Soulwoven

Chapter Three

~3~

A thin sheen of sweat clung to Ryse Lethien’s arms. A second skin of dirt shrouded her legs, her face, her neck. The stars glowed cold and damp in a black sky, her mouth tasted of earth, and she hung unwillingly from the arm of an old friend.

Once, when she had been an undersized, red-haired orphan in Eldan City’s vicious slums, she would have sat down and worked out what in the world had just happened to her. She would have climbed to the highest, safest place she could find, and when she’d been alone she would have licked her wounds and tried to calm her racing heart, wrapped her arms around herself and cried and told herself that everything was going to be alright.

But Ryse Lethien was no longer that child. And there were people dying nearby. She could hear them. They needed her.

The ground was uneven and damp, and Ryse nearly lost her footing with her first step. She did not want help. She wanted to walk on her own, had bought that with years of training, years of study, years of devotion. She had earned the right to be the strong one.

Litnig mumbled something. Ryse held his arm and let him walk her toward the moans, and she tried to make sense of the world.

She had faced necromancy. Thousands of the River of Souls’ tiny, glowing spheres woven into marionette strings, pulling on the arms, the legs, the backs of the dead. She had stood tall in the chaos and dirt of the graveyard, breathing huge gulps of the River in and out with her soul, tearing the strings apart and hammering the corpses with bolts of fire and concussive force. The soulflow had been thick and difficult to weave in, but the River had moved like air, like water, in ways she had seen it move before.

And then it had surged toward the temple and rebounded.

The movement had pulled her off-balance. A hot wind had roared over her body and a flood of souls had drowned her in a bright, bewildering maelstrom. She had lost herself in the light, confused and desperate as a speck of dust on a hummingbird’s wing, an insect in a hurricane.

And then the scream.

“Ryse?”

She stood next to Litnig over a boy with a dislocated knee, probably torn ligaments, possibly broken bones. His face was pale and sweaty. His hand shook when he reached for her.

Breathe, she told herself.

Ryse could treat his knee. If he had a strong draw with the River of Souls, he might even walk without a limp someday. She knelt beside him in gray mud and clay, pumped warm air against the crispness of the night. The thousand thousand peaceful souls of the River floated past her, calm and comforting, waiting to be grasped.

She closed her eyes. When she reopened them, tiny, bright spheres drifted around her in gentle streams, a tapestry of light and warmth waiting to be called to use. Waiting for her.

Breathe.

She inhaled not just with her lungs but with her soul. Her chest filled with air and the heavy, warm void of the River alike. The souls drifted toward her, already whispering in her head, wondering what she asked of them.

And then their voices were cut off. A black cloud enveloped her mind and a thick, bilious feeling bubbled up inside her until it produced three words, dark and clear as crystal:

I am coming.

Ryse sucked in a shuddering slug of air and lost sight of the River. She saw only stark white moonlight on the body of a dying boy, cold unfeeling darkness beyond. The urge to run, to scramble away on her hands and knees and bury herself in the deepest shadows she could find, burned deep in her chest. She saw two eyes of red light set in a bony, snakelike dragon’s head swimming in the darkness above the boy’s body. The same nightmarish vision that had held her petrified for the eternity between the scream and the moment Litnig had touched her arm.