Chapter 37
THIRTY-SEVEN
Safi was under strict orders to remain in her bed, which meant that she absolutely did not.
After confirming with a few steps back and forth across her hut that she was able to walk again, she hefted up a blanket and finagled it around her shoulders.
Then, because she’d been caught too often unawares, she found her sword and fastened it—belt, hilt, and Truth-singing steel—to her hips.
Warmer and armed, she now stomped into Last Holdout.
It was her first time really seeing the settlement. The tree-branch canopy that seemed to block out the sky, the forest hugging them close like walls.
Safi’s right hand flexed at her side. It was a movement she saw the Bloodwitch make often, and she had a sudden, visceral understanding of why he was always doing it: because if he didn’t, his fists would form and someone might get hurt.
There was no one outside at this hour for Safi to hurt, and she couldn’t decide if she was happy about this fact … or angry. With the pain in her arm reduced to annoyance—and the muscles themselves almost completely healed—she had nothing to distract her from everything else that had gone wrong.
The Cahr Awen souls knew the Well was near. They were awakening again, resuming their eyeball-squeezing song. Why are you not moving? Why are you once more standing still?
“Because,” she hissed at them, “the other half of the Cahr Awen isn’t with me, and what good am I for the Well if she isn’t there to heal it too?”
The souls didn’t answer, because they never answered.
Iseult had told her they were just leftover Threads, floating around, no longer bound to the outer package that had been their bodies.
They were just the forgotten edges of desire, of need, of hunger—hundreds of each emotion crammed inside Safi’s entirely too-human brain.
She spun around, searching the empty passages between huts for signs of life. But there was no one awake, no one out, no one to ask, Excuse me, where can I find your leader?
She picked a direction and started walking.
There was a vaguely central point where the woven canopy seemed highest—and where a shadowy column awaited.
A tree trunk, she thought at first, until she was close enough to see it was made from the same stone as the shrine they’d camped beside last night.
Then Safi was close enough to see a carving on the stone.
A huff of understanding escaped her nose.
In four more steps, her blanket loosening on her shoulders, she reached the column and placed her hand on the familiar marking.
It was an owl, Safi knew, just as there had been an owl under the imperial palace in Praga.
So many secret places across the Witchlands, and somehow she and Iseult kept finding them. Or perhaps it wasn’t somehow so much as Lady Fate guiding them. Perhaps all these places had been built long ago for the day when a dark-giver and a light-bringer might need them.
A voice sheared through the night, bouncing against wooden boughs and sliding into Safi’s ears. A boy’s voice poised on the cusp of manhood. “He isn’t back yet.” He spoke elegant Cartorran.
“Obviously.” This was another boy’s voice, and there was a decidedly sulky layer to it. “We all got eyes, Revan.”
What followed was a rapid-fire stream of Marstoki between the young boy and a grown man, but it was quiet—too quiet for Safi to easily hear beyond the words tunnel and forest.
Safi tipped her body around the column. Her blanket slid down her left shoulder; cold kissed her skin.
Standing before one of the smallest huts (of course Merik would have chosen the smallest; she should have guessed that) were four figures.
Three were hooded, and the fourth wore a fine, if enormous black robe.
And beside them was a horse, gray as a stormy sky with breaths to puff against the cold. “Cloud!” Safi scrabbled out from the column, half tripping on her blanket as she ran. “Where is the rider?” She flung this question out in Marstoki. “Where is the rider?’
“There was none.” This came from one of the hooded figures, who drew back his hood to reveal a handsome face with thick, dark lashes. “We found this horse not far from Last Holdout—alone.” He flipped his hand toward Safi to reveal a Herdwitch’s mark.
But Safi wasn’t impressed by his power or his words. “Great. Your magic found a single horse. Now I need you to find two more, as well as the people who were on them.”
“They are gone. The two horses you seek have disappeared into the other part of the forest.”
“The other part?” Safi sputtered. Then she tossed up her hands. “You know what? I don’t care. Just show me.” She reached for Cloud’s reins. Her blanket slipped farther down her shoulder.
And the smallest person, the one they’d called Revan, hurried in. “No, no, Lady! You are not supposed to leave. Merik said you must rest and heal.”
“Do I look like I need rest?” Safi snatched Cloud’s reins. The horse snuffed; her ears swiveled back.
But the Marstoki man holding the reins only gripped tighter. “We will await Merik’s return. I can describe what we found if that might help.”
No, Safi was about to snarl. It won’t help. This was Iseult’s horse, which meant Iseult had to be nearby. Any other possibility …
Safi couldn’t think of it. She wouldn’t.
But right as she centered her strength to kick onto Cloud’s saddle and spur straight out of this uncanny place, a dog’s whine pierced the night. Loud, sharp, and with percussive, booming thuds to rumble beneath it.
Then everything happened at once. A creature rounded a nearby building, enormous and gleaming with wings that smacked branches and feet that churned up soft earth. Cloud reared, stealing her reins from both Safi and the Herdwitch.
And one of the other hooded figures shouted, “Aurora, no!” at the same moment the last hooded figure shouted, “Merik must be in trouble!”
Those words jolted through Safi, almost as intensely as Cloud’s hooves did, now tumbling toward her face. Safi jolted sideways. The blanket fell. Cloud trampled onto it, while the Herdwitch started shouting, “Ho, calm! Ho, calm!” His commands thrummed with truth and power.
The two hooded figures, meanwhile, were already running—one with a rifle clutched tight and the other with his hood falling back to reveal a mop of brown hair. They chased after the storm hound thundering out of Last Holdout.
Safi launched after them.
Stacia Sotar had been here before. Not here in this physical space, but here in this scenario. Except the first time it had happened—the first time she’d come face-to-face with the Fury—the heat of late Nubrevnan summer had warmed her skin.
There hadn’t been a fallen roof, nor shouts of alarm from raiders outside, nor a knowledge poking at the back of Stix’s brain that said, This isn’t the Fury. You knew the real Fury as a Paladin, and he has been gone for centuries.
Still, Stix had seen this man before. She knew him. Even without her glasses, she could recognize the scars on his face.
More than that, she recognized his magic. The winds that poured into the attic (which had been her bedroom until five seconds ago) carried with them snow and power. There was a charge to them, an electricity that she had felt before. Not quite human, not quite … alive.
The ice encasing the man shattered outward.
And on the floor below, voices boomed into the building.
Vague words of alarm and calls for violence.
The specifics didn’t matter. People were coming, and Stix thought people ought to be good.
She might not like the raiders who worked for Ragnor, but at least they were on the same side.
This man frozen before her—who wasn’t the Fury, yet was …
He was the enemy. He had to be stopped just as Stix had stopped him before.
And Stix would use exactly the same techniques she had used at Pin’s Keep when she’d first faced this specter.
She stomped once, her boot thundering through the floor.
All the ice she’d created turned instantly to burning fog.
“Stix,” the man croaked, vanishing inside the world of white. “Stix, it’s me.”
Winds blasted her face. She rocked back. The man was trying to summon more power. He was going to escape.
Vibrations in the floorboards signaled raiders on the stairs, but they were slow. Stix had chosen this building because she liked its rickety passages and tiny rooms. It reminded her of her apartment in Lovats. It reminded her of her quarters tucked belowdecks on Vivia’s old ship.
“Stix,” the man repeated, hopping upward like a baby bird learning to fly. He would escape through the hole he’d made. She needed to stop him before he could do that.
Distantly, it occurred to her that this Fury-man knew her name. And distantly she wondered how the man who had stalked the streets of Lovats might be here, hundreds of leagues from where she’d first met him.
But these were thoughts that happened so deep inside her skull, they couldn’t push to the forefront.
Stix flung out two water whips, using the fog to form them.
They surrounded the man, freezing and banding his arms to his sides.
Yet again, somehow, he was stronger than she.
His winds blasted outward, shattering her ice.
Then lightning cracked, so brightly it stole all her sight.
Forced her to close her eyes and duck low to the floor.
And so loud, it was like a firepot had detonated inside the room.
Stix felt unmoored. She felt sick. She felt as if her body had melted away and all that was left were her thoughts.
Useless thoughts, too, about a Heart-Thread named Bastien and a prince who had died …
And loudest of all, the words of the Fury carved into shrines across Nubrevna:
Why do you hold a razor in one hand?
So men remember that I am sharp as any edge.
And why do you hold broken glass in the other?
So men remember that I am always watching.
Stix had possessed that glass, hadn’t she? And she had possessed that razor after claiming it from inside the sleeping mountain. Everything from the past was rooted in the present. Just as Ragnor had told her.
She herself was nothing more than legend. Lady Baile with her three rules and the cats that never left her. The cats, she thought, and that thought prompted her to move. To try opening her spectacled eyes and survey the world around her.
Were her cats all right?
She squinted. Something huge and golden flapped above the broken roof. It looked like the statues on the bridge into Poznin—except very alive and very here.
He really is the Fury, an old voice whispered in Stix’s brain. Bastien always could talk to storm hounds.
But it isn’t him, Stix countered. You know it isn’t really him.
She loosed herself, muscles pushing her to standing.
Her ears still heard nothing, but her blurred sight was returning.
That isn’t the Fury. Not the Fury I knew.
That is the man I met in Lovats. And somehow, he is leaving this place with a storm hound.
The door into Stix’s room burst wide. Raiders poured into the room. “I need Windwitches!” Stix shouted, pointing at the hole in her ceiling. “I need Windwitches, and tell the Baedyeds to get their pistols ready. We have a storm hound in the city.”
The closest raider, a Red Sail with her hair in two long braids behind her head, gave Stix such a crisp Nubrevnan salute, Stix wondered if the woman hadn’t once served in the Royal Navy. The other raiders, less disciplined, just stood there gaping at the damage around the room.
Something nudged Stix’s calf. She flinched, half expecting to find a storm hound’s mouth chomping down …
but it was only her calico, purring against her as if none of the chaos had just happened.
As if he had come for his usual evening cuddles, and goodness, could someone please do something about that draft?
Stix smiled as she crouched down to pet him. And always, always stay the night, she thought. For Baile’s slaughtering. One stroke across the cat’s head. One scratch behind the ears. Then Stix left the cat and the damage.
Come, she told her magic as she strode for the stairs. We are hunting.