“Moving on.” It was Vidrol who spoke, a strong arm hooking beneath mine, strapped across my front and lifting me up, my hand slipping from Andel’s.
Vidrol carried me like a rag doll, hooked across his arm, my limbs dangling, my head heavy. I blinked my eyes open, crawling out from the prison of my own making, my skin feeling raw and electrified at the same time. Vidrol dropped me into a chair, where I immediately pulled my knees up to curl myself into a ball. I peered at Andel, still choking on the feeling of horror … and then I dragged my gaze over to Helki.
Helki, who had stolen my life force in order to survive my shadow.
Helki, who was now smiling at me like some kind of beast who had cornered his prey exactly where he wanted it.
“You almost died,” I accused him. “You can’t be invincible.”
“I’m sure I did,” he agreed. “It’s keeping me dead that really proves difficult. This thing won’t stop for more than a second or two.” He thumped his chest.
My mind went blank before running off in a hundred different directions. They couldn’t die. They couldn’t die. I had felt it when I tried to look into Andel, but hearing Helki admit it was a whole other thing.
Even the first Fjorn had tried to warn me, but I hadn’t taken her words literally.
It is impossible, she had said.
She was right.
“Why are you telling me this?” I demanded, hugging my legs closer. “What does that mean? What are you?”
“What we are is more powerful than you could even imagine,” Vale answered, turning from where he had been staring out the window—as he usually was. “More powerful than you could ever hope to be. More powerful than you will ever be able to understand.”
“And we’re telling you,” continued Andel, before I could properly catch my breath, “so that you’ll finally understand. We don’t care if you live or die. We don’t care if this whole world lives or dies. The coin of power has two sides: where there is death, there is life. Where there is dark, there is light. Whatever happens to this world is only the night before day. And in the new day, we will exist just as we did in the night that felled everyone else.”
“If I’m just a tool for you to use, if this is all just a game for you, then who are you playing against? Each other?” I glanced between them. “The King of Ledenaether? The Darkness? What’s the point of it all?”
Vidrol tsked, leaning over my chair. “Do you know why the Skjebre spin their prophecies into fishing lines, Tempest?”
“For the ceremony of it?” I guessed. The truth was nobody quite understood how the Skjebre worked their fate magic. It was done in the dark.
“Come here,” a rough voice spoke from the other side of the room. Vale. “I’ll show you.”
Vidrol smirked at me, drawing away. He waited for me to stand from the chair, but I was barely a few steps away from Vale when Vidrol’s hand pressed suddenly against the centre of my back, propelling me forward. I fell between Vale’s legs, hitting the floor with a thump as I caught myself on his knees. Vale was already drawing something from the folds of his cloak, and I noticed he had wrapped his arm back up again, covering his burn.
“The vevebre are made of silk fibres,” Vale said, materialising a bundle of fishing line from one of the pouches around his belt. It was stark white. Pristine. Freshly spun. He picked up one of my hands from his knee, holding it up before him as he wound the line around my wrist. “The future cannot be written into stone, and our prophecies must reflect that.” He wound the line up my arm, carefully, slowly. “If a fate is chosen, it will likely come true … but the future is never certain. There must be room for error.” The line reached my elbow, but he only dragged me closer, straightening my arm to continue up further. “When the vevebre are cast out into the water, they become possibilities. When they are cut loose, they become impossibilities … but can something be truly impossible if it once existed?” He stopped winding the line, pulling it up to my mouth. “Open your mouth,” he ordered.
I was too stubborn to obey, but it didn’t matter, because the mark on the right side of my face burned and my mouth parted at his command. He threaded the line through the space between my lips, his thumb pressing it against my cheek. I bit down on it instinctively, and he made a grunting sound that may have been approval.
“You sense it already,” he told me, his voice rougher than before, his eyes brightening. “The instinct to grasp your fate, to seek it out and pull it from where it hides, thread by thread.”
He pulled a small knife from somewhere and cut off the end of the line faster than I could even flinch away at the sight of a blade hovering near my face. He pulled out another length, and then—beginning at my wrist—he repeated the process all over again.
“Will you die tonight?” he asked. “Or tomorrow? Are you like us or like them?”
I became suddenly conscious that I had been staring at Vale, trapped in the unbroken blue of his eyes. I was swaying forward, my left hand resting on his leg as my right remained notched over his shoulder, the lines forcing it to remain straight. His words fell against the skin of my forearm as the silk thread wound higher and higher.
“Can you handle the possibilities?” he asked me, holding the snipped end of the line over my mouth.
I didn’t need to be told, this time. I was ensnared, a bug languishing in the silken web of a spider. I parted my lips ever so carefully, keeping the first line from falling out. I wasn’t open as wide as I had been the first time, but Vale threaded the line through with effortless precision. His hands were big and rough, but his fingers worked with confidence, easily mastering the silk thread.
“Now you could be both.” His voice was heavy with grisly premonition. “Dead and alive. A possibility and an impossibility.” He watched me. Watched my mouth. For a moment, he said nothing, and I realised that the room had gone eerily silent. Even the sound of the waves breaking against the mountain seemed to have paused. His eyes drifted to his mark—the small, silver circle beneath my right eye. His hand hovered over my face, his thumb pressing to the mark, brushing over it in a way that caused me to shiver.
“Vale,” someone growled behind him. A terse warning. I wasn’t sure who.
“But there are more than two paths ahead of you, aren’t there?” Vale asked, his gaze sharpening, his hand dropping away from the mark to pick up the fishing line again.
He wound a third, a fourth and fifth line up my arm in complete silence, threading the end of each one through my lips with careful, solemn accuracy.
“You want to know who we’re playing against, Tempest?” Vale brought the knife to my face again, and with his eyes fixed on mine, he sawed through one of the lines. It unravelled immediately from my arm, slipping free to dangle from my wrist. I flinched back, but his other hand slipped to the nape of my neck, drawing me forward, holding me prisoner.
“We’re playing with impossibilities and possibilities.” He sliced another line, almost pulling the other end of it from my teeth. “We’re in a game with fate.” He made another cut, drawing me even closer until I felt the surface of his eyes finally crack, revealing the violence of the sea that churned beneath. “The point of this is to choose our future.” He sawed through the fourth line before suddenly pulling back, only one line remaining taut. “If you can offer us the right future, we will keep you,” he said, his finger running up the length of the line from my shoulder to my mouth, where it rested against my lips.