Page 141 of Witchlight
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, herbones—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 howmuchhe did look like the Noden that Stacia Sotar had been raised to believe guided all.
So much history forgotten. So much historychangedto 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’dmadethe 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 couldfeelsap 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.
Thatwas 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? Whereisthis 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—thatwas 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?Couldshe 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.
