Bloodwitch (The Witchlands, #3)

Yet something flickered in the farthest corner of Safi’s brain. Something that said, You’re missing part of the puzzle here. No time to consider, though. Only time to run.

She reached a fallen cedar, its branches aflame. A wall of smoke and heat she couldn’t see beyond.

She jumped. She tripped, hands flying forward.

She landed on a dead man. Not just one, but a hundred. A whole pile of corpses waiting for the flames to consume them. Freshly dead, blood still sticky, and with only their smallclothes and weapons left to them.

Metal weapons. These were the real soldiers.

Safi yelped. Then tried to rise, to scrabble desperately back to her feet. But the blood was slick against dead skin.

Flames and smoke choked in, along with flame hawk screams. False soldiers raced past, clearing the burning tree as Safi had and fleeing the flame hawk. No time, no time. Safi scrambled to her feet. Her bad ankle twisted, a distant pain she knew she would regret later. Assuming there was an actual later.

She swung her arms high and joined the racing soldiers—except she opted to run an entirely different direction. If she followed them, they would all eventually reach the sandstone wall and be trapped. If she wanted to escape, she would have to circle around.

As Lady Fate would have it, though, her plan was a poor one, for the flame hawk set its sights on her. It careened closer, screaming like the demons of the Void. Heat and noise and light.

And death, if Safi could not find cover. She needed something that would not burn. The forest fell away. Abrupt, exposing, and leading Safi right back to the Well where this had all begun.

She was left with only one real option: she dove in.

A punch of cold, a swipe of silence. Then the flame hawk reached the Well. Instantly, the waters boiled, a rush of scalding heat that shoved Safi deeper. She swam as fast and as hard as she could. Down, down, down.

She reached the deepest part of the Well right as the skin-cooking waters touched the soles of her feet. Her mind wiped clean with pain. Her lips parted; air burst from her lungs in a rush of bubbles.

Then her hands touched the rock bottom of the spring.

A tremor erupted. Water blasted against her, and with it came a light so white, so blinding, she thought she had died. That the flames had claimed her soul, and this time, there would be no survival. No rebirth.

Except that two thunderous heartbeats passed, and she was not dead. Instead, she was being punched back toward the surface … Then above the surface, where she found herself gulping in air and gazing at an evening sky turned to gray.

A sizzling sound behind forced her to turn. A light shone from the Well’s heart—a column that seemed to whirl and writhe. So bright, Safi had to squint to see what lay beyond: the flame hawk. Its golden-feathered body hissed and smoked, fires extinguished, while the saddest whimper Safi had ever heard came from its onyx beak.

For approximately two seconds, she pitied the creature. Then its tailfeathers sparked to life, and she decided pity was better reserved for creatures that didn’t want to eat her alive.

She paddled frantically to the Well’s edge and clambered out. Sopping, she aimed toward the path … Which was blocked by the burning wreckage of Vaness’s tent. While she gaped and searched for an alternate route, a sleek black bird shot past Safi. She knew in an instant that it was the old crow. The one from her bedroom that had left her a drained Painstone.

For a single sodden breath, time blurred into a meaningless thing. The crackling flame hawk, the glowing Well, the fighting soldiers in the distance—it all became a blank backdrop to the old crow zooming by.

It flew, squawking, to the golden spire.

And that, Safi realized, was her protection. Lit by the Well’s light, it shone like polished gold. Solid, huge, and quite inflammable.

Safi launched into a gallop—and time launched as well, suddenly feeling twice as fast. Too fast. She pelted past the Well. Twenty paces to the forest. Another fifty paces to the spire after that.

She reached the cedars, sparing a single glance for the flame hawk. Which was, of rutting course, fully ignited once more. And now bellowing at Safi with a fury that told her she was out of time. Its next attack would be the last.

The hawk took flight.

Faster, faster—Safi pushed herself faster. This was who she was. No looking back, no thinking. She was a bundle of muscles and power honed to move, honed to live. This would not be her end. She had survived a flame hawk before; she intended to survive it today too, thank you.

Gold radiated ahead. Brighter by the second. Closer, closer. And with the old crow never leaving her sight. Always, it darted just beyond. And always, the flame hawk darted just behind.

Hotter, hotter. Louder, louder.

The crow reached the spire. Safi reached the spire. She clawed for the edge, ready to sling herself around before the hawk could reach her.

Her footing failed. Her weak ankle snapped, and before she could catch herself, she toppled forward.

She hit empty air, no ground to catch her. Darkness engulfed her. She slammed against stone, though somehow she managed to tuck her chin to her chest, catch the impact with her shoulder, and transfer the energy into a roll.

A roll that carried her into a bright blue light.

Power crashed over her. Sudden and shocking, it stretched her and crushed her. It tore her apart and then put her back together again.

Until she rolled to a stop and stared up at a stone ceiling far, far overhead. Her lungs pumped, her heart pummeled, and chills rippled down her body, while her ankle throbbed with angry, fresh pain.

No memory of the flame hawk’s heat lived in her veins now, though. Only ice and silence, while blue light continued to waver in her vision.

Where the hell-gates am I?

Angling a bruised arm beneath her, Safi sat up—and almost fell right back down again. She sat sprawled upon a ledge scarcely large enough to hold her, and beyond waited a black abyss of nothing. Somehow, in her fall, she had slipped into a cave beneath the golden spire …

And somehow that cave was large enough to hold the entirety of the Floating Palace. Twice.

Even as Safi thought this, she knew it was impossible. Even as her mind tried to grasp why she no longer heard signs of battle or the flame hawk, why heat no longer chased, she knew, deep at the core of her witchery, that it was because she had left the Origin Well’s grounds entirely.

She had left Marstok entirely.

True, true, true.

A squawk pierced her eardrums. Safi flinched, snapping right and flinging out a hand to brace herself. It was such a long, long way to fall.

She found the crow glaring at her a mere arm’s length away. It perched upon an unlit torch fixed to the cavern wall. Beside it was a door. The door Safi had traveled through.