Isak lay clown on his huge bed and looked up at the painted beams on the ceiling, thick hands oi red that ran the length of the room. He
losed his eyes and tried to clear his thoughts, but it didn't take long for his fingers to start twitching in irritation at the stillness. With a sigh he sat up again.
'Perhaps I can do this without being asleep,' he said out loud. 'How about it, spirit?'
Lamentable wretch, spat Aryn Bwr in reply, blind and ignorant creature!
'Fine, be like that,' Isak said, determined not to let himself gel wound up by the dead king's insults. 'It can't be so difficult – she said we shared a connection, so I'll find her if she wants me to.'
He sat cross-legged and, running his fingers around the Crystal Skull as if he were stroking a woman's cheek, pulled it loose from Eolis. It was warm to the touch, and so silky-smooth he could hardly feel the surface. Isak had discovered from his tentative experiments that the Skull responded better when it was in contact with the flesh that had had its colour burned from it by his God's lightning. He had wondered about asking Dermeness Chirialt, the mage who'd helped him make Carel's sword, but decided he probably didn't want to know the answer. He was afraid of finding out something fundamental had changed, that his mortal flesh had been replaced by something else, something less than human. Isak had never expected frailty to possess its own attractions.
Isak raised the Skull and watched it slowly return to shape. The line of the jaw came first, then the dome, followed swiftly by the angled planes of the cheeks. For a brief moment it was a disconcerting blind face before the sockets sank down. Once the Skull was solid again, Isak cupped it in his hands. It looked oddly bifurcated, bright white on one side and a dull pink on the other.
He raised it to his chest and touched it to the scar there. Burned into his skin on his first night in the palace, the runic form of her name was his closest link to Xeliath. That would be the path he'd follow.
The witch of Llehden waited on a rolling plain of shivering wheat It was a place of bland nothingness. A handful of trees stood nearby, but there was nothing beyond. Xeliath had not seen the need to go further than that. There was no sunlight, nor sound, and the plain was an uncomfortable, disconcerting place to pass an hour. For someone inextricably woven into the fabric of the Land, the witch fell it a terrible loss to be in this slate-sky place of dead memories. She pulled her shawl tighter as the breeze picked up. It felt like the ghostly wind was able to draw the warmth from the living, despite knowing that the told wasn't real.
Xeliath was a little way off, delighting in her restored grace and making the most of her time in these dreams, turning cartwheels, let-ting her skirts fall about shamefully, swinging from the branches of the trees. She knew well that soon she would have to return to her twisted and damaged true body, but until then she sang with pleasure at the sensation of strong limbs being once again fully under her control.
At this moment she was hanging upside-down with her legs wrapped around a bough, crooning softly to herself in the strange language of her people.
'Ane you sure he heard you?'
I m sure.' Xeliath didn't turn her head. Her soft chestnut hair hung loose and free. It still struck the witch as strange that the girl's hair was almost exactly the same shade as her skin. It seemed unnatural somehow, in some ways as disturbing as an albino's lack of colour. It made Xeliath's eyes even more striking. A curl of a smile on her lips could be electrifying. Though the girl was normally all youth¬ful Innocence, she possessed the arresting presence of a white-eye.
The Gods have chosen this one well,' murmured the witch. As Isak's
queen, Xeliath would have been able to bewitch men with a glance; 'those didn't find themselves hanging off Isak's every word would tremble when his lady spared them the briefest of moments.
Xeliath stretched out her arms as far as they could go, turning her wrists in circles. The witch blinked, and when she opened her eyes
again, Isak was standing directly in front of the brown-skinned girl. Xeliath squealed with delight and wrapped her arms around the
massive scarlet and gold-clad apparition. Isak started, he'd appeared
just a few inches from Xeliath's face, and was immediately grabbed, but his struggles ceased almost at once as the girl locked lips with his.
Her slender fingers gripped a handful of his thick black hair to hold him close.
His passion reflected hers and the massive white-eye lost no time in swinging Xeliath down from the branch and enveloping her in his
Where's a bucket of water when I need one?' wondered the witch aloud, Isak jumped and tore himself from Xeliath's arms. Eolis was half drawn before he recognised the speaker.
'You! What are you doing here?'
'Waiting for your raging hormones to calm down.'
'Well, if I'd known there was a queue…' He smirked.
The witch had no intention of giving him the satisfaction of a reaction, but Xeliath was quick to offence, and though significantly smaller than Isak, the Yeetatchen girl showed no hesitation in reach¬ing up and jabbing him hard.
The witch managed not to smile at Isak's yelp. The flash of anger faded quickly when he turned back to Xeliath.
The witch made a note of that small detail, tucking it away in a corner of her mind. She would decide later if it was worrying. Xeliath's charms held Isak in thrall, as they would any other man, but she was cut off from a real life. Outside her excursions into dreams, she was nothing more than an imprisoned, frustrated child. The only thing she might be able to control in her life was Isak… the witch won¬dered if he were the one who would end up determining the course of history.
She shook her head to clear her thoughts. 'We brought you here for a reason,' she said. 'There are matters that need your attention.'
'Matters that need my attention?' Isak took a step towards her. 'I'll tell you what needs my attention: the largest nation in the Land. My investiture ceremony, so that I am legally recognised, and the trial of a daemon-worshipping traitor, and once I've got those out of the way, I have a war to prepare for. You'll forgive me if I don't feel like sorting out anyone else's problems, especially when ordered to by someone I've hardly met – I don't even know your name.'
'Her name?' Xeliath walked around him and stood next to the witch, her eyes flashing. 'Don't you know anything about witches? They give up their names when they stop being apprentices. To give you her name would be as dangerous as you handing cuttings of your hair to any passing mage. As for giving you orders – she's trying to warn you, that's all. She's an ally. You might at least let her finish speaking before you bite her head off.'
'How do I know she's an ally?' Isak said, a little grumpily. He felt like he was being ganged up on.
'You need proof?' the witch cut in. 'If I were an enemy, do you think you would so easily have left my domain bearing those gifts from the Knights of the Temples? To be a witch is to be able to feel the heartbeat of the very Land itself, to be part of the patterns and rhythms that bind
it. It does not tell me the future, but I can sense something of what that pattern might result in – just as I can sense when there is some¬thing wrong in that pattern.' She shuddered. 'What I feel right now is a danger to us all, and it grows with every day. I know this because of what I am, because of what I have sacrificed to become what I am.'