Soulwoven

Chapter Twenty-Five

~25~

Ryse Lethien’s feet pounded a rocky, hard-beaten path of dirt. The River of Souls swirled in bright eddies in her eyes. She still felt a trace of the fever that had overtaken her in the tunnels, but she ignored it.

The valley ahead of her, a wide river plain surrounded by high mountains and dominated by a city that crept up the seat of a throne-shaped peak, was rich with souls. They poured over the tops of the peaks in heavy swells, rushed along the valley floor, pooled over villages and towns and crossed the night in fluorescent, auroral arcs.

Fighting had already begun inside the city. The River was flooding into it in a vortex of light that roared over not just it but the whole valley. The Heart Dragons of Aleana were not yet broken—Ryse thought she would’ve felt it if they had been—but they were clearly at risk.

It wasn’t the danger to the heart dragons, however, that had set her heart racing.

Before the torrent of souls flowing into Du Fenlan had obscured all detail, she’d thought, just for a moment, that she’d felt the eddy of a soulweaver she hadn’t seen in more than two years. A soulweaver who had been in the Academy with her. A soulweaver who had died in the White Forest just before she’d gained the robe.

A hundred memories gaped before her: A boy with a drawn, darkened face drinking tea. A surprisingly warm conversation in which she’d learned that he, too, had never known a real family. Stealing time away from lectures and drills to meet him in empty hallways for a moment’s shared smile. The thrill that had shot through every bone in her body the first time he’d held her. The taste of his lips—

The darkened walls of Du Fenlan loomed above.

Ryse could feel the soulweaving inside the city more clearly close up. There were two necromancers. Their weaving had a distinct, twisted aspect—pulled at the River in a way that was too easy, reckless, like a cart rolling unchecked down a steep hill. There were others weaving as well—Aleani soulweavers, she figured. They created dozens of smaller whirlpools and waves in the River’s flow, but the two necromancers were far more powerful.

And one of them wove just like a man she’d been told was dead.

Her mouth was dry. The others stood in front of a small door cut into Du Fenlan’s massive, wooden gates. Len was shouting at someone.

Through a slit in the door, Ryse spotted orange light and a pair of beady eyes. She couldn’t understand the words of the Aleani on the other side of the gate, but his tone was clear. They would not be let in.

And then she was weaving.

She laid a web of souls over the door and stepped forward. Her voice surprised her with its coldness.

“We are coming in,” she said. “If you value your life, you will step back.”

She scarcely registered the gatekeeper’s face. Aleani, dreadlocked, tattooed, it did not matter.

He moved, and she blew the door off of its hinges.

She was running then, racing past columned buildings of limestone along a river and then moving up a steep hill tinted blue in the moonlight. Flagstones flew by under her feet. Souls streamed past her in the thousands.

Leramis’s father had been a scoundrel and a lush. The soulweaver she’d sensed could have been an illegitimate brother, a sister, a cousin—someone with a link to him.

But Leramis had told her that his relatives had all died in the plague. And he’d been powerful, woven so smoothly, so surely—just like the necromancers ahead.