Windwitch

by Susan Dennard

  Good. Safi smiled. She would hack this place to the ground, starting with the Baedyeds who’d killed Merik.

  Lights blared to life. Alarm-stones nestled in the walls flashed, summoning guards.

  Safi’s smile widened.

  “Lev!” Caden shoved through the crowd, Cartorran sailors dispersed behind him. “We can’t get through the way we came in. Zander’s gone to find another exit … Where’s the empress?”

  This was directed at Safi, but she only grinned all the more. Zander, whose head towered above the fray, waved at them to follow.

  Safi set off immediately, glad to be moving. To be fighting. She body-slammed her way forward, elbows out and teeth bared.

  All the while, the alarm-stones dazzled on.

  The madness spat Safi out before Zander, who waited beside a passage that was eerily quiet, eerily empty. Some slaves sprinted into it, but most moved very distinctly away. “It’s the way to the arena!” Zander’s bass roar was almost lost to the chaos. “But I think there’s a cutoff that’ll take us outside!”

  “Lead the way!” Caden ordered before turning to the Cartorran crew, counting them as they pelted past.

  Safi stalked after Zander, following his shadowy bulk upward. The puddles thinned out. A strange vibration took hold of the floor.

  At first Safi thought it simply a result of all the noise, all the slaves fighting their way free. Yet the closer they got to the fork ahead, the more a shuddering quaked through her legs. She felt it all the way in her lungs with each panting inhale.

  Even the torches sputtered in their sconces.

  “What’s that?” one of the sailors asked.

  “It’s coming from the arena,” said another.

  “Which is why we won’t go into the arena.” Lev pushed ahead and reached the forked pathway first. Then with a holler for everyone—“Hold up a moment”—she launched left into the darker tunnel.

  The moments slid past, and everyone gathered at the fork. Safi’s pulse beat with the same rhythm as the vibrations through the stones—faster, faster—until she was certain the blackened hallway Lev had chosen was wrong, wrong, wrong.

  She rounded on Caden. “Call her back. Something’s down there.”

  “What—” Caden began.

  Wrong, wrong. Safi shot past him, cupping her hands. “Lev! Come back!”

  “Just a moment!” came the distant reply. “I see something—” Her words broke off, swallowed by an ear-splitting shriek.

  Then orange light blazed at the end of the tunnel, and Lev’s voice came clattering down the stones: “FLAME HAWK! THEY HAVE A RUTTING FLAME HAWK! RUN!”

  “Oh, shit,” Caden said. Or maybe that was the crew. Or maybe Safi herself had said it. She was certainly thinking it as she turned tail and ran as if demons of the Void were after her.

  Flame hawks. Demons. Close enough.

  Noise built behind her. A growing roar like a waterfall approaching fast. Except not. Definitely not, for waterfalls did not make the ground wobble or turn darkness into day.

  Next came the heat. She felt it searing against her, clawing and nipping at her shoulders, long before the fiery glow caught up.

  And when the glow did catch up—holy hell-gates, Safi had never run so fast in her life. She passed sailors, she passed slaves, she passed Caden and Zander, and oh, there was the empress, just stepping through a sunny doorway.

  “RUN!” Safi screamed. She reached Vaness and clapped her hand on the empress’s arm. With all her strength, she shoved. Out the doorway, out of the flame hawk’s path.

  Yet what Safi shoved herself and Vaness into wasn’t much better than the flame hawk. They had reached the arena.

  All across the gravel-floored basin, Baile’s Slaughter rampaged. Lightning sliced out, singeing Safi’s cheek before it crashed against a stalagmite now punching up from the earth. A Stormwitch battling an Earthwitch. Excellent.

  Safi vaulted left, scarcely avoiding a flurry of ice shards that were quickly sizzled up by a wall of flame. All lines had faded between friend and foe, slave and slaver, Red Sail and Baedyed. Everyone fought. Every single thrice-damned person alive in this arena grappled body to body, blade to blade, or magic to magic.

  Oh, and there was the matter of the flame hawk. It had reached the arena’s surface and now careened from the tunnel in a streak of white heat.

  Thank the gods Safi’s muscles were smarter than her brain, for at first sight of the beast—a streak of fire as long as a galleon with wings twice as wide—she would’ve happily stood there, awestruck.

  Her legs, however, wanted to move. She dove for a stalagmite, but it crumbled the instant she got close. So she scrabbled on—cover, cover. She needed cover. For the hawk was circling now and screeching its rage to a keen, blue sky.

  Then it folded its wings close and dove. Directly for Safi.

  She tried to bolt, to duck, to wheel sharply aside, yet even as she evaded, she knew—in that base, survivalist part of her brain—that this wasn’t a creature one could escape by simply twisting fast.

  Her hearing was swallowed by noise, her sight a raging inferno. There would be no escape. Not this time.

  A body rammed into her from behind. She hit the ground, chin cracking hard on the gravel. “Close your eyes!” Caden shouted.

  Safi closed her eyes. The flame hawk hit.

  The old life ended.

  When she was a child, Habim had told her that the Marstoks believed flame hawks to be spirits of life. Of birth. To meet a flame hawk—and to survive—was to be given a second chance. A new beginning. A clean break.

  Safi believed it, for in that space between one heartbeat and the next, while the beast roared over her with light and heat and sound, Safi’s entire being focused into a flash of thought. A memory, sharpened like the finest of blades.

  Everything you love, her uncle had said, gets taken away, Safiya … and slaughtered. But you will learn soon enough. In all too vivid detail, you will learn. Then he’d told her: If you wanted to, you could bend and shape the world. You have the training for it—I’ve seen to that. Unfortunately, you seem to lack the initiative.

  Well, Safi was calling horse shit on that. She didn’t lack initiative—she was initiative. Through and through.

  Initiate, complete.

  Safi was ready to bend the world. Ready to break it.

  And with that thought, a new life began.

  The flame hawk shrieked past. Caden clambered off Safi’s back. Her hair was incinerated to half its length. And her gown had enormous holes along the edges.

  Caden offered a hand. As before, his scars oozed with darkness that whispered of wrong. His pupils had spread to the limits of his irises.

  “Next time,” he panted, the words mingling with shadows, “you see a flame hawk, how about not standing in its way.” He turned as if to stagger away.

  But Safi’s fingers whipped out. She grabbed his noose and yanked him close. “What,” she hissed, “are you?” Even as she asked the question, the shadows were already receding. His irises were melting back into brown, and no more smoke-like darkness curled off his tongue.

  “If we get out of this alive,” he said, looking once more like the Chiseled Cheater she’d known, “then remind me to tell you. But for now, Domna, we keep moving.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Merik knew this storm. He’d survived it in Lejna, flying against the same charged winds in search of an eye. In search of the source.

  Today, when Merik found the storm’s heart, the same man flew. Today, though, Kullen was not collapsed and dying but rather hovered, stiff as if he stood upon mountain peak.

  Once, in boyhood, a fire had swept through a house on the Nihar lands. The people who’d lived within had escaped; their dog had not. The shiny, charred shape of its corpse amid the wreckage had been forever etched into Merik’s mind after that.

  Now here he was, facing it again. Remains. A corpse. Horrifying, yet unmistakable, even as his mind whispered, Stop seeing wh
at you want to see.

  Kullen spotted Merik. Lightning flashed, illuminating a toothy smile. His lips stretched in a way that was simultaneously familiar and thoroughly inhuman. Black winds spiraled endlessly behind him, carrying debris, autumn leaves, and sage.

  “No words of welcome, Threadbrother?”

  “You aren’t my Threadbrother.” Merik was shocked by how evenly his voice came out. “I saw my Threadbrother die.”

  “You saw me cleave.” Kullen spread his arms, almost languidly, and lightning laced from his fingertips. “Cleaving need not be the end, though.”

  “What are you?”

  “You know the answer to that. I am vengeance. I am justice. I am the Fury.”

  At those words, ice, anger—they sank claws deep into Merik’s chest. Yet distantly, Merik knew they were not his own.

  “I asked you to kill me,” Kullen continued. He swept in closer. Closer still until there was no missing how shadows lived inside his flesh. Inside his eyes, glowing with each crack of lightning below. “Remember that, Merik? In Lejna, I asked for the wind-clap. Thank Noden, you refused, for otherwise, neither of us would be here today. You would be dead, I would be dead, and we’d both we waltzing with the Hagfishes.”

  Merik tried to answer. Tried to utter some response, but no words would come. Nothing beyond, You would be dead, I would be dead.

  Kullen laughed. “Yet only in death, could they understand life. And only in life, will they change the world.” He tapped his head, that unnatural grin spreading all the wider. A smile that didn’t reach his dead, dead eyes. “The Fury’s memories were always here, Merik. I just had to die to unlock them.

  “Now I will make you a king!” Cold radiated off Kullen. Power begging to be used. “Together, we can claim this city! Claim this whole nation!”

  “No.” Merik’s head shook. Tears flew from his cheeks. Vanished into the storm. “I don’t want that, Kull! I don’t want to be king—”

  “Oh, but you do.” Before Merik could blink or resist, Kullen had clutched him by the neck. He drew the air directly from Merik’s lungs. “If you do not join me, Threadbrother, then I will deem you enemy. And remember, I am sharp as any edge.”

  “Please, Kull.” Merik hammered at Kullen’s arms. “This isn’t you!”

  “This is me, Merik. My true self finally set free.” Kullen’s fingers gripped tighter, searing into Merik’s skin.

  “Stop this storm,” he rasped. “Leave, Kullen, leave.”

  “No.” Kullen chuckled, a throaty sound that set thunder to rumbling. They were high, so high. “I made this city, and so I will destroy it too.”

  “I won’t let you,” Merik wheezed. His lungs were aflame. He blazed from the inside out.

  Kullen’s grip dug in. Black ice to pierce Merik’s skin. Snow fell around them. “Do you think you can stop me, Mer? I am bound to the Loom, and you are bound to me. If you send my soul past the final shelf, then yours will follow. Threadbrothers to the end.”

  With that statement, he released Merik. Breath roared in while winds kicked under Merik. Keeping him aloft. Kullen’s winds, he knew, yet he felt his own power writhing in there too. As if they both controlled the magic, as if this witchery—this rage—was a river stretched between them. A well they both pulled from.

  And in that moment, Merik understood.

  He was a dead man. Just like Garren. Just like Linday. And, worst of all, just like Kullen soaring before him. The saint of all things broken, more grotesque than even the Hagfishes. Kullen was the Fury, through and through.

  “I see you understand,” Kullen said, and though the words were lost to the tempest, Merik felt them rattling in his soul. “The explosion on the Jana killed you, but we are bound as Threadbrothers. The same weaving magic that keeps me alive has stretched into you. If one of us dies, though, the other one goes too. And so, what choice do you have but to join me?”

  Light flared behind Kullen. So bright it sent Merik’s eyes snapping shut. His hands rising. Then came a boom to shatter the earth. By the time Merik had his eyes open again, it was to find Kullen staring below.

  Through the clouds and chaos, Merik saw it too: the ship with seafire had exploded.

  Kullen’s attention whipped back to Merik, his eyes pure black. No lightning now. Only ice and wind and rage. “Your sister might think she has won, but I will simply break the dam on my own. This city will be returned to its rightful ruler one way or another.”

  Merik wasn’t listening anymore. Through watery eyes and storm, he saw figures plunging into the valley, specks of color amid a world of smoke and dark flame.

  One person tried to pull water toward her. Tried to tow herself back to the water-bridge. Vivia. She fell to her death, leaving Merik with only two choices.

  Save the city.

  Or save his sister.

  The answer, he knew, was obvious. One for the sake of many—he had lived his entire life by that creed, sacrificing himself, giving up Safi, and ultimately losing Kullen for what he’d thought would be the greater good.

  It hadn’t worked, though.

  It never worked. Merik had always been left empty-handed, with a darkness digging ever deeper. Soon, there would be nothing left inside him, nothing left to give.

  Merik saw that now. What did he know of this city? What did he know of the vizers or the navy? He’d tried—Noden knew he’d tried to be what his people needed, but the payoff had only ever been ashes and dust.

  Vivia, though … the sister Merik had never understood and forgotten how to love, the Nihar who could lead this nation to safety, to prosperity, who could—who would—stare down the empires as easily as she stared down a tide …

  Vivia was meant to be queen. She’d been born to it; she’d been honed for it.

  “Come,” Kullen commanded, summoning Merik’s attention. Winds and frost pulsed across the Threads that bound them. “It is time to remind men that I am always watching.”

  The need to obey crystallized in Merik’s bones. The need to use Kullen’s cyclone, to succumb to the endless power. To break and scream and shred and ruin.

  But Merik fought it. This time, he dug deep inside himself. Until he found the temper. The kindling of Nihar rage. That was his magic—weak and tiny but wholly his own. It would have to be enough.

  Otherwise, Merik would never catch his sister before the hungry Hagfishes.

  So with that thought, Meirk turned away from Kullen, using only his own magic, only his own will.

  Many for the sake of one.

  * * *

  The escape from Baile’s Slaughter was a blur of steel and blood and magic. Safi’s steel. Others’ blood. Vaness’s magic.

  Near the main exit out of the arena, they rejoined with Zander and Lev, who still had most of the Cartorran crew trailing behind them.

  “Piss-pies,” Safi swore once they were outside—for somehow, the bedlam around the arena was even worse than what had warred within.

  “Piss-pies,” Caden agreed. The single road toward the wharf overflowed with people, fleeing and fighting. Two bridges had collapsed from too much weight while three more were engulfed in flames.

  The final kick in the kidneys, though, were the waters circling the arena. They foamed with blood and movement. With crocodiles writhing and rolling and snapping up any person, living or dead.

  “There is absolutely no way,” Safi hollered, “we can reach the harbor.”

  Caden tossed her a smirk of absolute smugness. “This is nothing,” he said. Then he shouted, “Hell-Bards! In formation! Everyone else, get behind! You”—he pointed at the empress—“We need three shields. Big ones.”

  Vaness matched his smirk, and with the same control that marked all her movements, all her magic, she swooped up her arms. Three iron shields—big ones—gathered and formed from any iron nearby. Safi’s own sword wriggled from her hands before reshaping into a curved chest-high shield for Caden.

  “Move behind!” Caden shouted.

  Safi moved
behind.

  “Move out!”

  Immediately, the Hell-Bards triangulated themselves. Zander at the fore, Caden and Lev just behind. Then they shot forward in a full-speed charge.

  Followed by a pause.

  Followed by a charge.

  Safi had never seen anything like it. They worked in perfect concert. Charge. Pause. Charge. Pause. While a brave few assaulted their formation from the sides or rear, the sailors were well trained.

  In this pattern, the Cartorrans crossed the marsh. Time lost all meaning. It went from seconds and breaths to bursts and lulls. To blades arcing up and jaws snarling near. Charge. Pause. Charge. Pause. On and on beneath a perfect, cloudless sky.

  Until at last, they reached the harbor.

  Until at last, they reached a ship.

  They weren’t the only ones to reach the Cartorran cutter at the end of the dock. Sailors already crawled across its deck while a woman with gray hair trumpeted orders from the stern.

  She saw them approach before her crew did. She smiled—a false thing that scuttled over Safi’s magic—and then trilled, “You’re too late to reclaim your ship, lovelies!”

  One by one, her men swiveled about to see who’d arrived. And one by one, they drew knives, cutlasses, and Firewitched pistols.

  Vaness’s arms rose, and Safi saw exactly where this was headed. More fighting, more bloodshed, more wasted life.

  Then she thought of initiative. Of bending and breaking, and she found herself shoving in front of the empress. In front of the Hell-Bards. “Wait!”

  Kahina waited, eyebrows slinging high.

  “We don’t have to do this,” Safi said. Merik might be dead—and countless others too—but that didn’t mean anyone else had to join him today.

  “Walk away.” Kahina strode to the bulwark. Her own sword clanked against her hip. “I have no quarrel with you, but I claimed this ship. Now I keep it.”

  “Play me for it.” The words tumbled out. Stupid—so stupid. But also something they would never see coming.

  Caden and Vaness pivoted toward Safi, faces aghast.

  Admiral Kahina, however, looked delighted. A feline smile spread over her face, and she leaned a hand onto the bulwark.