A pool that had sucked him in. A pool that might suck in others too.
If he and the Northman could get into that water and reach the stairwell at the back, then maybe the Cleaved would pour in behind them. Even if the water did not kill them, it would at least slow them. It would at least give Merik the time he needed to reclaim his breath.
And reclaim his magic.
Then he saw it. The cattails and the murky waters and the floating bodies, so calm beneath the night sky. He plowed directly for it, praying the Northman would not argue or slow.
More Cleaved streamed along the corners of his vision. He dared not turn his head to look at them. If this pool did not save him, then he was out of options.
“Swim!” Merik roared at the Northman, pointing ahead. Then he reached the cattails. His feet squelched in mud.
Instantly, the pool’s power rushed against him. Come, it sang. Come in and find release. This time, he was ready for it, though. This time, Merik knew to fight.
He splashed onward until the water reached his knees. His thighs. Then he launched into a dive, the Northman just behind.
His head crashed beneath the surface.
The power of the pool grew tenfold. A chorus that vibrated in his brain, crushing and creeping into every crevice, every memory.
Come, come, and find release. There were the water-bridges and the white-sailed ships. Come, my son, and sleep. There was Kullen chasing crabs beside the shore. Come, come, the ice will hold you. And there was Merik’s mother, tired and sad, while she read to him about Queen Crab and her treasures.
Merik swam deeper. His legs propelled him, his arms pulled.
Come, come, and face the end.
A faint blue light glowed from a stone wall at the bottom of the pool. Corpses, some pale and fresh and floating, others rotten and sinking, blocked it. They had tried to reach that light; they had failed.
Merik would not fail.
A body slammed into him. The last of Merik’s breath burst from his lungs in great, blinding bubbles. And suddenly he realized his chest was on fire. His skull. His eyeballs, his very mind.
He was drowning.
Arms fished around him, tugging him toward the surface, and he did not resist. Seconds later, he and the Northman broke the surface. But there was no respite here. The water churned and splashed as Cleaved poured into the pool, ten at a time, row after row, tumbling, toppling, grabbing.
Merik’s plan had worked too well.
He led the way, swimming for the stairwell. Corpses bumped and sloshed against them, but he kept going—and the Northman kept going just behind. Until at last, they reached the first steps.
Merik hauled himself up.
The step crumbled beneath him, dropping him back into the water. Knocking him against a dead man and tangling him in the corpse’s long black hair.
The Northman tried the next step, but it too collapsed beneath his weight. And now the pool was filling at a rate that would soon leave Merik and the Northman cornered. Trapped. They could not tread water forever, and the Cleaved could not keep rushing in. Eventually, the pond would fill and then Cleaved who still lived would simply walk across the bodies.
The water seethed around Merik. Corpses bumped against him, and the Northman splashed and sprayed, trying over and over to reach higher stairs.
This was it—this was the best Merik was going to get for time. If he couldn’t make his magic work now, if he couldn’t coax it back to life, then this was the end. Not just for him, but for the Northman who had come to save him.
And for Nubrevna, exposed and unready for a Raider King’s attack.
Merik wasn’t ready for that end. He closed his eyes.
Come, the water sang around him. Come and find release. There was power in that water. Where it came from or what it meant, he couldn’t guess. But the magic was there all the same.
Listen, he told the spark in his lungs. Listen and see.
All his life, Merik had been a weak witch. Barely able to earn his Witchmark as a child, he had disappointed his father. Disappointed himself. Only when his temper flared did he ever seem to have any power.
The Nihar rage, his family called it.
But in anger there could be no listening. In rage, there could be no sight. And in fury, there could be no understanding.
Esme had been right—just as Cam had been right. Merik saw what he wanted to see. He told himself he made all choices, good and bad, to help Nubrevna as if this somehow justified his willful blindness. As if this somehow vindicated his dependence on blood-boiling rage.
And Safiya fon Hasstrel had been right too: Merik loved to feel needed. It did give him purpose—and it also gave him excuses.
For almost two days he had lived without his magic inside him. For almost two days he had moved where someone else willed, and he had seen with eyes unclouded by wrath. Words had freed him from Esme’s collar, not anger. And it was not anger—or even magic—that would free him from this pool filled with corpses.
Listen and see. Listen and see. The spark in his chest thrummed louder. The waters sang and pulled. The power at work here wanted him to reach that blue light. It wanted him to travel through. It wanted him to embrace the full magic that waited on the other side.
Merik’s eyes snapped wide. Water rocked and crashed against his face. A woman’s dead eyes stared into his. There were too many bodies now, splashing and piling and raising the water with each second.
He inhaled as deeply as he could, a desperate gasp with no grace or ease, but it was enough.
Wind rushed in.
A second breath, a second gale. Three breaths, four, ten—the winds writhed in stronger, wilder. Water spun and corpses spun too. Until at last, enough air cycloned around Merik for him to finally make his move.
He flung up his hands. Air rocketed beneath him, beneath the Northman. They shot up from the waves.
Merik flung his hands down.
Water and bodies and Cleaved ripped backward, away from Merik and the Northman. Away from the blue light still glowing below.
Power, power, power.
This was what magic was meant to feel like—this was what it had always wanted to be. No Nihar rage to fuel it. No dark magic from the Fury to taint it. If only Merik had listened sooner. If only he had bothered to see.
“Down!” Merik warned. Then he punched his winds toward the blue light below, and he and the Northman flew.
In seconds, they landed before the blue light and the stone wall that surrounded it. Behind them and above, held back by a wall of winds, the water waited. The Cleaved struggled and clashed.
“Go,” Merik told the Northman, pointing at a doorway made of blue light.
But the Northman took no steps forward, and Merik supposed he could not blame him. So he took the enormous man’s hand in his own. Then he towed him toward the light.
“We go,” he said, attempting a smile. “We go.”
Together, they stepped through the doorway.
Together, they entered the mountain that everyone wanted to claim.
FORTY-NINE
Stupid as it might seem, Safi always told Iseult, stupid is also something they never see coming. Except this time, there was no Iseult to save Safi’s hide. To complete what she’d initiated. It was Safi and only Safi flying straight down toward Lake Scarza with Vaness right beside her.
The lake swallowed them. Light and heat tore against them—boiling in its ferocity, curls of flame to claw beneath the waves—and with no glamour to hide the sinking naval ship right before them.
Beside Safi, Vaness jolted to life. Mathew’s control had ended, and the Glamourwitch’s magic too, so there was no missing the blood pluming around her.
Safi frog-legged to her and then propelled them both toward the surface. Vaness tried to swim, to help Safi rise, but her legs tangled in their waterlogged gowns, which then tangled Safi too.
Safi pushed on, though, and she pushed through. Even as heat and light off sinking
boats made it impossible to see where they were going. Even as her lungs ached from a breath held too long and the world heaved from the pressure gathering in her ears.
At last, Safi’s head broke the surface, and Vaness burst up beside her. But Safi had no idea where to go now, or what to do. They were caught between ships aflame and an island overrun by the enemy.
Vaness took charge. Despite the jagged wound across her face, she raised a single, weak arm upward.
A rope of iron shot off her wrist, looping around Vaness’s waist, around Safi’s. Then it yanked them toward shore.
“Hold on!” Vaness screamed.
Safi held on. The rope hauled them through smoke and bursts of fire, past ships and corpses, over waves building higher with each new explosion upon the lake. Vaness knew where to go, though, and eventually, both women were pulled beneath the surface once more.
Water and darkness rushed over Safi. The iron rope cut into her hips, her belly. She couldn’t see, couldn’t gauge where they traveled. All she knew was that it was down and that her lungs howled.
Then her trajectory changed. No more flying forward. She was abruptly jerked up, and somehow, the water charged even harder against her. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t move. Her fingers brushed rough metal, and she prayed it wasn’t a sinking ship.
Safi erupted from the water. Carried by iron, carried by magic, she hurled from the darkness and rammed onto a narrow lip of stone. Gasping, coughing, squinting.
“Sewer,” Vaness said eventually, between sputtering breaths of her own.
Well, that explained the smell. It also explained the rounded shape of the tunnel overhead, and the constant current of water rushing past. As Safi’s eyes adjusted, she spotted a single lantern flickering nearby, a single ladder moving into a new tunnel above.
It was the blood that caught Safi’s attention, though. It dribbled in spurts from the top of Vaness’s forehead down to the edge of her right jaw. A deep wound had rendered her right eye completely useless. The Empress clutched it, still breathing hard.
The stone lip around her was already stained red.
“We need to wrap that.” Safi scooted toward her, reaching for her sleeve so she could tear it. Vaness moved faster, though.
“Wait,” she panted. Then her iron rope transformed, slithering inward before expanding and sharpening and splitting in two. In seconds, the iron became scissors that Vaness used to snip off a piece of red skirt.
Safi gathered up the crepe. It wasn’t clean. Not after the dunk in sewage. Nor was Vaness’s wound. But it was the best they could do, given the circumstances.
“I’m sorry,” Safi said while she wrapped the fabric around the Empress’s head. Over and over, tighter and tighter. “I’m so, so sorry I couldn’t stop the attack.”
“I watched it, you know. I watched the entire thing unfold, but I could do nothing.”
“Because you were Wordwitched.” Shamed fire burned in Safi’s shoulders. In her belly. She should have seen this coming. Why hadn’t she seen this coming?
“You know the man who did this to me.” A statement, not a question.
And Safi couldn’t lie. “Yes. I know him, and General Fashayit too. They raised me, and I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you. You trusted me, and I failed you.” She tied off the red crepe. Then with all the truth she could summon, straight from the heart of her magic, she said: “I swear to you, Your Majesty, that I did not know what they had planned. I thought Habim had come to the city to take me home. Nothing more. Had I known they planned to … to…”
She trailed off. She couldn’t say the word “assassinate.” She couldn’t believe the people she’d loved—her Thread-family—were capable of such a thing.
Vaness watched Safi. Her left eye blinked and blinked. Her chest trembled. No expression, though. No hint as to what she might be feeling. Until: “I believe you.” She looked away. “I heard what you told the men. And … Well, I suppose people do not jump off cliffs for just anyone.”
“No,” Safi replied, a taut chuckle beneath that word. “They don’t. I don’t.”
As Safi uttered these words, Vaness changed. Between one moment and the next, the Empress went from injured and weak to poised and unharmed.
“Shit,” Safi whispered. “You’re glamoured again.”
No change of expression hit the magicked Vaness, but Safi heard her gasp. She heard her gown rustle too, as she frantically examined herself.
All Safi saw, though, was a cool, collected Empress staring straight ahead. And if this glamour had returned, then the others must have too. Which would make this escape much, much harder.
“Hell-Bards,” Safi blurted at the same moment Vaness said, “The Cartorrans.”
“They can see through this,” Safi went on, and at the glamoured Vaness’s nod, she asked, “Where are they now?”
“Only a level above.” The false Vaness pushed gracefully to her feet.
Then the false Vaness tumbled into the wall, and Safi realized she was barely clinging to consciousness. Safi slid an arm behind the stone-faced Empress. “Hold on to me,” she said. Then together, they walked to the ladder. Together, they ascended—Vaness first, in case she lost her strength.
It felt like a lifetime climbing those rungs. And the higher they moved, the more sounds drifted down from above. A rhythmic boom! that could have been fireworks, or could have been explosions. And a roar that sounded like the water in the sewer had felt. Like wind on a storm-crossed day.
It wasn’t until they reached the small hatch that would eject them into the palace that Safi realized what the sound was.
Fire.
Everything from the escape in Veñaza City was being used again. Glamours and distractions, soldiers with shifted loyalties and fire—lots of fire.
Heat pressed against them through the door. “We should turn back,” Safi called, but either Vaness did not hear, or Vaness did not care. With her magic, she melted apart the door.
And the heat and roar doubled.
Vaness crafted a shield—a tactic she had successfully employed twice with Safi. Of course, both times there had been somewhere for the smoke to go. Now, there was nowhere except around the iron barrier as Vaness and Safi climbed into and then across a room thick with flames.
Or maybe they were in a hallway. Or maybe it was a closet. Safi had no idea what was around them. Her eyes streamed. Her throat and lungs spasmed, and she only kept going because Vaness did. When they reached a stairwell not consumed by flames, though, Vaness sagged into Safi.
No warning, since Safi’s magic was still half missing and she only saw a perfectly poised Empress. Again, she helped the woman ascend, this time up low steps clogged by heat and smoke.
They reached the next level, and a familiar sandstone hall met Safi’s eyes. However, now it burned, and now, there was no one alive.
Vaness came to the same conclusion. She shook her head, expressionless, and shouted, “They cannot have survived this!” She tugged at Safi to continue rising.
But Safi didn’t move. In Veñaza City, Habim had started the fires in the walls. A Firewitch’s flames were magic.
“Release their restraints!” she called. “They could still be alive—please!”
A nod. A choking cough from a mouth that did not move. Then Vaness lifted an arm. Her wrist tipped upward, and together, she and Safi waited. Safi squinted into the flames while the glamoured Vaness appeared to do nothing at all.
Two charred breaths later, shadows appeared. Black and skeletal and moving this way.
Safi whooped. She couldn’t help it. The Hell-Bards were alive. Habim hadn’t killed them. The flames hadn’t ended them.
Zander stumbled from the fire first. His golden noose glowed. His face was red with heat. Then Lev raced out behind, and finally Caden staggered out last.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Lev said between coughs, but Safi just grabbed her arm and roared, “Come on!”
Without being asked, Zander scooped up V
aness and tossed her over his shoulder—which meant Vaness’s injury must be grim indeed. Safi couldn’t see it, though. Not so long as the glamour ruled and her magic failed.
Together, Safi, Vaness, and the Hell-Bards ran. Up stairs that boomed beneath their feet in time to explosions that definitely weren’t fireworks.
“Wait!” Safi screeched as they charged past a hallway. She recognized it. It led to the storage room filled with fireworks, and at the end, there was access to the lake.
“Your Majesty.” She pushed in close to the Empress draped over Zander’s massive shoulder. But Caden shook his head. “She’s out.”
“I can wake her,” inserted Lev. “It won’t be pretty, though.”
Safi nodded. “Do it.”
“All right, Domna, but later when she wants to kill me, you tell her it was your idea.” Without preamble, Lev stabbed her finger into Vaness’s injured eye.
And the Empress awoke shrieking.
It was horrible to see, horrible to hear—an expressionless face emitting a sound of absolute, bone-rattling agony. But Safi needed Vaness awake, and pain was a better alternative to death.
“A boat!” Safi flung her voice over the screams, over the flames. “Is there a boat beyond this storage room?”
“YES!” Vaness screamed. Then Lev released her, and the Empress toppled limp against Zander’s shoulder.
Hollering for the Hell-Bards to follow, Safi shot out of the stairs and into the hall. Caden stayed close at her side, while Zander followed with the Empress, and finally Lev took up the rear. They crossed the hall and no one stopped them. No soldiers or fire appeared.
They crossed the storage room, and still no one interfered. They crept past crates of spark-candles—except they weren’t spark-candles at all. Which meant as soon as the fire chasing behind them reached this room …
“Faster!” she urged, and the Hell-Bards obeyed.
They reached the doorway at the end. As she’d seen earlier, it led to a cavernous boathouse that opened onto the lake. Naval vessels appeared to float harmlessly, but Safi knew, even if her magic did not, that it was all a lie. The battle echoes spoke otherwise.
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