Page 83 of Witchlight
The trees east of Poznin had always teemed with menace. The shadows didn’t move when the sun did, and a storm hung forever overhead. Now Stix was in those trees, and it was worse than any child’s tale she could have conjured.
White, papery bark scraped against her skin. Jagged branches poked into her mouth, her ears, her eyes. Leaves rustled and rubbed. While underneath it all was the bass grumble of rock grating on rock.
Stix had the sense that she was being moved.
She grappled for water, of course. Weren’t plants mostly water? Was her magic notthemost powerful water magic in all the Witchlands? But although the water answered her with tendrils from the river that chased along like snakes, with ice crackling then steaming then crackling anew, it was never enough to stop the wood or rock that carried her.
Until at last, as fast and as feral as she had been plucked from the river, she was dropped again. The trees released her. The stone melted away. And Stix found herself staring at the gray, baleful sky. Her chest shook. Her skin felt as if the trees still writhed against her. She wanted to weep, but she was too numb to feel anything beyond relief.
Or maybe she did weep. All that moisture against her face couldn’t merely be from magic.
“I am sorry to be so rough,” came a small voice. Incomprehensibly small against a forest so vast. Then a smell wafted over Stix, like fresh-churnedsoil and cold caves. It reminded her of a time a thousand years ago when she’d known what she was and the world had made sense to her.
Not to me,she thought.It made sense to the Paladin soul inside me.
“Yes,” the small voice said. “I feel it too. Anytime we are together again.” She slid her little body into Stix’s view: a Nomatsi child, but with hair whitening at the roots. It was the same thing that had happened to Stix when she was a child.
How strange,her father had said.Your hair is changing like mine.Her mother had brought home a dye for her to try, if she’d wanted. But Stixhadn’twanted because she’d recently met Vivia, and the first thing Vivia had said to her wasYou look like the moon at sea.Then Vivia had flushed, embarrassed by her honesty, and Stix had known right away that Vivia was special. That she wasn’t just a princess hungry for a crown like people believed her to be.
Now this girl hovering over Stix had the same thing happening to her hair. It was not as silvery as Stix’s—there was more warmth to it. Anearthiness,like the soil left behind when a field had burned to ash.
“You’re Saria.” Stix’s voice was a cough, and she was surprised when the language that came out wasn’t her own.Itisyours, though, because you are Baile and she is you.And Baile, Stix was quickly realizing, didn’t trust Saria. Stix couldn’t recall a reason why, but there was a rift there. Some betrayal tucked in Stix’s Paladin past.
“I’m Dirdra,” the child corrected. “Although I like to be called Owl. But yes, a thousand years ago, the soul inside me was named Saria. And you were Baile.” She tipped backward, forcing Stix to crane her neck—and to finally see where the forest had taken her: a wide clearing, with jagged rocks punching up from the ground. Except one of the rocks, Stix realized as she squinted with her unreliable eyes, was moving. There was a claw. There was a tail. And there was a head, swiveling sideways.
“His name is Blueberry,” the girl explained. “I almost sent him after you, but you had the river on your side. I didn’t think he could match both of you, so I had to send the forest instead. Which was violent, I know. The trees are… bored. The rocks too. They have waited such a long time for me to return to them.”
“Why did you attack me at all?” Stix shoved herself into a seated position. The movement revealed cuts in her uniform and across her skin. She glared at them. Then glared at the girl, who stood as still as the giant rocks nearby. She wore a simple black coat lined with fur.
“I couldn’t let you kill the man you chased. For one, he isn’t a threat toyou. For two, he’s important. One of the ones we’re supposed to protect, not to harm.”
“We?” Stix drew in her legs. A giant hole now slashed across her pants; the skin beneath was already bruising. “So you are on the Rook King’s side?”
The girl didn’t answer. The mountain bat—Blueberry—snuffed. It was a sound like laughter.
“I do notopposeyou,” the girl said carefully, “if that is what you are asking.” She watched Stix with large hazel eyes. Her face held the wisdom of countless Earth Paladins; her skeleton carried more years than it was ever meant to sustain. She had come into her knowledge young, and Stix pitied her that.
“I didn’t ask if you oppose me.” Stix stood. The clearing and its rocks swam unfocused around her. “I asked if you are onhisside. The Rook King’s. He killed us, remember? He hunted us down a thousand years ago, and he thrust a blade into my belly.”
Stix didn’t mean for her voice to shake as she said this. Kahina had been so steady when she’d relayed her own story a month ago, when she’dshownStix why the Rook King was their enemy and the Raider King was their future, their friend, the only one to finish what Eridysi had begun. But whenever Stix tried to explain how the Rook King had killed her…
Stix rubbed at her eyes. There were cuts on her brow, dirt in her tear ducts. But she scrubbed and scrubbed and swallowed a fresh surge of tears.
“He stabbed me too,” Owl said. Or Dirdra or Saria or whatever her name was. There was a cautiousness to her tone, like a mother who didn’t want to upset an already unhappy toddler. “But it was a regular blade. Not the one you stole from the Sightwitch in the mountain.”
Cold swept over Stix.
“Where is the blade?” Owl asked.
Stix didn’t answer.
“Do you have it with you?” A pause. Then a head shake. “That’s a silly question. The blade sings to me, just as it sings to us all.Death, death, the final end. And I do not hear it now, so you must have left it behind.” Her little face pinched up, blunting her features into the child she really was. “It’s a good thing you don’t have it. Now neither of us need fear the final end.”
Stix set her jaw warily. She knew what Eridysi’s blade could do, and the looking glass too. She’d finally read Ryber’s diary, and she’d visited the workshop inside Sirmaya’s mountain that had helped her remember more. Above all though, Stix had spoken with Kahina, mining the older woman’smemories for answers about her own past. And until right now, Stix had believed she knew the full shape of what had come before and what needed to be.
But right now, right here, she stood with a child who was disrupting everything.
Stix planted her feet more firmly beneath her, groping for water in the soil as she did so. It was as impatient as the trees to move again; it had flooded onto this land so long ago, and it moved so slowly through the soil. It ached to flow, to fly. To rush and charge and drown.
