MEMORIES
The Exalted Ones found us. They found the doors, and I fear the world is ending.
There is no time. The ice comes for me, and I must write. Lisbet told me I must write.
Five hundred and two people. That was all we got through the door from the Scorched Lands and into the underground city.
Then the Exalted Ones came. They used the door from the Windswept Plains—a door that none of us were guarding. The Six, the general, and I were too busy coordinating the movement of a hundred families through the cavern.
The only warning we had was a rumble through the earth. Saria felt it first. I saw her frown, then stride away from our spot at the rear of the group. “What is it?” I called after her.
Then the earthquake hit.
After that, my memory is a mess of broken moments. Of falling to my knees, then heat barreling over me—so hot, my hair caught fire and my eyebrows singed off.
Of screams, frightened and shrill, as people fled. A dropped satchel. A forgotten book.
Of the Exalted Ones loosing magic and war cries that hummed with fury, betrayal, revenge. Each emotion spilled over me. Solid. Real.
What had we unleashed?
Then I watched the Six abandon our group and meet the Exalted Ones head on.
In those seconds that seemed never to end, only two words filled my mind: the girls. Fool that I am, I had let them join us in the cavern. I’d sent them up to the highest ledge, beside the spiral tomb’s entrance, where I’d thought they could watch everything proceed while safely out of reach.
Fool, fool, fool.
I had to get to them.
Then he was beside me, my Heart-Thread, clutching my arm to lift me from the stone. Together, we ran across the glamoured bridge that shook beneath our feet.
Wind roiled against us, water and ice sliced past—and fire, fire, everywhere there was fire.
But we did not stop. We did not slow. Hands grasped tight, we ran for the girls, who meant everything.
We reached the ledge. The girls were not there, but the tomb entrance was open, and Lisbet’s knife poked from the key slot. Its amber hilt glinted in the flames.
Clever, clever Lisbet. We could hide in the tombs until the war below had ended.
I yanked the knife free and flung a final glance behind.
I wish I had never looked. The Six were losing. Rhian and Midne lay crumpled on the stones, while fire engulfed Bastien. Baile was pinned by swords to the wall, and Saria was trapped inside a growing cage of stone. The Rook King—the one to whom I had given the Paladin-blade for safekeeping—was nowhere in sight.
There was nothing to be done, not with the girls’ safety at risk. So I hauled the door shut and led the way into the ice.
Our breaths hashed out, overloud. Our feet hammered and scraped. Until at last we reached the spiral’s heart.
And there, my darling, wonderful girls awaited. Lisbet stood tall, her sister clutched tight. Her eyes glowed.
Once to them, their father fell to his knees to inspect them all over. Lisbet rooted her brilliant gaze on me, though. “We must sleep now, Dysi.”
It took me a moment to understand what she meant. Sleeping was what dying sisters did when they saw their time come.
“No, Lisbet.” I cupped her face. “We can hide in the tomb, but once this battle is over, we will leave.”
“But it won’t end. He’s betrayed them all, don’t you see?” She pulled from my grasp and turned to her father. “Tell her, Da. Tell her that it’s time to sleep now.”
“Sleep?” He glanced to me, confused. “Lis, love, we need to hide. Like Dysi said.”
“No.” Cora pulled free from her father’s grip, and slipping her little fingers into Lisbet’s, she drew her sister away three paces. Then both girls thrust out their jaws.
“Lisbet saw what is to come,” Cora said, “and we have to sleep now. All of us—even you, Da, so you can be there when she wakes up.” Cora pointed at me. Then up the spiral. “There’s a tomb waiting for us.”
Their father rose. “I don’t understand.”
“I do.” The words slippered from my throat, for I did understand. This was what Lisbet had seen.
And this was what Sirmaya had chosen for us all.
“It won’t hurt,” Lisbet said to me. To her father: “The ice will protect us for a time, and then we’ll sleep until it’s time to wake up again.”
My fingers moved to my belly. “What about … him, Lis?” I almost choked on the words. Tears slid down my face—when had those started?
“He’ll be fine,” Cora answered. “Lizzie told me all about him, and he’s going to be a very good older brother one day.”
“Older brother?” I tried to ask, but the girls were already marching for the spiral.
Their father did not follow.
“Come.” I reached for him and took his hands in mine. He looked ancient in this light, and so tired. “You must trust the magic of the Goddess, my love.”
Still he did not move. “There are people out there. I must help them.”
“You can do nothing.” I squeezed his fingers tightly. “The Exalted Ones will kill you.”
“I have to try,” he countered. “I cannot abandon my king.”
“Yet you can abandon me? And the girls?”
His eyes averted. “No. I …” Then he wilted into me, his forehead resting against mine. “We cannot walk away from this, Dysi. Someone betrayed us.”
“Or we were not careful enough.”
“Da!” came Cora’s call, muffled by the ice. A heartbeat later: “Dysi! Come! We have to hurry!”
“I don’t want to do this,” he murmured.
“I know. But you have to trust me and trust the girls.” I rested my hands on either side of his face—that beautiful, lined face that I had grown to love. “This is what the Goddess wills, and so we must obey.” Then, when he made no move to turn, I murmured the only No’Amatsi words I knew: “Mhe verujta.”
Trust me as if my soul were yours.
He gave a long, slow blink. Then whispered, “Mhe verujta,” and together we ascended the spiral.
A tomb waited for us with four gaps in the ice. If I’d had any doubt that Lisbet’s vision was true, it was gone now.
Though that did not mean I was ready. Cora went first, then her father. And I cried—it was selfish of me, but I could not stop the tears.
Everything I had worked for had crumbled away. The doors, the rebellion, and a life with my Heart-Thread, these two little girls, and the boy growing in my womb.
I was the last into the ice, for Lisbet told me I must write a final entry. “Leave the diary and your taro cards behind,” she ordered me. “The last Sister will need them.”
Yet as the ice scuttled over Lisbet, I had to ask her. I had to know. “How can you be so calm? How have you lived all these weeks and months despite knowing all that was coming?”
“Not despite, Dysi.” She gave me a sympathetic half smile, and it was not a child’s face that stared at me. “Because. We value things more when we know they won’t last forever.”
Then ice covered her completely, and she joined her family in the Sleeper’s embrace.
So I did as she commanded, and now it is only I to sit alone in this room of eternal cold and blue, blue, blue.
Whoever you are, last Sightwitch Sister, please make use of the time you have. Do not do as I did. Do not trap yourself away inside a mountain with your head stuffed in the past.
You have a life to live, and Sirmaya thinks it is an important one.
So go outside. Meet the world and embrace its trials head-on.
A lone sister is lost, you know, so never let yourself be alone.