Page 77 of Witchlight
The two hooded figures, meanwhile, were already running—one with a rifle clutched tight and the other with his hood falling back to reveal a mop of brown hair. They chased after the storm hound thundering out of Last Holdout.
Safi launched after them.
Stacia Sotar had been here before. Notherein this physical space, butherein this scenario. Except the first time it had happened—the first time she’dcome face-to-face with the Fury—the heat of late Nubrevnan summer had warmed her skin.
There hadn’t been a fallen roof, nor shouts of alarm from raiders outside, nor a knowledge poking at the back of Stix’s brain that said,This isn’t the Fury. You knew the real Fury as a Paladin, and he has been gone for centuries.
Still, Stix had seen this man before. Sheknewhim. Even without her glasses, she could recognize the scars on his face.
More than that, she recognized his magic. The winds that poured into the attic (which had been her bedroom until five seconds ago) carried with them snow and power. There was a charge to them, an electricity that she had felt before. Not quite human, not quite…alive.
The ice encasing the man shattered outward.
And on the floor below, voices boomed into the building. Vague words of alarm and calls for violence. The specifics didn’t matter. People were coming, and Stix thought people ought to be good. She might not like the raiders who worked for Ragnor, but at least they were on the same side. This man frozen before her—who wasn’t the Fury, yetwas…
He was the enemy. He had to be stopped just as Stix had stopped him before. And Stix would use exactly the same techniques she had used at Pin’s Keep when she’d first faced this specter. She stomped once, her boot thundering through the floor. All the ice she’d created turned instantly to burning fog.
“Stix,” the man croaked, vanishing inside the world of white. “Stix, it’s me.”
Winds blasted her face. She rocked back. The man was trying to summon more power. He was going to escape.
Vibrations in the floorboards signaled raiders on the stairs, but they were slow. Stix had chosen this building because she liked its rickety passages and tiny rooms. It reminded her of her apartment in Lovats. It reminded her of her quarters tucked belowdecks on Vivia’s old ship.
“Stix,” the man repeated, hopping upward like a baby bird learning to fly. He would escape through the hole he’d made. She needed to stop him before he could do that.
Distantly, it occurred to her that this Fury-man knew her name. And distantly she wondered how the man who had stalked the streets of Lovats might be here, hundreds of leagues from where she’d first met him.
But these were thoughts that happened so deep inside her skull, they couldn’t push to the forefront.
Stix flung out two water whips, using the fog to form them. They surrounded the man, freezing and banding his arms to his sides. Yet again,somehow,he was stronger than she. His winds blasted outward, shattering her ice. Then lightning cracked, so brightly it stole all her sight. Forced her to close her eyes and duck low to the floor.
And so loud, it was like a firepot had detonated inside the room. Stix felt unmoored. She felt sick. She felt as if her body had melted away and all that was left were her thoughts. Useless thoughts, too, about a Heart-Thread named Bastien and a prince who had died… And loudest of all, the words of the Fury carved into shrines across Nubrevna:
Why do you hold a razor in one hand?
So men remember that I am sharp as any edge.
And why do you hold broken glass in the other?
So men remember that I am always watching.
Stix had possessed that glass, hadn’t she? And she had possessed that razor after claiming it from inside the sleeping mountain. Everything from the past was rooted in the present. Just as Ragnor had told her.
She herself was nothing more than legend. Lady Baile with her three rules and the cats that never left her.The cats,she thought, and that thought prompted her to move. To try opening her spectacled eyes and survey the world around her.
Were her cats all right?
She squinted. Something huge and golden flapped above the broken roof. It looked like the statues on the bridge into Poznin—except very alive and veryhere.
He really is the Fury,an old voice whispered in Stix’s brain.Bastien always could talk to storm hounds.
But it isn’t him,Stix countered.You know it isn’t really him.She loosed herself, muscles pushing her to standing. Her ears still heard nothing, but her blurred sight was returning.That isn’t the Fury. Not the Fury I knew. That is the man I met in Lovats. And somehow, he is leaving this place with a storm hound.
The door into Stix’s room burst wide. Raiders poured into the room. “I need Windwitches!” Stix shouted, pointing at the hole in her ceiling. “I need Windwitches, and tell the Baedyeds to get their pistols ready. We have a storm hound in the city.”
The closest raider, a Red Sail with her hair in two long braids behind her head, gave Stix such a crisp Nubrevnan salute, Stix wondered if the woman hadn’t once served in the Royal Navy. The other raiders, less disciplined, just stood there gaping at the damage around the room.
Something nudged Stix’s calf. She flinched, half expecting to find a storm hound’s mouth chomping down… but it was only her calico, purring against her as if none of the chaos had just happened. As if he had come for his usual evening cuddles, and goodness, could someone please do something about that draft?
