Windwitch (The Witchlands 2)

He let them follow for a time before pushing his witchery to its full power. Faster, faster he ran until the men vanished from his senses entirely. Until at last he was far enough away to know he could pause undisturbed in a clearing where underbrush grew thick but shafts of cloudy light streamed in. Here, Aeduan examined the arrowhead.

Nothing. No blood-scent, just as the Threadwitch had no blood-scent.

There were different smells, though. Faint and mingling, as if others had handled the arrowhead. Corlant’s scent hovered deep beneath the bloodstains. And then, lacing over the top, was a smell like hearth fires and teardrops.

Yet nothing for the Threadwitch Iseult.

Aeduan wanted to know why. Did she lack a blood-scent entirely, or was he simply unable to smell it?

He ran his thumb over the arrowhead, and a memory unfolded. Hazy at first. A face made of moonlight and shadows. An ancient lighthouse and a sandy beach. A night sky, with the Threadwitch’s face at its heart.

She had outwitted Aeduan that night, distracted him long enough to ensure her friend got to safety. Then she’d leaped off the lighthouse in a jump that would have killed her if Aeduan hadn’t followed. Yet she’d known he would, and he had ultimately broken her fall.

After, when she’d spared Aeduan’s life on the beach, her face had been cinched with pain and blood had bloomed on a bandage at her biceps.

An arrow wound, Aeduan knew now, and one that somehow connected her to Corlant. To a foul Purist priest in his father’s employ.

Aeduan’s breath loosed. His fingers curled over the arrowhead.

He was left with two choices, two ghosts he could try to hunt: the girl with no blood-scent or the talers with no trail.

Then the decision was made for him. He smelled his silver talers.

Before Aeduan had abandoned his iron lockbox in the hollowed-out tree, he had spilled his own blood across the coins. For his own blood he knew; his own blood he could always follow. Yet until this moment, he’d been unable to even sense those stained coins—much less track them down and reclaim them. It was as if they had been hidden beneath salamander fibers, and only now could Aeduan smell them.

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.