Chapter 50
FIFTY
Never had Stix focused so much energy into such a confined space, never had she had to stay so perfectly concentrated, perfectly connected to the magic coursing through her.
If her attention lapsed, if she lost even a droplet of the water she’d fought to find, then it was a long, long way down for her and the people of Last Holdout.
So much ice inside this mountain, yet so little that she could touch—because Sirmaya wasn’t willing to let it go.
Beside her, Owl did the same with whatever earth and rock she could claw from Sirmaya’s grasp.
They both stood, feet planted, stances low, and arms outstretched for balance, upon a sheet of ice thin as paper, beneath which was a sheet of even thinner stone.
Inch by cautious inch, they stepped across the gaping abyss that filled this cavern.
But like walking on a frozen river, one false move and the ice and stone beneath them would give way.
It didn’t help that Sirmaya wanted the magic inside Stix, inside Owl, inside all the people, huddling close and following.
Come, come, the ice will hold you. It stretched and spanned in feathery tendrils all over the massive cavern of Paladins’ Hall.
Easy to tell apart from Stix’s ice because it glowed, it throbbed, it whispered with black shadows.
Yet for some reason, as hungry as it was, that ice made no move.
It was as if something had happened that had chained it in place; now it could do nothing but watch and salivate while food sauntered by.
“Thicker,” Owl cried in her child’s voice. “You must make the ice thicker!”
What about you? Stix wanted to snarl, but she dared not speak. Dared not lose focus. If she did not cross this gap, then she would not reach the door into Lovats. And if she did not reach the under-city, then all of these people would die.
And, if Stix was wholly honest with herself, there was another reason she wanted to go to Lovats.
At that thought—at Vivia’s face forming in Stix’s mind—two droplets broke free from the ice, followed by a great crack!
across the surface. Shit, shit. Stix crouched lower in her stance.
Anything to keep balance, anything to keep her weight even and the ice intact.
They were only halfway across the cavern.
“Wait,” Stix croaked, as she realized the path she was trying to forge veered away from Owl’s. “Where are you going?”
“You need that water.” Owl pointed to a gush of liquid that poured out from the doorway into Poznin—the doorway Stix and Kahina had used to reach the Raider King’s armies.
Most of the water pouring out of it had frozen like a river in winter, but there was still a narrow current slithering down, pooling over a lip of stone, then dropping into eternity.
“I can reach the Nubrevnan door without that water.”
“No” was all Owl replied, and there was little Stix could do to argue. She needed the reinforcement, weak though it might be, of Owl’s stone. Otherwise, she and these hundreds of terrified people would never cross the abyss.
No regrets, keep moving, she thought, invoking Vivia’s words. Stix couldn’t second-guess. She just had to keep moving. And if, when she reached that waterfall, she didn’t like what Owl said or where Owl tried to go … well, then that water would be the advantage she needed.
Stix did not breathe. Every fiber inside her body was alight.
One more inch of platform. One more inch of platform.
Not too far now. Another inch of platform.
Voices murmured or sobbed or whimpered. Stix ignored them, just as Baile had ignored the people in the under-city.
Not because she didn’t want to help them, but because the only way she could was by powering forward.
At least Stix didn’t have a ring-bond breaking her from the inside out as Lady Baile had.
That thought made Stix think of Kahina … and that thought made her stomach kink. A thousand years ago, Rhian had been Baile’s dearest friend. A mentor in much the way Kahina had become for Stix.
You will find her. Once you know these people are safe, you will find her, and together, you will finally deal with the Rook King.
Soon, the weak waterfall vibrated against Stix’s magic, and like a harpoon launched at a shark, Stix aimed all of her magic at it.
Her witchery lanced deep, deep into the heart of the liquid, freezing it instantly.
Ice exploded outward. Thousands of crystals to fly and assemble until suddenly their flimsy bridge became an avenue.
As strong as the bridge crossing the river into Poznin and covered in just as many people.
As Stix worked, reinforcing all she’d built, spirit swifts whorled upward from the chasm.
They reminded Stix of the swallows that nested beneath the Water-Bridges of Stefin-Eckart.
And when the Aether-bound creatures swept against her, an exultant song trilled into her skull. Good Paladin, strong Paladin.
Stix finished her bridge and hurried onto the stone platform where the doorway into Poznin awaited.
The water, sourced from that city, was nothing more than a trickle now, as if Stix had drained the city dry.
Beside her, Owl crouched on her knees and quivered.
But there was no emotion on her face. None of the grinning, gulping triumph that Stix felt.
“We still have far to go,” Owl said, pointing across the chasm at the door that would actually take them into the under-city of Lovats. “And we’re running out of time.”
“Hye,” Stix agreed. Now that she had access to so much water—water that was not the goddess’s—she could get everyone to safety much more quickly. She lifted her arms, then cast them forward in a punch of strength and power. Her witchery crunched out a second bridge to span the cavern.
“This way,” Owl shouted in her small voice. “This way.”
At first, Stix assumed the child was addressing all the people of Last Holdout, who hewed close to the icy center of the bridges while galaxies seemed to dance beneath them and blackened ice watched hungrily.
But then Stix saw that Owl waved her arms. That she had gathered rock beneath her and had vaulted herself up, high as Stix. Then higher. “This way! This way!” And it was then that Stix saw to whom Owl shouted: new people thronged into the mountain from a different doorway.
Stix knew them. Of course she knew them, smeared though they were without her spectacles, she knew the Carawen monks in their distinctive white cloaks and hoods.
Lady Baile had known them too, but they had been soldiers in an army for the Rook King a thousand years ago, back when the Monastery had been nothing more than a fortress atop a mountain.
“What,” Stix snarled at Owl, “have you done?”
Baile stands surrounded on all sides by thick forest and white-capped peaks. Snow falls, and nearby, a river churns, its dark waters spanning a stone bridge. Elias, the Rook King, strides toward her.
He has found her. Here, where she and Bastien tried to flee into the Ohrin Mountains.
Elias points beside Baile, and she tries to turn her head …
but she can only slide her eyes sideways to where a woman lies on her back, a broken blade thrust through her belly.
Silver pools around her, glowing with power.
Magic entwined in her very blood, and where the raw magic moves, rifts gouge into the rock.
Two paces away, on his knees and crying, is Bastien. He looks at Baile. “I am sorry.”
It is all right, Baile wants to say, for it is not his fault he couldn’t save her from the Exalted Ones. Yet no words come; she can’t part her lips to speak.
Bastien doesn’t turn when the Rook King arrives. He doesn’t turn when the king calls out, “Is your fury quenched? Is your wrath complete?” Nor does Bastien turn when Elias yanks the shattered sword from the Exalted One’s gut.
Only when the king comes to a stop before him does the man finally twist his head. “I will find you,” the scarred man rasps. “In the next life, I will—”
The king slices off his head. Bastien’s words break off. Blood sprays, mixing with the silver.
Then the Rook King fixes his gaze on Baile, and she realizes that he holds a different sword.
It is not the blade to kill Paladins—although that is clutched in one hand.
Instead, it is a simple soldier’s sword, now bloodied with Bastien’s life.
“It will all be over soon,” Elias tells Baile before his blade arcs out and crashes against her neck.
Only as the sword cracks against stone does she realize why she has been locked in place. Only when it cuts through the rock—three swings it takes him—does she realize she was encased in granite. Saria’s granite.
It was not only the Rook King who betrayed the Six. It was his Heart-Thread too.
Blade bites flesh. Baile dies.
“What have you done?” Stix’s magic snapped off, her bridge unfinished toward the under-city.
She would destroy it and her first bridge if she had to.
“What have you done, Owl? You said we were going to help people, and now you betray me? I remember, Saria. I remember what you did a thousand years ago.”
“I do not think you do.” Owl blinked like a real bird from atop her stone perch. Her silvery hair shone almost blue in all this ice.
“You helped Elias and turned on Bastien and me.”
“No.” Owl’s face scrunched into a sneer.
It added years and lines to her skin. “You know the words of the Lament: six turned on six, and one turned on five. But it wasn’t Elias who betrayed you, and it wasn’t me.
In Elias’s strange, frustrating way, I think he was trying to fix what went wrong—and he is still trying to fix it to this day.
One reincarnation after another, focused on the same problem year after year. ”
“But those soldiers are his.” Stix flung a pointed finger at the monks.
“Just as the Cahr Awen is his. And now you have brought them here.” As Stix watched, more monks poured through the distant doorway.
Two by two, they filled the mountain like white termites.
“I trusted you.” Stix lifted her other hand, ready to dismantle her first bridge.
Burst the ice into instant steam and plummet the monks into darkness.
She would not let the Rook King’s soldiers enter Poznin.
Owl moved, fast as an avalanche. Two stone shackles that latched on to Stix’s arms while the girl herself sprang down from her stone column.
“Your queen needs you.” Owl’s eyes glowed a pure, pure brown—and they pulsed too, as if bound to the heart of Sirmaya.
“And her people need you. I have not betrayed you because I am not him.”
“You encased Lady Baile in granite a thousand years ago.”
“To protect her! I failed, though. Elias killed me too. He killed Saria, his own Heart-Thread, with a plain, unmagicked blade just as he killed Baile. You. So believe me: whatever it was he had planned that day and whatever it is he plans now, I have no part in it.”
At those words, Owl aimed a small arm at the first bridge. The monks were approaching fast, vague features taking shape. One, however, was at the lead, sprinting far faster than any other monk behind him.
“Stix, you are needed in Nubrevna,” Owl continued, “because everything is about to change, and that is where you belong. Both of us will need to be ready for when the past returns to life, so don’t let the same fury that blinded Bastien blind you.”
Yes, the spirit swifts seemed to chime. They flapped upward, dazzling colors and light into Stix’s weak eyes. Listen to the Earth Paladin. Poznin is not your home; the king here is not the one you must lift up and serve.
“We are on the same side.” Owl lifted her tiny chin. “The Rook King Elias played me too, a thousand years ago. But now the Queen of Foxes needs you. All of Nubrevna needs you, so get these people into the under-city and I will join you there.”