Soulwoven

Chapter Fifty-Two

~52~

Blood dripped into backlit water in front of Litnig Jin’s swollen face. Each drop looked different—a dark cloud that swirled for a moment against a bright backdrop and dissipated, pulled downstream.

Litnig heard crickets. His head pounded. His neck was sore.

I was unconscious.

He remembered rope being wrapped around his wrists. He’d tried to resist. Someone had thrown him to the floor. The butt of a spear had flown toward his forehead.

And then the world had gone black.

His nose was killing him. His mouth was dry. The water in front of him looked cool and inviting, but when he tried to reach for it, his arms didn’t budge. They’d been twisted behind his back and anchored to a heavy weight. His legs were bound as well. The ropes had been exchanged for chain.

“Shit,” he mumbled. The blood in the water was his. It was dripping from his nose and trickling into the Lumos from the crystal boardwalk he lay upon. The light behind it shone from the midst of some waving stands of plant life at the bottom of the river.

“Es’na,” grunted a voice above him. Something thwacked into his rib cage.

Litnig couldn’t see the others. His head felt foggy. Tsu’min had been talking to the Sh’ma on the throne. The guards had rushed forward—

He heard a splash. At the edge of his vision, something white sank into the river.

His blood went cold.

Ryse.

His aching brain lurched into motion. He remembered what had happened in the throne room.

And he realized that the Sh’ma were going to drown him and the others like rats.

Litnig tried to wrench his wrists free of their chains, but with his arms pinned behind his back, he barely had the strength to pull the metal links taut.

Cole, he thought. Maybe Cole can get free, maybe he can—but even if his brother did slip out of his chains, what would he do? The Sh’ma had already shown that they were more than capable of overwhelming them.

Maybe I can find the River again. Maybe the weaving will work better than last time.

Litnig shut his eyes, held his breath, and willed himself to see the stream of glowing orbs.

Nothing happened.

He didn’t have a clue how to find the River.

He fought for calm and tried not to think that any second there might be another splash, that Ryse might already be sucking in water down below, that Cole could be next, that he could be next—

“Tsu’min! Na’oth’na e!” someone shouted.

A sharp flash lit the night. A thunderclap broke the world’s sticky stillness into tiny pieces. A burst of wind raced over Litnig’s back, and then he heard shouting and the pounding of feet. A whistle blew. Someone screamed. There was a heavy crack, and a network of snow-white fractures appeared in the crystal beneath him. The boardwalk tilted in the direction of the river. Litnig heard a heavy thoom. The tinkling of breaking glass filled the air.

The boardwalk canted further, and Litnig slid toward the water. He tried to dig his feet, his face, his chains—anything—into the crystal, but there was nothing to catch himself on. He couldn’t stop.

His shoulders hit the water first.

His head bobbed toward the surface. He had the giddy thought that he was going to float.