LATER
I did it. I entered the doorway and I reached the Rook King’s court atop Sirmaya’s mountain.
Nadya waited in the cavern and watched me go. “May Sirmaya protect you,” she whispered.
Then my feet crossed the threshold, and I was sucked into a blizzard made of fire. A burst of such intense power that it both scalded and froze at once. It sucked the air from my lungs and flipped my stomach straight into my skull. I felt stretched. I felt crushed. I felt made of starlight and molten stone.
Then, in a blink, it was over. I was there. In the matching doorway Saria had carved on the cliffside above the Rook King’s palace.
At this high an altitude, there was no escaping the sun—nor its fierce glare upon the snow. Worse, my legs collapsed beneath me from the sudden sense of weight. Of existence. Of mountain cold to gust against me.
Footsteps crunched on the snow, and then a warm weight dropped over me. It smelled of tallow and wool. “These will protect your eyes,” came the Rook King’s low voice, and I felt his hands slide around my head.
A strap tightened, and tentatively I opened one eye. Horsehair goggles, I realized, and when I tipped up my chin, I saw that the Rook King wore a matching pair. With the hood of his black cloak towed up against the wind, the only part of his face that showed was a grin.
“You did it,” he said. “Well done.”
I nodded, a breathy laugh falling from my tongue as he helped me rise. “I did, didn’t I?” My words puffed with steam. “I built the door, Your Majesty, and here I am. I cannot believe it worked.”
“I can.” He offered me his arm and waved to a path cleared down the mountain’s snowy side. “Will you join me? As I said in my last message, the general wishes to discuss defense of the doorways with you.”
I nodded with far too much excitement. I had been ready for months to confer directly with the general, and I’d already told Nadya that it might be several hours before I returned.
“Let us go,” I declared, and I allowed the King to guide me into the evergreens. His rook, which I hadn’t noticed skulking in the trees, flapped over and settled on the King’s shoulder.
I still didn’t like that bird. It was far too human-like in its gaze.
We tromped past snowdrifts tucked behind stone walls, built just for that purpose, and we wove left and right around branches bowed low beneath the white. Not once did the wind stop its howl, and despite my added layer, I shivered and shook.
We had cold at the Convent, but this was a new level. Colder even than the deepest corners of Sirmaya’s underground.
I had visited this mountaintop fortress once before, but it had been late spring then. The snow had not lain thick across the crags and peaks, and the people had not been mounds of shapeless wool with only horsehair goggles to reveal them as human.
Each person we passed in the woods bobbed at the knees and tapped their fur-covered brows with a mittened hand. The Rook King always returned the gesture, an aura of absolute respect rolling off him.
Gone was the sense of outsider. Here, in his own realm, the Rook King felt as he had when I’d first met him: a man who wanted to stop the ceaseless death caused by Exalted Ones unchecked. A man who loved his home and his people.
Down, down we zigged and zagged toward his dark palace on the cliff. The wind carried the sound of soldiers and horses in training: the clash of metal, the jangle of tack, and hundreds of voices—women’s and men’s—shouting as they worked.
The Rook King’s army was the smallest of all the Paladins’, but no one doubted his was the fiercest. Trained in this harshest of lands, his soldiers were led not only by the King, but also by a general known across the Witchlands as the best of the best.
He was, aside from the Sightwitch Sisters, the only person on the continent who knew what the Six intended, and though it had irked me to go all these years without an introduction, I was too giddy over the door to care today.
We crossed a low drawbridge slatted over a moat filled with snow. Yet we did not pass through the main gate. Instead, we skirted the yard, using a corner tower to reach the battlements.
There, I had a view of the soldiers in practice—and what a sight to behold. I will never forget it. Two hundred people, bundled up and layered in loose, leather armor, moved in perfect coordination at the bellowed cries of a man on a wooden scaffolding. He paced back and forth, dressed no differently from his subordinates.
The general, I presumed.
Crossing the battlements, we entered a private study, where a welcome fire snapped in the fireplace. Steaming, rosemary-scented broth waited on a short table at the room’s center, and four cushions rested around it.
The King’s bird swept off his shoulder and landed on a hook overlooking a long, curved desk covered in maps and letters.
“This is the general’s office,” the King explained, yet before he could peel off his goggles, the door creaked open.
A fur-covered head poked in, and a decidedly feminine voice said, “Your Majesty, we need you at the stables, sir.”
Instantly, the rook was off his perch and flapping back onto the King’s shoulder. The sound of his flight drowned out whatever the woman said next—and whatever the King answered—yet the sudden stiffening of the King’s spine told me it could not be good.
“I’ll be right there,” he told the woman. Then he swung his gaze back to me. His expression was inscrutable behind the wool and fur. “I need to go to the stables. We’ve had disease hit my favorite hounds. Lady Saria just arrived to help, and … I apologize, Sister Eridysi. Can you speak with the general alone?”
I bowed my head. “Of course.”
“Thank you. I will join the two of you soon.” And with that, he yanked on his goggles and pushed back into the winter’s day.
The door thunked shut, and I was alone. After hanging my cloak and goggles on a knob by the door, I crossed to the fireplace to wait.
As I warmed up, a grin eased over my face. My head lolled back.
I had done it. I had done it! One passage was complete, and the remaining five would be easily done. Then, once we had them all, we could start porting people away from the Exalted Ones. Even the blade to kill them was almost complete too. All our plans were coming together.
I beamed so broadly my cheeks hurt. Even when the door rushed open and footsteps stomped inside, even as I turned to face whoever it might be, I still grinned.
I couldn’t help it.
The general stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of me, the door open and his mittened hand clutching the latch. Snow swooped in. Cold washed against me.
My smile faltered. Then frosted away entirely. Why did he stare? Why did he not shut the door?
I offered a polite bow. “I am Sister Eridysi. You must be the general.”
He flinched. Then, voice muffled by the angle and the layers, he mumbled, “Yes.”
Aiming for a string of hooks nearby, his back to me, he removed each layer. Hat, scarf, leather armor, outer coat, undercoat.
He shrank and shrank and shrank, until at last there was nothing but a man with dark hair and a standard black silk uniform.
Then he turned to face me.
“You,” I breathed.
“You,” was his reply. Then his gaze dropped to his toes, and he scrubbed a hand over his dark hair.
Nervous. He was … nervous.
“You told me you were a soldier.” Accusation laced my tone.
He offered a tight laugh. “An advanced soldier.” Then he shrugged, his eyes finally lifting to meet mine across the room. “Does … it matter?”
“No!” I rushed forward two clumsy steps. Then stopped, feeling a fool.
Now I was the one staring uncomfortably at the ground. “I simply … That is to say, I assumed you were somewhere near the Convent. In one of the Rook King’s southern forts.”
“A fair guess.” He cleared his throat. “I never specified.”
“You must truly love the girls.” I twirled away and marched to his desk. It was so much easier to speak when I didn’t face him.
So much easier to breathe.
“Not that I doubted you loved them, of course,” I rambled on. “But it must take you an entire day to travel both ways.”
“Each way,” he corrected. “The journey takes two days.”
I watched him from the corner of my eye as he approached me at the desk.
He frowned. Then he was at the table and standing beside me. Close enough that I could smell iron and horse. Close enough that, if I wanted to, I could have reached out and touched him.
“So you are that Sightwitch. The inventor without the Sight.”
Shame gusted over me.
“Your eyes are silver,” he continued, oblivious of the fire raging on my cheeks. “So I assumed you were like the others.”
“Well, I’m not,” I said flatly.
Now he was the one to blurt. “I meant no offense. I’m sorry, my lady. Truly.”
I believed him and forced a smile. “I suppose we’re both more than we let on.”
“Ah.” The worried lines of his face smoothed away and he offered me one of his own smiles. The kind that made his bright eyes crinkle and my stomach knot tight. “When did you get here?”
“Only moments ago. The first doorway is complete.” I gestured vaguely up the mountain. “I just tested it.”
He stiffened. “You tested it?”
“Of course. Who else would?”
“I don’t know. Someone who isn’t you.” He shook his head, an impatient movement. “What if the magic had gone wrong? What if you had not arrived here at all? Did you even try it before you stepped through?”
“How would I possibly try it?” I drew back my shoulders.
“Throw a stone in it.”
“The spell only works on the living.”
“Then send a Paladin!”
“Oh, right,” I retorted, “because the most important people in all the land would risk their lives testing my doorway.”
“Yes! And they should! This is their rebellion—”
“This is our rebellion!”
“—and if they die, then they’ll be reborn!”
“Why are you shouting at me?”
“Because it was foolish! What if you had died?”
“The Six would have gone on just fine without me,” I snipped, and because I didn’t know what else to do—because I don’t like confrontation—I gathered myself up to my fullest height and said, “I will tell Lisbet and Cora you send your love. Good day, General.”
Then I stalked past him and aimed for the door. As I grabbed at my cloak, ready to yank it off its hook, his voice skated over me. The words were too low to discern.
“What?” I angled back.
He cleared his throat. Then louder, he offered, “They aren’t the only reason.”
“Who?”
“The girls.”
I released the cloak. Then turned to stare at him straight on.
There was no more anger to cloud his eyes. Nor pain nor anything else I could easily recognize.
Then he repeated, “The girls aren’t the only reason I come each full moon,” and I knew exactly what expression he wore.
Need.
And I needed it too. I had all along, hadn’t I? Since that day at the Sorrow when the world had tilted sideways. When he’d flashed a single smile.
I would not let this moment slip past.
In four long steps I was back to him. Rolling onto my toes and looping my fingers behind his head.
His hair was as soft as I had dreamed it would be.
Then our lips touched, and it was over. I had kissed before. A hundred girls around me, and I was bound to try. But I’d never met someone who made me want to keep kissing like he did.
Twice, I had to pull back to catch my breath. The room spun. His face spun.
But I could not stay away for long. A heartbeat, perhaps two, and then our lips were crushed together once more.
This was it. This was what it was all about—this was true Sight, true understanding of what life really meant.
The general and his daughters had been the change to shake me loose, and I knew that from this moment on, I would never be the same.