Chapter 41
FORTY-ONE
Safi reached the edge of Last Holdout, emerging from the bowed branches and protective trees to find chaos on the river beyond. The two people she’d followed stood on a soggy shoreline. Natural and magicked winds beat against them.
But it was what swept high above that held everyone’s attention: a limp figure plummeting from a fall too high to survive—while the storm hound swirled and flipped around him. Lightning flared off Aurora’s body before she wrestled hold of the figure.
Of Merik.
Then came a sound like gunshots to fill the night. Safi’s attention snapped to the river—but it wasn’t rifles or pistols she found. It was ice, crackling across the river like a ship cutting through waves. And at its helm was a figure with her arms opened wide.
Air kicked against Safi’s bare face. Sleet too, needles to stab at her palms, her cheeks, her brows. But she didn’t retreat from the river.
“Rifle!” Safi barked. “Shoot that witch on the ice!” She knew the winds would blow any shot wild, but surely an attack was better than watching idly as Merik and the storm hound fell.
The person with the rifle seemed to agree. They crouched. They aimed into the chaos. Yet before they could pull the trigger, something happened that, even years later, Safi would have trouble describing.
The forest came alive.
Tree branches stretched out like sluggish whips, the wood groaning so loud, it rattled into Safi’s chest and overwhelmed the winds.
Stones seethed outward too—even though Safi had never seen such stones here before.
This whole place was made of soft earth, yet from somewhere, boulders, rocks, and pebbles launched across the river.
The unknown Waterwitch barely had time to raise a shield of ice. It stopped the stones.
It did not stop the branches.
The wood curled around the shield and onto the Waterwitch, who writhed and resisted. Until the branches had closed away all shape of humanity. Then those branches tugged, creaked, moaned backward into the trees that had birthed them.
The forest swallowed the Waterwitch whole.
Seconds after that, the full power of the storm hound’s winds hit Safi, forcing her and her companions back into the trees. Lightning charged and sparked, and for what felt like an eternity, Safi huddled. She waited.
Until at last, at last, the clamoring storm settled into silence. But when Safi raced to the shoreline expecting to find a collapsed man waiting there with his storm hound coiled around him, she found only the hound—and only ice, quickly melting as the river surged by.
Aurora sank back on her haunches and howled into the dawn.
The branches were eating Stix alive.
The trees east of Poznin had always teemed with menace. The shadows didn’t move when the sun did, and a storm hung forever overhead. Now Stix was in those trees, and it was worse than any child’s tale she could have conjured.
White, papery bark scraped against her skin. Jagged branches poked into her mouth, her ears, her eyes. Leaves rustled and rubbed. While underneath it all was the bass grumble of rock grating on rock.
Stix had the sense that she was being moved.
She grappled for water, of course. Weren’t plants mostly water?
Was her magic not the most powerful water magic in all the Witchlands?
But although the water answered her with tendrils from the river that chased along like snakes, with ice crackling then steaming then crackling anew, it was never enough to stop the wood or rock that carried her.
Until at last, as fast and as feral as she had been plucked from the river, she was dropped again.
The trees released her. The stone melted away.
And Stix found herself staring at the gray, baleful sky.
Her chest shook. Her skin felt as if the trees still writhed against her.
She wanted to weep, but she was too numb to feel anything beyond relief.
Or maybe she did weep. All that moisture against her face couldn’t merely be from magic.
“I am sorry to be so rough,” came a small voice. Incomprehensibly small against a forest so vast. Then a smell wafted over Stix, like fresh-churned soil and cold caves. It reminded her of a time a thousand years ago when she’d known what she was and the world had made sense to her.
Not to me, she thought. It made sense to the Paladin soul inside me.
“Yes,” the small voice said. “I feel it too. Anytime we are together again.” She slid her little body into Stix’s view: a Nomatsi child, but with hair whitening at the roots. It was the same thing that had happened to Stix when she was a child.
How strange, her father had said. Your hair is changing like mine.
Her mother had brought home a dye for her to try, if she’d wanted.
But Stix hadn’t wanted because she’d recently met Vivia, and the first thing Vivia had said to her was You look like the moon at sea.
Then Vivia had flushed, embarrassed by her honesty, and Stix had known right away that Vivia was special.
That she wasn’t just a princess hungry for a crown like people believed her to be.
Now this girl hovering over Stix had the same thing happening to her hair. It was not as silvery as Stix’s—there was more warmth to it. An earthiness, like the soil left behind when a field had burned to ash.
“You’re Saria.” Stix’s voice was a cough, and she was surprised when the language that came out wasn’t her own.
It is yours, though, because you are Baile and she is you.
And Baile, Stix was quickly realizing, didn’t trust Saria.
Stix couldn’t recall a reason why, but there was a rift there.
Some betrayal tucked in Stix’s Paladin past.
“I’m Dirdra,” the child corrected. “Although I like to be called Owl. But yes, a thousand years ago, the soul inside me was named Saria. And you were Baile.” She tipped backward, forcing Stix to crane her neck—and to finally see where the forest had taken her: a wide clearing, with jagged rocks punching up from the ground.
Except one of the rocks, Stix realized as she squinted with her unreliable eyes, was moving.
There was a claw. There was a tail. And there was a head, swiveling sideways.
“His name is Blueberry,” the girl explained.
“I almost sent him after you, but you had the river on your side. I didn’t think he could match both of you, so I had to send the forest instead.
Which was violent, I know. The trees are …
bored. The rocks too. They have waited such a long time for me to return to them. ”
“Why did you attack me at all?” Stix shoved herself into a seated position. The movement revealed cuts in her uniform and across her skin. She glared at them. Then glared at the girl, who stood as still as the giant rocks nearby. She wore a simple black coat lined with fur.
“I couldn’t let you kill the man you chased. For one, he isn’t a threat to you. For two, he’s important. One of the ones we’re supposed to protect, not to harm.”
“We?” Stix drew in her legs. A giant hole now slashed across her pants; the skin beneath was already bruising. “So you are on the Rook King’s side?”
The girl didn’t answer. The mountain bat—Blueberry—snuffed. It was a sound like laughter.
“I do not oppose you,” the girl said carefully, “if that is what you are asking.” She watched Stix with large hazel eyes.
Her face held the wisdom of countless Earth Paladins; her skeleton carried more years than it was ever meant to sustain.
She had come into her knowledge young, and Stix pitied her that.
“I didn’t ask if you oppose me.” Stix stood. The clearing and its rocks swam unfocused around her. “I asked if you are on his side. The Rook King’s. He killed us, remember? He hunted us down a thousand years ago, and he thrust a blade into my belly.”
Stix didn’t mean for her voice to shake as she said this.
Kahina had been so steady when she’d relayed her own story a month ago, when she’d shown Stix why the Rook King was their enemy and the Raider King was their future, their friend, the only one to finish what Eridysi had begun.
But whenever Stix tried to explain how the Rook King had killed her …
Stix rubbed at her eyes. There were cuts on her brow, dirt in her tear ducts. But she scrubbed and scrubbed and swallowed a fresh surge of tears.
“He stabbed me too,” Owl said. Or Dirdra or Saria or whatever her name was. There was a cautiousness to her tone, like a mother who didn’t want to upset an already unhappy toddler. “But it was a regular blade. Not the one you stole from the Sightwitch in the mountain.”
Cold swept over Stix.
“Where is the blade?” Owl asked.
Stix didn’t answer.
“Do you have it with you?” A pause. Then a head shake.
“That’s a silly question. The blade sings to me, just as it sings to us all.
Death, death, the final end. And I do not hear it now, so you must have left it behind.
” Her little face pinched up, blunting her features into the child she really was.
“It’s a good thing you don’t have it. Now neither of us need fear the final end. ”
Stix set her jaw warily. She knew what Eridysi’s blade could do, and the looking glass too.
She’d finally read Ryber’s diary, and she’d visited the workshop inside Sirmaya’s mountain that had helped her remember more.
Above all though, Stix had spoken with Kahina, mining the older woman’s memories for answers about her own past. And until right now, Stix had believed she knew the full shape of what had come before and what needed to be.
But right now, right here, she stood with a child who was disrupting everything.
Stix planted her feet more firmly beneath her, groping for water in the soil as she did so. It was as impatient as the trees to move again; it had flooded onto this land so long ago, and it moved so slowly through the soil. It ached to flow, to fly. To rush and charge and drown.
Nearby, the mountain bat did not move, but its eyes blinked and blinked … and it flicked its tail like one of Stix’s cats.
“I will ask you again, Owl, and I want a direct answer this time: Whose side are you on? Do you support the Rook King?”
Owl sighed, her little shoulders deflating.
She was suddenly a lost, shivering child in a terrifying forest that wanted to claim her.
“I am not on his side, but rather on the side of the Witchlands. And that means I cannot let you go back into Poznin—it means, that although you have gathered all this water … I need only splay my fingers to hold it in place.”
She did it so easily, so fast, Stix had no time to comprehend Owl’s words. The child simply spread her hands wide, and the connection Stix had just forged, the water she had just assembled in the soil …
It squeezed away. Compressed downward as the earth wrung it out like a sponge—and in a tiny pocket of her mind, Stix recalled a Sightwitch learning rhyme Ryber had once sung to her:
Earth encloses Water,
Water drowns the Air,
Air snuffs out the Fire, blazing everywhere.
Aether shines on Void, shadows turned to light.
So Void seeps into Earth and, softly laughing, wins the fight.
A useful rhyme that Stix wished she’d remembered before she’d started this fight she could not win—before Owl had shifted her weight, and in doing so, sent three of the largest rock columns scuttling sideways.
Except the attack Stix expected never came. Instead, a hole in the ground was revealed.
Stix had to squint to find any details without her spectacles, but even as she gaped, she knew what descended before her: a doorway into the mountain. A doorway into Sirmaya’s ice.
“A portal,” she said, awe briefly supplanting outrage or fear. “It’s a new one, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Owl replied. “And soon, you will come with me inside. But first: there are innocents who need us, just as they did a thousand years ago.”
“What innocents?”
Owl lifted a hand, and Stix thought it was a quelling palm meant to silence her. But then she realized Owl pointed upward. “The innocents of this forest who are about to be burned alive in their homes.”