Chapter Seventy-One
SEVENTY-ONE
Stix wanted to weep, but she couldn’t control anything inside her body. Whatever this ring was that Lovats had—the ring she’d never been able to forget—it moved her about like a doll.
He carried her through the city, limp in his arms because he wanted her limp in his arms, and everyone she passed saw nothing more than a powerful man helping a broken woman.
Without her spectacles, the people of the city blended into a hundred colors and countless sobs of pleading, of loss, of desperation.
Their Lady Baile had abandoned them. Not by choice, but by force.
Stix remembered Lovats now. Everything. How she had agreed to this—how they all had. Bargains that four of the Six had made, one by one, to protect the different peoples they’d loved. And one by one, Lovats had used their magics to build his city.
This city.
But Kahina, Stix thought. She has her own ring. How?
The question was useless. Even if Stix had an answer, there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She was pain, she was emptiness, and each step that Lovats carried her—thump, thump, thump—splintered her farther apart.
But you have fought this before. She knew she had—she’d remembered it so clearly in the mountain only a few hours ago. What was different now? Why could you push back then?
Because she hadn’t been alone. Owl had been with her—a girl who knew so much more about their past lives than Stix did. Now, Owl wasn’t here. Nor was Kahina.
Stix had only herself … and only this pain.
She tried, as they left Hawk’s Way and wove deeper into the city, to do as Lovats had described.
To stop fighting him, if only so she could be free of this torture.
But it didn’t work. Perhaps because her mind could not switch off her body’s most base instincts.
Her muscles, her organs, her bones—they wanted to be away from this Paladin of Fire, and no matter how much Stix told them to relax, to relent …
Her body would not give way. And so the pain would not give way either.
Every few minutes, she spotted hazy streaks across the morning sky. And she felt—like small pinpricks of freedom—as sea foxes slithered through the city’s ancient Cisterns.
Those beasts could no more help Stix than Cam could. She had to figure this out. Alone. With only the limited memories and knowledge she had of Baile and Lovats and the Paladins from a thousand years ago.
Except, as Lovats hauled Stix ever onward, he wasn’t the tyrant she remembered. He smiled at passersby or nodded with grave sympathy. He even paused twice to ask if he could help someone that Stix, in her limp pain, couldn’t see.
He isn’t really changed. Of this Stix was certain, for no changed man would control her as he did now—nor let this pain punch through her like wildfire on dead fields. But he believed himself changed, and perhaps Stix could use that.
“If you … love me,” she croaked while a sound like wind-drums echoed through the city. While broken awnings and dusty rubble smeared by in her periphery. “Release me. We can … speak.”
“Soon enough,” Lovats murmured, tugging her more tightly to him.
He was shockingly strong; Stix didn’t think anyone had carried her like this since she was a child—and certainly not for such a distance.
“We will speak and you will understand once you see what I need you to see. We are almost there.”
“Almost … where?”
He didn’t answer. Only smiled at her with a smile that, against her will, made her heart ache from the glory of it. From how much he did look like the Noden that Stacia Sotar had been raised to believe guided all.
So much history forgotten. So much history changed to suit the needs of a lost people.
All these hundreds of years, Nubrevnans had believed that the statues in their city were of a god.
But that was because they’d made the statues in their city into a god.
Just as they had made representations of Baile and Bastien into saints.
“Ah, here we are,” Lovats said, and the sky opened wide. Judgment Square, Stix thought, recognizing the shape of this space and the building’s facades. Above all, she recognized the shackles where guilty were subjected to public shame.
Yet where she expected to see the dead white branches of a goshorn oak stretch into view, she instead saw leaves.
Vivid and green, a vast canopy cast her face in drifting shadows.
Impossible, she thought. This lighthouse-sized tree had been on the verge of death for decades.
It hadn’t sprouted any green in generations.
Now, somehow, it had thousands of leaves.
Tens of thousands, and small acorns too that clattered down like rain.
It was here that Lovats finally finished walking. He had reached the trunk, and he lay Stix at its massive base. The pale bark was warm, as were the shadows around her—suggesting the tree itself radiated heat.
It certainly radiated life. Stix could feel sap pulsing inside the oak.
“How?” she croaked out, searching Lovats’s face. He wore pride in his puffed chest, and self-congratulation on the slant of his full lips.
That was more like the Exalted One Stix remembered.
“The tree remembers me. It remembers the leader that built this place. Do you not hear how much these people cry out for me?” He motioned to the square—filled not with criminals facing judgment, but with the broken, the frightened, the lost. Ten times as many people here than had clustered into the temple. A hundred times as many.
“They have a leader,” Stix rasped. She tried to sit taller, and to her surprise, her muscles obeyed. Weak, agonizing … but responsive.
“You mean the queen you serve? And where is she now, then? Where is this little fox you so believe in?”
South, Stix thought, in Noden’s Gift. But she didn’t actually answer. Lovats didn’t need to know where Vivia and the Empress of Marstok had last been sighted. It would only put targets on them—only rope Vivia into this mess that Stix’s soul had fallen into a thousand years ago.
She sat a bit taller, and if Lovats noticed, he gave no indication.
He was looking at the oak, one hand resting fondly against its bark.
“So much has changed here,” he said with something almost like regret.
“But then I have changed too. I was once a fire fueled by kindling. Quick to spark, and quicker to flame out. But now…” He dragged his hand down, bark scraping until his fingers left the tree to touch Stix again. To rest upon her shoulder.
The rings winked, so close, and the one on his middle finger—that was the one she remembered. That, she was certain, was the one that controlled her.
She thought again of Kahina, who had somehow reclaimed the ring that bound her. Could Stix do the same? Could she get that ring off of Lovats and end this?
If only there was something she could use as a distraction.
Stix had never been a convincing performer.
Acting, donning masks had been Vivia’s skill.
Not one Vivia enjoyed—that much had always been plain to Stix—but a skill she’d been forced to hone nonetheless.
The vizers of the High Council never took Vivia seriously without bluster and bombast.
Stix, meanwhile, had always used the sheer strength of her Waterwitchery to cow any who might get in her way. But just as she had no one to help her—no Kahina or Owl or Cam or even a random passerby—Stix also had no magic. Not while Lovats overwhelmed her with his ring.
And whatever curse Stix’s soul had agreed to a thousand years ago.
It was, as Stix sat there and felt Lovats caress her cheek, as the Nubrevnans wailed and shambled and wept their way through Judgment Square, that she saw the shadows above her change. Subtle shifts in the leaves that weren’t caused by wind or aftershocks through the plateau.
Then she spotted golden eyes within the branches. Many golden eyes.
Stix wanted to laugh. She wanted to weep. Six-fingered cats to ward off mice, she thought, and with what little control she still had over her muscles, she nodded at all the cats now gathered in the leaves.
A black cat sprang first, followed a fraction of a breath later by tens more. A hundred more. Some with six fingers, but many with only five. They were the feral cats of the city, and they had always loved Lady Baile as much as she had always loved them.
The first cat landed on Lovats with her claws and fangs bared. The Exalted One was startled enough to spin about—and to meet, face on, the hundreds more bodies that hissed and yowled from the tree.
Stix sprang too. She had barely enough clarity, barely enough strength to control her muscles and grab hold of her witchery, but it was enough. It had to be enough.
Ice, she thought at the water all around her, gathered in cobbles, vaporized in the air, pulsing as sap in the tree. Feast upon him.
The water obeyed, crushing over Lovats—and over cats too—in an iron maiden of ice. Stix felt Lovats’s scream through her magic, through her water. And she heard it rip through the cats.
Then came his flames, cooking anything in his way. They roared into Stix. Cooked her eyeballs, her skin, her hair. But she thrust right through. She needed that ring; she had to get it off of him.
She tackled Lovats to the cobbles. Years of training moved her muscles without thought.
Always, always stay the night for Baile’s slaughtering.
Lovats was so much more powerful than she.
A god in many ways, and as soon as Stix’s arms slung around him, he flipped her to the ground.
She landed on irons. Chains and shackles barked pain into her kidneys—but that was minuscule concern compared to the bone-cracking pain the jade ring shot into her.
No, Stix tried to scream as Lovats bore down.
As his beautiful face swam closer and his fingers closed around her neck.
NO. She grabbed at his hands. A chokehold like this was so easy to get out of.
She’d practiced it so many times. She’d taught it so many times.
All she had to do was grab the pinkie and yank.
Snap the finger so hard that the knuckle broke.
On a normal human, that would be enough to change the fight’s direction. But on a Paladin? On an Exalted One as powerful as Lovats? Flames coursed off his body, and Stix smelled burnt hair. Her hair, the cats’. Hell, maybe all of the city burned for all she could see.
No, she thought again, and after fumbling her fingers over his pinkie, she counted inward one, two. Here was the middle finger. Here was the ring that controlled her. She felt it, right there, throbbing in time to her own fading, scorching heartbeat.
Stix grabbed hold. For this city, for Nubrevna, for the Fox Queen she would always serve, she ripped at Lovats’s finger. Because she was Lady Baile, she was Stacia Sotar, and she was not abandoning anyone today. Least of all herself.
Flesh tore. Muscles stretched and frayed. Bones snapped, and flames burned, burned, burned. But it was all too fast, too violent for Lovats to resist.
The finger came off entirely—and with it came the ring. With it came Stix’s power.
Water pummeled into Lovats then. Sap that finally broke from the tree. Floods that filled nearby Cisterns. Rain that had not planned to break today. It all blasted down in a single, targeted torrent for this man who was not a god.
Yet none of Stix’s waters ever made contact. Instead, they hit fire and became steam. A great, heaving fog that erupted across Judgment Square and shrouded everything. And as the fog and fires laid claim—scalding and cruel—the weight of Lovats atop Stix vanished.
She scrabbled to her feet, gasping for air and reaching, groping, searching the steam for some sign of which way he’d fled. But even with her magic back and the pain of the jade ring receding …
There was nothing to be found. No trace to follow.
Lovats was gone.