Chapter 62
SIXTY-TWO
After getting everyone off the second water-bridge, Stix carried herself on ice and tide back into Lovats. Scores of people were dead. Numbers beyond counting had fallen from vessels or been submerged and crushed on their farms.
It was more than her mind could fathom, and the only thing that kept her sailing—kept her reaching for this endless spring of magic inside her—were Vivia’s words: No regrets, keep moving.
Hell-waters, she prayed her queen was safe. For now, finding Vivia would have to wait. There was simply too much work to do. Too many lives that still needed saving inside of Nubrevna.
And Stix could never abandon them.
Especially because Ragnor had been right; the Rook King had not; and the proof of that was all around her.
Thank Noden no other cities in the Witchlands rely on magic as much as this one does.
There would be destruction everywhere across the continent, no doubt, but at least no other city was built almost entirely from witcheries like Lovats was.
At that thought, a question came, as sharp and brilliant as a beaming sun: Why is that? Why was this city, which had been named for an Exalted One from a thousand years ago, so dependent on magic? And was it important—was there something there that Stix ought to recall and use?
There was no time to consider this, or even to really let the thoughts fully surface. Because then Cam and his storm hound were before her. Winds battered. People fled, not knowing that this creature and its rider had saved them—or perhaps too driven by unshakable fear to care.
Stix leaped at Cam, and the hug she gave was enough to lift him off his feet. They hadn’t spent much time together before she’d sent him to warn Vivia against invading raiders, but she could easily say then—and she could especially say it now—that she’d never encountered anyone more loyal and true.
“How are you here?” Stix asked, finally letting him drop back to his feet. “How do you have these creatures with you?” She twisted to the storm hound—a small one compared to the beasts still slinging across the skies.
And … she’d seen this small one before, hadn’t she? When she’d chased the man she’d believed was the Fury?
“I don’t have an easy answer, sir.” Cam grinned his charming grin, dirt smeared across his face, and his hair was damp from floodwaters.
“But I was told to come here by two girls inside the mountain. Sightwitches, they are. And they said I would find Aurora, and she would bring me here. That’s her name.
” He grabbed for the hound, and with the ease of a boy and his puppy, he nuzzled against the creature’s massive neck. “Aurora, this is Captain Stacia Sotar.”
Aurora’s only answer was to blink.
“The girls told me,” Cam continued, “that only I would know this city—inside and out—well enough to help it, and then—” He broke off as a new figure staggered to their side.
Without spectacles, Stix didn’t recognize the man. He leaned on crutches while bandages encased his right leg. There were so many people, fleeing or limping or searching for loved ones, that one more person trailing this way scarcely registered.
Until a voice filled her brain: “Stacia.”
Shock swelled through her. After all these months, she’d thought there was no one she wished to see more than Vivia. That no face could lift her up so high, and no voice could steel her heart.
She was wrong.
“Father,” Stix croaked.
“Stacia,” he replied.
Even as his city fell apart, he was ever stoic, ever strong.
And it was that strength that had always kept Stix’s waters smooth.
Growing up with powers that often overwhelmed, with her white hair that made others laugh, with weak eyesight that meant advancing in the navy would be a struggle …
She could never have done any of that without this man right here.
And now, he could not keep standing without her. She grabbed for him, both arms sliding around him to keep him from falling off his crutch, and for several seconds, they held each other. Two Sotars in the city they both had always loved and protected.
“You’re hurt,” Stix tried to say.
But her father only shook his head. “I will survive. Which could not have happened without your powers. Or your creatures.” He looked at Cam now, his eyes almost skimming past Aurora as if afraid to look upon her directly.
And Cam, a well-trained sailor, snapped his posture high. “Sir.” He bowed, fist to heart. “I’m here with sea foxes and storm hounds to help the city. Just tell me where we’re needed.”
“The Cisterns,” Sotar said right away, as if his mind couldn’t grasp the enormity of what Cam had just told him—of magic creatures coming to save the city—and so he defaulted to training. “They’re collapsing, and waters are flooding into the Skulks.”
Stix hissed. “And the under-city? Is it flooded too?” She had just taken all those people there. Had she just led them from one death into another?
“I don’t know if it’s flooded because no one can get in.”
“I can.”
Stix and Sotar snapped their attentions back to Cam.
Gone was the boy’s earlier smile. Now there was only a stern slant to his jaw.
He looked older. He looked indomitable. “I grew up in the Cisterns,” he explained.
“I know every passage, every entrance. And this must be”—his attention flicked to Stix—“what those girls in the mountain meant when they’d said only I knew the city well enough to help. ”
“Then we’ll go there immediately. And I will summon the sea foxes.” Stix shifted as if to ease her father back onto his crutch.
But his posture gave way and a bark of pain left his throat.
Another hiss from Stix. “You are hurt, Father. Let me heal you. I have some skills—”
“No, no.” Her father tugged weakly. “There are healers gathering at the temple on Hawk’s Way. I will go there. You are needed in the Cisterns and the Skulks.”
Stix couldn’t disagree, but she also couldn’t leave her father like this. She wasn’t sure he could keep standing, much less get himself all the way to that temple on the canal. So she flashed a sharp look at Cam and said: “I’ll meet you in the Skulks.”
“Hye, Captain.” Another salute from the boy. Then he grabbed for Aurora, and charged winds once more spiraled them into the sky.
“Come on, Father,” Stix murmured, taking all of his weight onto her. “Let me carry you like you have always carried me.”
The creature that had claimed Vivia was unlike anything she’d ever seen, ever imagined.
A nightmare that had once, perhaps, been human, but had spent too much time as something else to ever truly be human again.
There were two legs, two arms, and a head with two eyes and a mouth.
But there were no ears and no nose. Only a curved, bloated shape like a fish left to rot on the waves.
“You never came to visit me,” the creature said as she hauled Vivia through the waters with kelp-like silver hair that tendriled around Vivia’s neck and arms. “Not like some who came before, who swam in my waters and healed themselves with my pain.”
Vivia had no idea what this meant. And the river shoving into her throat meant she couldn’t answer. There was nothing she could do but kick and claw against her captor.
Until even that seemed futile. Until Vivia was so exhausted, so drained, she knew that continuing to fight would only let the monster win faster.
Growing up, there’d been a cat that Vivia had loved. It had always hung around Pin’s Keep, and her mother had fed it whatever scraps the shelter had had left at the end of each day. A good mousing cat, Jana had always said. You can tell by its six fingers.
It had been a good mousing cat, but the mousing had also been one piece of the calico’s personality that Vivia had hated.
Because whenever he’d caught a mouse—or rat or sparrow or sometimes fat wolf spiders—the cat had never just killed them outright.
He’d always played with them for a while, carving off of their lives bit by bit with a savage swipe of claws or a chomp of fangs.
Once though, Vivia had walked into her fox’s den in the palace and found the calico there, far from his usual home. It had been after Jana’s death, and Vivia hadn’t seen the nimble mouser in months. Now here he sat, in the middle of her rug, a rat dangling from his mouth.
The poor rodent was barely alive. Its little chest wobbled, and its whole body hung limp in the calico’s jaws.
“No!” Vivia shouted at the cat. “Drop it.” Then without thinking, she grabbed on to her magic.
Glass shattered, water attacked, and the cat ran—although not before dropping the rat onto the rug.
Vivia, crying now, inched toward the dying, sodden creature. She was going to have to kill it herself, wasn’t she? Please, Noden, don’t make her do that. Please, there’d been so much death in her life lately. Don’t make her end this animal to save it from pain.
But as she knelt beside the rat, reaching tentatively toward its gray fur, the rat suddenly sprang up. No more wilted spine or rolling eyes. Just sheer determination to hang on to the last breaths it still had.
In seconds, it had scampered from the room, vanishing under a door that was now open—because now little Merik stood right there.
Oh no, Vivia thought. Did he see? He must have. He must have seen Vivia trying to hurt the cat to save a rodent, and oh hang her, what if he told their father? Serafin would bellow and blare about showing strength by killing vermin … About acting fast before one’s prey could escape.
“Don’t tell him what you saw,” Vivia blurted.
Merik recoiled. He was a small boy, and gentle like Jana had always been. “What … did I see?”
Vivia blinked. Was he toying with her? Had he really seen nothing? No, she decided. He was simply being nice, being understanding. So she nodded. “Exactly,” she told him. “That’s exactly what you have to say.”
True to his word—or perhaps genuine ignorance—Merik had never tattled on Vivia’s weakness to their father.
He’d never brought it up with Vivia again, either.
And for years after that, Vivia had thought she’d seen the rat lurking throughout the palace.
A bit roughened up and scarred, but still hanging on to whatever last breaths it still possessed.
And now, being carried down this river by a beast as cruel as the calico had sometimes been, Vivia was determined to be the rat. Not a fox, not a bear, but a lowly rat that was impossible to kill because it knew how to wait for the right moment.
Vivia would wait. She would survive. She didn’t need her magic to win against a target bigger and more deadly than she. She just needed wits and patience.
She let her whole body go limp in the monster’s grasp.
Let herself float along like another Commander to sail uselessly out to sea.
She didn’t know where she was, where Vaness was, where Zander or Lev were—or if they were even still alive.
There was only the sky, brightening overhead, cresting with colors too beautiful for this much pain.
Thank you, Merry, she thought. Thank you for keeping my secret.