Chapter 42
FORTY-TWO
There were two small blessings in the loss, as far as Vivia could see—and she clung to them like rafts in a storm.
First, the Hell-Bard Lev had grabbed Vivia’s pack on their escape through the workshop.
In that pack was Vivia’s healer kit, which meant they could tend both Zander’s bleeding and the Empress’s.
Which led to the second blessing: Vaness was not dead. Of course, she also wasn’t waking up, and Vivia could see no reason why. Like Vivia and Zander, she’d used too much magic. The blood on her face gave her away. But Vivia and Zander had awoken—so why wasn’t Vaness awakening too?
“I’m bound to Air,” Lev kept saying. “And there’s nothing wrong with her lungs. Otherwise, I’d help.”
“It’s all right,” Vivia kept responding. Except it wasn’t. Not really, because nothing was all right. They were still within sight of the megalith on which the mountain door had formed—but it was closed now. Because of course it was closed now.
The Empress had been right. What if this magic is simply fickle, as you yourself suggested, and the door seals up behind you? Then you will be stuck inside the mountain for all of time.
Yes, Cam was stuck. Vivia had no idea where the boy was.
And now here she was stuck—with Vaness and these Hell-Bards—hundreds of leagues from home.
Keep your mask on, Little Bear. You have to keep your mask on. She was the leader now; she was the ruler in charge.
It certainly didn’t help that the river through the trees beckoned and crooned. That a breeze pushed through the jungle, hot and sticky. And tasting like thunderstorms with tantalizing rain.
Vivia gritted her teeth against it and stayed seated, cross-legged, beside the Empress on her bed of asphodels.
The night sky, thick with constellations, turned Vaness’s copper skin to silver.
It made her look less like a woman who’d almost died tapping into her magic, but like a story maiden about to be woken by her Heart-Thread.
Vivia cleaned blood crusted under Vaness’s nose, while beside her, Zander murmured, “I have seen her do this before. I can carry her, if we need to travel.”
Vivia had seen it before too, and she was angry. Vaness knew this would be the consequence. She’d had this kind of response to the iron since childhood—now magic was so much harder to control. So why keep the shackles on herself? Why tempt herself constantly?
That, you know perfectly well, isn’t why you’re mad.
“We’ll camp here,” she said, keeping her voice even. Her ire locked inside. “At least until the Empress wakes up.”
“Yes, Majesty,” Lev replied, and Zander—who was still a bloodied mess himself—lumbered to his feet, head bowed.
The minutes passed. The stars slid west, exactly as the stars at home did. Yet illogically, they felt brighter here. Razored and inescapable. Especially the Sleeping Giant, forever pointing north—which was no longer the way home.
After clearing a spot for a fire, Lev aimed south toward the snaking Amonra to fetch water. Zander meanwhile stayed near, foraging through the shadowy underbrush of the buzzing, clicking night.
The Empress slept on. Crickets silenced once the fire began. Moths, meanwhile, fluttered in. The orange glow drifted outward like a veil, too sharp in this peaceful clearing of white and yellow flowers. Too unnatural in a land few humans dared to cross.
Vivia kept thinking she heard giggles. That she saw childlike shapes within the trees.
You must be the Nine of Hounds, those girls had said to Cam. Do not be frightened. Nine is sacred inside this mountain, for only with nine can any of us ever think beyond.
Over and over, Vivia imagined the scene from the workshop. A thousand times, at least, but like her Witchmark when she rubbed too much, the memory was starting to swell. To change color and bulge with pain at the edges.
Zander eventually returned to camp. He settled beside Vivia in the shadow of an oak. “I found these, Your Majesty.” He offered his cupped palms to Vivia, where fat gooseberries glinted green and ripe. “They’re safe to eat.”
“I’m not hungry,” Vivia told him, and it was true. The thought of eating anything made her gut cramp.
Zander grunted. Then shoved a handful into his mouth. He’d cleaned his own face, so no more blood stained his lips or beard.
“You’re a powerful witch,” Vivia found herself saying as he grimaced against the sour berries. In the distance, a raven cried. “I’ve never seen anyone manipulate wood before.”
He chewed. Swallowed. Cleared his throat. “I don’t know if I’m powerful, Your Majesty. I was brought to Hell-Bard Keep when I was young, so I never had a chance to study it.”
“Does it overwhelm you? The magic. Do all these trees and flowers and vines clamor at you to be used?” Vivia made an almost frantic motion around her head, trying to imitate the onslaught she always felt from the water.
Now Zander frowned. “Maybe? I definitely think I’ve got more connection to the plants now than I did when I was a boy. But who knows?” A shrug. “It was so long ago. And I do know it’s nice to be here with the plants instead of inside that mountain without them.”
“Of course it is. Because you’re not trying to get home.
” Vivia didn’t mean to sound dismissive.
She didn’t mean to sound cruel. The words just popped out, and she wished right away that she could snap them back in again.
For all she knew Zander was trying to get home.
He had been a Hell-Bard so long—surely he did have a place he wished for.
But if Vivia’s words bothered the man, he gave no sign.
“Maybe, Majesty,” he agreed without malice.
“The way I see it, though … Well, I’ve been a lot of places in my life, and while they were almost never the place I thought I needed to be…
” Another shrug. “They were always the place that needed me.”
He shoved the second handful of gooseberries into his mouth, and with nothing more than a soldierly nod, he pushed to his feet and strode away.
He didn’t get far—there was nowhere to go, after all.
And Vivia could already hear Lev’s return, tramping through the underbrush with water sloshing in her bags like the sweetest of wines.
She was the opposite of Zander in gentleness and solemnity, but Vivia had to acknowledge, Lev wasn’t the opposite in loyalty.
These two Hell-Bards had proven themselves.
Empress Vaness had been right about them; Cam and Vivia had not.
Vivia swatted a gnat from her eyes. She didn’t want to think about Cam. Or the mountain or the ice or what the blight she was going to do now to get home. Just because she was sitting still didn’t mean she could let madness overtake her.
So she didn’t. Instead, she stood as Zander had. Instead she barked, “Watch the Empress, please. Keep the bugs off her.” Then she set off the same way Lev had just come from, to face the Amonra. To face the waters always calling to her.
Over the last month together in Noden’s Gift—often on their nightly chats beside the Well—Vivia and Vaness had discussed what might be going wrong with magic.
Was it actually a wrongness? Or was it simply a gift they’d not yet learned to utilize?
Was magic actually expanding in strength, or were Vivia and Vaness simply weakening in their control?
They’d had no answers, and it had become a problem that would have to be dealt with later.
For although other witches in the settlement had also felt their magics surge, none had experienced the same barrage.
They could still function, and technically so could Vivia and Vaness.
As such, this particular problem would have to wait until after Vivia had reclaimed her throne. Priorities were what they were.
Vivia wished now that she’d looked harder for answers.
The waters of the Amonra formed a thick, writhing beast before her. Starlight reflected and pulled. To the west, Vivia could just glimpse where oaks relented their hold on the earth and the massive stones rose instead.
Use us, the waters lapped, reaching for Vivia’s toes. Join us.
She nodded absently at them. She was going to have to listen to them soon.
And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t done so before, a month ago, when she’d carried herself and the Empress on tides far, far across the Jadansi.
Away from Noden’s Gift almost all the way to the Pirate Republic.
It had exhausted Vivia then and overwhelmed her, but it hadn’t killed her.
Surely that counted for something?
Join us, Little Fox. We belong to you.
“Yes,” Vivia agreed, her voice eaten by the night’s thrum—and her skin eaten by mosquitoes that thrived this close to the shore. “You do, but I can’t join you yet.”
Something about those words made her face scrunch up, as if there was some important lever she’d just pulled. Sticky heat pressed against her. She stared again at the stones that marked the western edges of the Contested Lands.
But no insights came to her. No more levers she could try. Just mosquitoes, buzzing their high-pitched keen into her ears. She swatted at them. Mud shifted underfoot. It knocked a branch into the waters, and the waves grabbed for it like sharks fighting for chum.
Until the waves soon realized it was wood and not their little fox. Then they let it drift away.
The branch hit a weak current. It spun once, then glided out toward the heart of the Amonra, where it would eventually drift east, then south, before slowly, slowly reaching the Jadansi.
Oh, Vivia thought, and suddenly she had an answer. An insight. An idea. One that made her smile with sharp teeth into the night. She spun on her heel and left the river.
To call what Zander made a boat would have been an insult to boats everywhere. But it did float and it did have space for four people—even if one of them was stretched out and unconscious.
Which Vaness still was, although Vivia kept murmuring in her ear, “Please, Empress, wake up. No one else can order me around as you do.” Vivia insisted on being the one to carry Vaness to the Amonra, her pace shambling and ungainly. Not once did Vaness stir; she simply slept on.
“Does it have a name?” Lev asked once they were all together at the shadowy shore, eying Zander’s creation. “’Cos I’d like to propose the Commander.”
Zander grunted, a sound caught between humor and grief. “Yeah. That’s a good one. He’d love knowing a boat that small and ugly was named after him.”
Vivia was too tired to ask who he might be. Or to care that gnats were now zapping at her face. The boat was small, and it was ugly. No mast, no sail, no wave-cutting shape. It was more raft, actually, with green leaves still attached and sap oozing out of wounds left by Zander’s sword.
It had oars, though, which Vivia was impressed the Hell-Bard had thought to include.
It would also float, and as far as Vivia was concerned, that was all the Commander really needed to do for them.
Lev clambered aboard first, reaching back to help Vivia with the Empress. They were at a slight angle thanks to the shore. Vivia almost tripped over a knobby branch … until the branch groaned downward, vanishing into the other gnarls and lines of the boat.
“Let’s try not to kill any royalty,” Lev said lightly. “Really don’t feel like going back into a Marstoki prison. Or”—she shot Vivia a grim side-eye—“I’ve heard Nubrevnan prisons are even worse.”
“Sorry,” Zander muttered. The flush on his face looked almost gray in the first hints of dawn. “I’ll fix any other rough spots once I’m on board.”
“It’s fine,” Vivia assured him. Because it was. The man was clearly struggling against his magic, and Vivia had no desire to push him harder. They had what they needed; he’d done what she’d asked of him; a few forgotten branches wouldn’t kill anyone.
With Lev’s help, Vivia draped the Empress along the raft’s center. They’d all peeled off layers, and now they used their armor and coats to create a covering like the forts Vivia and Merik used to make in her old “fox’s den.” It would keep the sun and insects off Vaness.
At least until she wakes up. And she was going to wake up.
“Ready?” Zander asked, still slouched on the shore.
Vivia nodded and tried not to think about the waters she was about to coast upon. About how much louder they would be once they were directly beneath her.
Zander grunted and shoved. His boots plowed into the soft bank. Mud scraped under the Commander. Then the Amonra licked a welcome at the raft’s bow and dug rivery fingers into its woven hull. Moments later, Zander hopped aboard. The boat tipped. Water splashed against Vivia.
Swim with us, Little Fox!
Zander settled, as did the Commander, and he reached for an oar. “No,” Vivia told him, pushing away from Vaness, now hidden under leather and cotton. “Let me do it, Hell-Bard. You need to rest.”
The man didn’t argue. Instead, he crawled close to the Empress, lay down with a hand over his eyes, and promptly fell asleep.
The shoreline shrank as Lev and Vivia rowed them toward the river’s deeper, faster heart.
Fishes slithered, cutting through the waters that Vivia could never disconnect from.
Shelled creatures scuttled in the substrate.
She heard owls and saw bats, dark shapes that blotted out a few lingering stars.
Use us, the waters begged. But always, Vivia exhaled against them.
The potential consequences were too dire; she couldn’t risk losing herself to waters that might never let go.
She kept her focus instead on keeping their course true, right down the center of this mighty river that began far to the west in the mountains of Vivia’s home.