Chapter 57
FIFTY-SEVEN
Merik’s home was gone. There was nothing left of Last Holdout. He stood in the center of the charred, scorching remains of the refuge he’d built, and he wondered how there could be so much hate in something as simple as fire.
He didn’t know what to do, so he stood there while smoke plumed around him and embers burned into his boots. The only thing left of this place was the stone shrine, twenty paces away, turned to shadow by smoke.
Snow fell. Thick, wet, freezing flakes that had been ensnared by the clouds for weeks. Now they fell, as if the sky itself wept for what had happened. Merik wept too, for the people who’d been here. For the target he had painted on this place when he’d gone into Poznin.
The horns no longer blasted from the city, but the battle clamored on. Louder. Crueler.
He wasn’t sure when he sank to the smoldering soil—to the earth that had been soft enough to sleep upon. In a numb, meaningless sort of way, he sensed his knees were on fire.
How had everything gone so wrong? How had he failed so badly, again? Always the disappointment. Always the one who hurt those who got near.
The Fury never forgets, he thought. Whatever you have done will come back to you tenfold, and it will haunt you until you make amends.
That was all he’d ever wanted to do: make amends.
Fix everything he’d ever broken. But every step Merik had taken forward had meant two …
three … a thousand steps falling back. Everyone he’d ever loved was always left ruined or cursed or dead.
Kullen. Cam. Safi. His sister. Even his own mother all those years ago.
How many times could Merik’s body die, only to come back so he could destroy the world again?
Eventually, the burning in his knees prompted him to haul himself upright.
In the distance, he could sense things had changed—although he could pinpoint no reason why.
The battle sounded the same. The war for the Cahr Awen still raged, and he needed to pull himself and his winds together so he could fly that way.
So he could still try to wring some use from his ever-failing soul.
He was just stumbling away from the embers, sucking winds to him, when he felt his magic shift. Like a wind snapping into a new direction or a whistle piercing through total silence: whatever had been a reliable constant inside him was suddenly gone.
Just … gone.
Merik fell. A lurching, brutal fall that shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did—but that sent him once more to his knees. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see. He was again choking on Hagfishes that weren’t Hagfishes, and death was coming for him.
He prised up his head, fighting to see against dark, writhing winds that he could no longer feel with his magic. They crushed into him, fists that wanted to shove him down. He couldn’t fight them. He was beyond weak; he was beyond dead; he was simply empty.
Ah, it is he who would be king, said a voice Merik felt more than heard. So close, and so easy to find. But do not worry, Little Hound: it will all be over quickly, the end of everything.
Paladin, Merik thought, and old words surfaced in his brain—sentences from a book in Kullen’s apartment he’d found months ago: The Paladins we locked away will one day walk among us. Vengeance will be theirs in a fury unchecked, for their power was never ours to claim.
Merik knew, with a sickening, violent certainty that such a Paladin had now awoken—and now vengeance would raze the Witchlands until there was nothing left.
At that thought, the ancient voice scuttled up Merik’s neck and tickled into his ear. A living voice that said, “Why, look at the little hound, cowering before his master.”
The winds softened. The blackened cyclone stopped its spinning.
And finally he could see who spoke to him: she was like a bird’s skeleton bleached by time and sun.
There were echoes of what she might have been—pale, blond, powerful.
But now, she was a crooked, stretched-out creature with arms that were too long for her body and fingers with swollen knuckles.
Her head was hammered thin and long, her eyes distended and glowing.
“I can see you do not recognize me, but long ago, I was exalted. Long ago, these plains belonged to me, and all knew the name of Itosha.” She smiled, an unnatural expression that revealed teeth too straight. Too sharp. “I will enjoy teaching the world my name again.”
She settled onto the carpet of ash that had once been Last Holdout. For a creature of such distortion, she moved with carnivorous grace.
Merik pushed to his feet, ungainly and weak. He swayed once he was upright—but he didn’t fall over.
It made the creature laugh. “Oh, Little Hound. You have no Paladin here to protect you. And no magic either—which must hurt so very deeply. Although…” Her smile returned, no longer amused, but instead hungry. “Nothing will hurt as much as what comes next.”
She slashed out, a whip of pure wind to reach for Merik.
Time stretched long. As if each heartbeat were a lifetime, each breath a generation.
No, Merik had no magic. This monster was right about that.
Whatever had once been the source of his witchery, it no longer lived inside him.
Where Esme’s collar had cut Merik off from the source, now there was no source.
No Well either, he thought—although that realization was deep, deep in the crevices of his brain.
Where Merik also found a tiny pocket of something else.
It blustered and blew inside him. A corner made of Threads that bound him to a different Paladin far, far away inside the sleeping ice. Merik had used those winds before, when he’d fed himself on rage and hungered for vengeance. They’d been brutal and electric.
Now, the winds were the smile of a Threadbrother who wasn’t gone, but only sleeping. Take them, Kullen said from his tomb.
So Merik did.
When Itosha’s wind finished its whipping arc, Merik spun sideways on a burst of freezing, summoned air. Hoarfrost laced around him.
There are advantages to being a dead man, he thought, smiling just as Kullen would have.
Then he made a wind whip all his own, and he attacked.
Vivia was empty. Where for weeks she’d been resisting the magic always lapping and singing, now there was nothing at all. No connection to the waters of the Amonra or the fog still rising into the sunrise.
She’d wondered in the mountain what it would feel like to lose her Tidewitchery—for the waters to snap off into silence. Surely her pained resistance against that magic was infinitely better than having no connection at all.
It had been.
Now she knew with merciless certainty that the possible deluge of her tides had been far better than having no tides at all.
“Gone,” Vaness croaked, her eyes bulging and terrified.
“Gone,” Vivia agreed, and something that might have been despair flashed across the Empress’s face.
“Why?” This came from Lev, who crawled toward them from the back of the raft. It made the Commander rock and sway. “Why do I feel like I’m being noosed all over again?”
“Magic,” Zander now choked. He was the only one who had pushed to standing, although his posture was half collapsed. “It’s gone, I think. I think magic … is … leaving.”
Those words made no sense to Vivia. Magic couldn’t just disappear. It couldn’t just punch out of a person like water ejected from a drowning man’s lungs. Someone had to take it, like the Hell-Bards with their Loom.
Maybe someone is, she thought uselessly. Maybe Noden Himself has decided He will lay claim to everything.
Their raft was rocking now, tipping everyone on white chop that Vivia could see, but that she couldn’t feel. As far back as her memories went, she’d been bound to that water. Now it was simply something she observed. Something she fought against on this raft that was …
“Breaking!” Lev barked. “This rutting thing is falling apart!”
The Hell-Bard was right. The oak branches that Zander had wound together were now sliding apart. As if the branches had forgotten how they’d been ordered and arranged.
Vivia, Vaness, Zander, Lev—they would topple right into this roughening water.
And they would drown, because no matter how well they might swim, this river had become ravenous.
Yes, said a slippery voice in Vivia’s mind.
You will all drown, and I will delight in watching it.
Because I was drowning for so very, very long, and now it’s your turn, Little Fox, Little Hawk, Little Bat.
“Paddle,” Vivia barked, clawing to her feet. She might not be able to control the water, but she had other instincts inside her. Other training and power. “Get us to shore! Now!”
They made it a few feet. Lev on one paddle—which was already crooking and changing in her hand—and Zander on the other. Row, row. Vivia, meanwhile, shoved her legs off the back of the collapsing raft and kicked as hard as she could. More white foam to add to the already churning river.
But they were too slow. Or too weak. Or maybe simply too late to fight back against a magic so vast it could command not only the Amonra, but the steam now roiling to life around them. An unnatural fog that heated toward boiling.
The branches of the Commander cracked. Vaness screamed and Vivia reached for her, straining to cross water now burbling upward. Ripping them apart. But she couldn’t fight this river. She couldn’t fight these branches.
She did, at least, manage to grab on to the Empress. We’ve survived this before. We’ve drowned and lived. We’ve faced a navy and kept breathing.
Silly words from a silly mind trapped inside a sinking body. She couldn’t hold on to Vaness because the waters wouldn’t let her. Like they’d done to the raft, they now shoved up to separate. Vivia lost the Empress’s hand. She lost sight and sound and breath.
The last thing she saw before the river crashed up to cover her—and to claim the woman she loved—was something heaving through the fog.
A blobbing, almost formless figure, like a fish from the deepest pockets of the Jadansi.
It called to a piece of Vivia that wasn’t her magic over tides, but was some other cluster of key Threads that defined her.
Then slimy gray skin clamped around Vivia’s waist and gurgling laughter filled her. “There you are, Little Fox. Let us find the others, shall we?”
Vivia was yanked down into darkness.
Kullen,
We were wrong.
We were wrong and the Wells should not have been healed. I need to fix this. I need to make this right before it really is too late.
The Rook King had it all wrong.
And the Raider King had it wrong too—although I suppose out of everyone in the Witchlands, he was the closest to seeing the truth. I understand that now, from this diary left for me. I have read the whole thing, you see? I had the second half before, now I have the first …
And oh, by the Sleeper, it was a text meant to be read whole.
I must now track down the missing girls from the tombs, Lisbet and Cora. They were the Raider King’s daughters and the closest Eridysi ever had to apprentices. Lisbet was the most powerful Sightwitch who ever lived, so if anyone will know what to do, it is she.
Yet only in death, could they understand life. And only in life, will they change the world.
—Ryber