Soulwoven (51 page)

The others who were looking, pale and sick, back down at the slip.

Dil heard a shout above the roaring of the water and looked down. Two dark shapes were still visible on top of the rocks. One lay crumpled around the feet of the other. The second was standing and shouting her name.

Cole.

Litnig.

“No,” she whispered.

And then the water thundered over them.

SIXTY-ONE

The water was cold.

Not just
cold
cold.
Fucking
cold.
Colder than the water underneath the mountains of Aleana had been.
Cold enough to take Cole’s
breath
away. The flood was filled with rocks and dirt and boulders bigger than he was, and it rolled and pitched him in a dozen directions. It was all he could do to hold on to the dead weight of his brother.

He tried to kick for the surface, but he couldn’t find it. Rock after rock smashed into him. Every so often, he was thrown free of the deluge for just long enough to suck in a breath, and then he plunged back into it again. His arms got tired. It became hard to think. He lost track of time. All he could do was hold on, roll, breathe, roll,
hold
—

Stay calm,
he told himself, but his mind was breaking apart. He pitched forward and turned a somersault. He broke free of the water and barely remembered to take a breath.
Stay calm—ca—calmm—

The weight in his arms was too heavy. His hands were numb. He wanted to hold on. The weight was important. It mattered.

But he was so tired. He needed to let go.

Something grabbed him beneath the armpit.

He lost his grip on the weight.

The hand holding his armpit pulled him upward and outward until he was free of the water. He took a deep breath, then another.

But he was freezing. His mind buzzed and swam. And he felt empty without the weight in his arms.

He was dragged onto something hard and wet.

“Brr,” he mumbled.

A voice said something comforting. Warm arms wrapped around him.

Cole shook his head. He could feel water freezing into tiny crystals on the hair on his arms, his head,
his
face. His lips wouldn’t move properly.

“Brrth,” he managed the second time.

The voice said something consoling. A pair of hands began to rub his arms vigorously.

Cole opened his eyes and found himself sitting on a large slab of dark rock. The world looked bleary and bright. A torrent of gray-and-black water roared on either side of him.

“Brrothherr!” he snapped, and he tore free of the arms around him and crawled on shivering, wasted hands and knees toward the river. He remembered what the weight in his arms had been.
Who
the weight in his arms had been.

The voice of murmurs became a voice of words.

“No, Cole. Stay. Promise me you’ll stay. I’ll find him. I swear to you, I will find him.”

Cole’s arms wouldn’t bear his weight. He collapsed and curled into the fetal position.

He was so cold.

A girl slid into the water in front of him on her belly. Cole caught a glimpse of her head breaking free of the flood, and then he couldn’t hold his neck up any longer. He lay down on his rock, and he shivered, and he shivered, and he shivered.

He woke when a dark mass was tossed onto the rock beside him. The body was cold and wet and heavy.

“Lit,” Cole croaked.

There were snowflakes in the air. Cole’s hands were stiff and frozen, but he poked at the rubbery mass that was his brother anyway, and then he threw himself over him.

Litnig didn’t move.

“Off,” said the comforting voice, and Cole felt himself pushed gently from his brother’s chest.

He flopped onto his back and looked up. Above him, swimming in the snow and the gray, was the face of a girl with dark hair and shining golden eyes.
Yenor’s angel.
She was like Yenor’s angel. She would take care of everything.

Cole closed his eyes, and he let the world spin out of his control and into hers.

A succession of strange dreams flowed through Cole’s mind. An enormous black dragon bit the head off a laughing Aleani; a spear of smoke slipped between Cole’s teeth and down his throat; a sad golden eye in a white-scaled face filled his vision and blinked.

And then he awoke.

He felt warm. He was lying in someone’s lap, and a pair of arms was rocking him gently back and forth.

Dil was talking.

“—so sorry, Cole.
I didn’t mean to—it was the frog, the damn frog. It’s so hard to keep your mind separate from theirs, to think and not just be.” He felt himself squeezed tight. “I’m so sorry—”

“Lit,” he mumbled, and he opened his eyes.

The sky was black and clear and dotted with stars. Cold air nipped at his skin. His breath misted in front of his lips, but the rock beneath him was comfortably warm. To his right, someone’s eyes glowed white.

Cole tried to sit up fully and wound up falling back against Dil’s chest. His head swam. His body felt sick and feverish. His tongue flopped around in his mouth when he tried to speak, like it was cast in lead.

“How’s Lit?” he managed after a moment.

“Alive,” said another voice.

Cole stopped trying to sit up. He held his hand out. Warm dark fingers grasped it.

“Quay,” he breathed. “Quay, what happened?”

“The valley collapsed. There was a flood.”

Cole nodded.

“Dil pulled you out, went back for Litnig, and ferried the rest of us to this rock.”

The arms around Cole hugged tighter. “He wasn’t breathing, Cole, but I got him breathing again. I took too long to find him, but I swear, I wouldn’t let you lose him, I wouldn’t—” Dil’s voice broke.

Cole found her hand with his and wrapped her fingers up.

“Love you,” he mumbled into her thigh.

“What?”

“I love you, Dil.”

For a moment, no one said anything.

Dil squeezed Cole’s hand and his chest. Her torso jerked underneath him. He felt tears on the back of his head. And then she kissed him on the forehead, then the lips, again and again and again, until his whole face felt warm and wet.

Time passed. Dil stopped crying, but she didn’t let go of Cole’s hand.

“What’s next?” Cole asked.

“We wait for the floodwater to ebb. Then we walk out,” Quay said. The prince was sitting up, staring numbly toward the mouth of the valley. His eyes looked red and puffy. “We’ll head northwest, to the coast. Leramis can send a message to the Aleani if we can find a dead bird or kill one. We’ll ask them to pick us up and hope they respond.”

Leramis, seated on the other side of the rock, looked up when his name was mentioned. But he didn’t speak.

“What about—”

“The dragon?”
Quay shrugged. He sounded empty somehow, broken. “Tsu’min thinks the dragon will find the densest populations it can and snuff them out. Leramis thinks the Duennin will control it well enough to free their people and bring war to Guedin. I think they’ll do something no one expects.”

Cole licked his lips. They were talking about the
dragon.
It didn’t seem possible.

Except that you’ve seen it,
said his mind.

And for once, he listened.

“What do we do once we reach Aleana?” he asked.

Quay stared downriver.

“We have a long time to figure that out.”

EPILOGUE

Soren Goldguard’s eyes snapped open. He sucked in a heavy, gasping breath and coughed it out. The air rasped cold and dry against his throat. His body was curled tightly around itself on wet stone. His hands were pressed over his stomach.

He saw nothing.

It was just the darkness of the cave.
The darkness of the somehow empty cave.

I should be dead.

Eshan had run his bloody orange sword straight through Soren’s guts. The necromancer had died with the dragon in his eyes.

And yet he was alive.

The gash in Soren’s stomach was smaller than he remembered but still trickling blood. He could feel his legs again, and his feet—even his toes.

The cave was black and silent.

Soren rolled onto his side and kept a hand against his stomach. The pressure didn’t make his wound any better, but it made him feel better and it reminded him not to move too abruptly, and that was good enough. He opened his eyes to the River of Souls.

The stream of white orbs drifted through the cave in lazy swirls.

The dragon was gone.

Soren closed his eyes.

When he woke, he felt slightly stronger. He staggered to his feet, wove a small ball of souls into a light above his head, and walked out of the cave.

The world beyond was frigid. Icy pellets of snow streaked through the gray, formless sky. The wind blew sharply out of the north. The smell of rock dust filled the air. The mountains and glaciers looked smaller and leaner, as if they’d shaken the dead weight from their bones.

Soren crept down the wide stairs that formed Sherdu’il’s rotting spine. He passed broken, collapsed buildings. He walked through blood, through vomit, through thrashing marks in the dust that were only somewhat obscured by the new-fallen snow.

Ramith and Miuri were dead. So was D’Orin. He’d seen their corpses in the cave.

He was the sole survivor in a shattered city.

Either Eshan or Crixine had brought him back from the brink of death but left
him
damaged enough to look dead. As if one of them was trying to fool the other.
Or the dragon.

Or me.

Soren stopped and leaned against one of the crooked buildings. His stomach hurt if he breathed too deeply.

They’re fucking with me,
he thought sourly.
Like they fucked with that boy.

The Duennin.
Litnig.
The one they’d been manipulating for months. The one they had something in mind for.

The beginnings of a plan formed in Soren’s head. Litnig had been there when Crixine and Eshan had turned on the rest of them. He’d come from Soulth’il, along with Leramis and the Prince of Eldan. Odds were they’d be returning there. Odds were Crixine and Eshan would follow.

The cliffs that held the rope bridge had been left relatively undamaged by whatever had remade the faces of the rest of the mountains. The bridge itself had been turned into splinters and dangling strands, but it was a simple matter of a moment’s snarled soulweaving to pull it up from the depths and bind it together with souls.

Soren walked across the pieces of the broken bridge. The wound in his stomach seeped blood over his hand. The river Lumos roiled black and sludgelike below him.

Whichever of the Duennin had left him alive had made the biggest mistake of its life. He would see Eshan and Crixine both
dead,
and he would make sure that in their last moments they looked at him and realized exactly where their plan had gone wrong.

No one betrayed Soren Goldguard and lived.

He would find the Duennin, and he would make them pay.

It was only a matter of time.

AFTERWORD

It feels very strange to be writing this.

Soulwoven has been a part of my life, in one way or another, since I was fourteen years old. I’ve known it longer than I’ve known my wife-to-be and one of my best friends. I’ve known it longer than I’ve known even the basics of the craft of writing.

To put the first section of it to bed, finally, and say that here is the finished text of the story and it shall not alter, is to close a very long chapter of my life.

Luckily, that chapter has had a happy ending.

I owe immense debts of gratitude to numerous people for helping me make this book a reality. There are the Wattpadders, who gave me the confidence to publish it. There are the Kickstarter backers, who paid its production costs. There are the writers to whom it is dedicated, without whose inspiration it would have been a shadow of what it is. There are the members of my family, who have encouraged me endlessly and who have read the book more times than anyone but me. 

I owe special thanks to Rose Fox, whose editing was a great guide to me, and to Michael Valsted, whose eyes are sharper than mine and whose knowledge of grammar is encyclopedic. Abby Howard deserves special recognition for her map, as does Kendall Roderick for designing an amazing cover (if you’ve only read the ebook, you’re missing out—the print book is a thing of beauty). 

And I owe my greatest thanks to Cass, the rock behind whom I pass the storms and the first to dance with me when the sun comes out.

Many other people have been indispensable to me as I became a writer, but it feels too early to thank them yet. I suspect you, dear reader, are more interested in what’s going to happen next.

I promise you’ll find out soon.

The second volume of Soulwoven should be out in late 2014. The third will be out sometime after that. I can write many things quickly—I’ve done that for a living, actually—but Soulwoven isn’t one of them.

I hope you’ll bear with me.

Many thanks. I hope your time in this world has been time well spent and that if it has, you’ll leave a review somewhere and share the book with others.

Jeff Seymour

1/30/14

Follow me on Twitter
@realjeffseymour

Like me on Facebook at
Facebook.com/realjeffseymour

Join my mailing list at
jeff-seymour.com/mailinglist

A Special Thank You

Eighty people backed the Kickstarter for Soulwoven. Eighty people made this book happen. Some of them deserve special mention, and, as promised, here are their names:

The Founder’s Circle

Cass

Best friend extraordinaire, his royal inspiration, Ryan Haywood

David Hdanger Goldberg

Eilish O’Loughlin

Mary and Justin Haas

Ian Caldwell

Anna Seymour

Jenny

Robert “Ducky” Hansen

Robin Jay

Emily Gerston

Dani Forshay