win this war with an unwilling army.

“So what do we do?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he whispered. “I’ve gone over it a dozen times in my head, and I can’t make it work. We don’t have enough fighters.”

After a few pensive moments, Rowan finally shook himself. “I’ll figure it out,” he promised.

He left her at the entrance of her tent and went to rejoin his stone kin out on patrol. She watched him until he disappeared among the trees, hoping he would forgive her for what she knew she had to do. She went into her tent and sat down on the ground.

She hadn’t had water or eaten most of the day in order to prepare. She didn’t know how far she’d have to roam on this spirit walk, but she figured it was going to be a long trip. She threw some herbs that were good for relaxation on the fire and settled back, breathing in the fragrant smoke.

There was one moment where she felt like she was falling even though she was pressed to the ground. She briefly looked down and saw her body lying below her wandering spirit, and then she turned her attention out past the Mist and into the overworld.

Spirit walking isn’t sequential like normal traveling. There are gaps in the journey, and vast stretches of space are covered in the blurry blink of an eye. It’s easy to get lost, and hard to pick a destination and simply go there unless you have some kind of landmark or key to highlight the path. But Lily knew what she was aiming for. She’d touched it with her own hands and chased its inner light with her own eyes, and although its pattern was too big for her to ever claim for herself, she knew how the first few notes of its great song went.

Lily sent her spirit all the way back to Bower City to find the pearlescent speaking stone on top of Grace’s villa. Starting there, she looked out across the overworld and saw them—bright and clear like searchlights beaming straight into the sky. She wondered how she could have ever missed them, but not knowing they were there had kept the speaking stones hidden in plain sight.

From her vantage in the overworld Lily could see that each speaking stone was unique. Each had a slightly different hue from the others, making it possible to know where your message was coming from based on the tint of the image you saw. Lily saw Grace’s line of speaking stones stretching across the continent and meeting up with another line of thirteen speaking stones down the eastern seaboard, one to each of the Thirteen Cities. Now that Lily had both of the paths clear in her mind’s eye she could use them when she returned to her body.