Page 14 of Bloodwitch
SIX
Stacia Sotar ran her fingers over the carvings in the limestone. Her skin glowed green beneath the foxfire. A hundred tiny boxes, each with diagonal lines to intersect, framed a rectangle as tall as she. It was as if someone had intended to build a door here, had even begun the process, and then abandoned it before actually hollowing out a passage.
Or maybe the door only travels one way.
For some reason, Stix kept thinking that this morning. That maybe, somehow, by some magic she did not understand, there was indeed a doorway here.
A doorway that only traveled one way.
Stix’s hand fell away from the carvings. She eased back two steps, head shaking as it did every time she’d come here. The urge to talk to Vivia swelled in her chest. She wanted to ask Vivia what she thought this door might be, tucked off the edge of the under-city, and above all, she wanted to know if Vivia heard the voices that trickled out from the stone.
The truth was, though, that Stix would never… shecouldnever speak of this to Vivia. The Queen-in-Waiting had enough burdens as it was—too many, actually, and Stix refused to add to that heap.
It didn’t help that things had been stretched so thin between herand Vivia since the kiss they never spoke of. It was so odd—had always been so odd—that Stix could be so near to her best friend, yet somehow a thousand leagues away. She caught glimpses of the real Vivia from time to time, but that was all she ever got. Tiny peeks that never seemed to last.
After the kiss, Stix thought she’d finally earned that raw honesty. That she’d earned Vivia’s true face she so adored. But then the promise of the crown had been laid atop Vivia’s head, and with it, a thousand tasks needed to rebuild a city scarred. Vivia had retreated behind her masks and her duties.
Leaving Stix to face the whispers all alone.
Besides, what could Stix even say?I know the underground city too well, Viv. I find secret corners and hidden streets that I should not be able to find.
Or,I feel anxious every moment I’m away from the city. But as soon as I’m back inside its walls, I feel as if I can breathe again.
Or, the one that scared Stix the most, the one she couldn’t even voice aloud to herself:There are whispers in the back of my skull, Viv. They talk all day, all night, and I am slowly losing my mind to them.
The whispers only spoke when Stix was aboveground, out of the under-city. They only screamed when she was far away from this door. When she was here with it, though, they were quiet.
It had started with dreams two weeks ago. Darkness and screaming and a pain in her neck that woke her in the night. She found her sheets soaked, sweat sliding off her in thick rivulets.
A week after that, the shadows had started coming during the day. Little flickers of movement that made her fear her already weak vision might be getting worse. The shadows only lasted a few days, though. Then they vanished and the whispers began.
The whispers were the worst part yet, because she could neverquitehear them. It reminded her of a cadet she’d trained, who, no matter how much she told him to speak up, never got his voice above a squeak. The majority of what he said went forever unheard, forever lost to the din around him.
These whispers were like that.
At times, Stix thought them a hundred different voices speaking inside her brain. Other times she thought them only one, as if all those separate sounds and languages were blended together like a vast orchestra playing a single tune.
One voice or many, it did not change the fact that none of the words made sense. It was a language—or languages—she did not know.
Worse yet, the low, inaudible murmur of the voices never ceased. All day, all night, they followed Stix. Always incomprehensible, always angry, and they expected Stix to do something about it.
But I can’t hear you!she had mentally screamed a thousand times in the past two weeks. Twice, she had even slipped up and barked it aloud.
Her only relief came from Pin’s Keep. The boisterous bustle of the crowded main room, where the homeless and hungry came for food. Where all that noise could, for a time, drown out the maddening whispers. But only in the under-city did Stix feel truly at home.
There, the whispers shifted from furious to cajoling.Come,they seemed to say in words that had no meaning.Come this way, keep coming.
Every night Stix followed, knowing tomorrow she would regret it. Tomorrow, she would be exhausted with her head pounding and the whispers returned. But the call of the city was always stronger, and every night, she gave in.
Even now, when Stix should have been helping families move in or overseeing dam reconstruction, she wasn’t. It was her father’s birthday too, and she’d promised him a trip to the Cleaved Man. Instead, here she was, standing in front of this door to nowhere.Again.But there were no more answers here than there had been last night or any other night before it. Only the faint hum ofCome this way, keep coming.
“I can’t,” Stix told them. Then she rubbed her eyes—by the Twelve, they burned—and turned away.
Stix was in the Cisterns, tracing the same path Vivia would have taken to reach the surface, when she passed a marking on the limestone wall. It wasn’t new; she’d seen it a hundred times before today.
For some reason, though,todayit gave her pause. For some reason, even though water thundered this way through the tunnel, Stix’s feet slowed. Her gaze raked up and down the image.
It was a relief of Lady Baile, patron saint of change, seasons, and crossroads. In one hand, she held a trout, and in the other, wheat. The limestone saint stood as tall as Stix, so worn by time that her fox-shaped mask was missing. Actually, most of the head was missing.
