Bloodwitch (The Witchlands, #3)

On his second contract, the tier four, Aeduan felt the Painstone begin to fail.

He was supposed to report to a small iron mine in Marstok, east of Tirla. They would soon transport a shipment west; they needed protection. Likely it was not a legal delivery, or they would have hired true soldiers.

Legality mattered none to Aeduan. Coin was coin, contracts were contracts. He simply walked east, the sun rising overhead. Then burning down. It was not a hot day, but he grew hot. Miserably so. Unbearably so. Until it was too much. He had to stop beside a creek. Barely a trickle over the mountain rocks.

He removed his cloak. He drank his fill, the water gritty, and he splashed the sweat from his face. Then he sat on a rock and waited for the last of the Painstone’s power to creep away.

It was worse than he expected. If he had thought that the sudden absence of pain yesterday was a clear indicator of how much he’d felt before, it was nothing compared to the sudden return of it. He had anticipated a slow cascade, like standing in a river as it slowly rose around you.

The pain was a tidal wave instead. It plowed into him, flame and violence to boil his blood. To cook off all thought, until he was nothing but shadows closing in and a body shutting down.

He collapsed into the stream.





TWENTY-EIGHT


Vivia stared into her lukewarm porridge, knowing she ought to eat. Instead, her gaze shot to the empty seat beside her and its untouched porridge growing colder by the second.

It would seem Serafin was not coming to breakfast. Which could mean only one thing: he had heard about Vivia’s trip to Marstok, and he disapproved.

A sigh slid between her teeth, like steam released from a bubbling pot, except that her exhale did nothing to ease the boil in her belly. She would have to deal with her father—have to apologize, perhaps even grovel. Though for what, precisely, she did not know. Sometimes, she never learned what she had done to awaken his Nihar rage.

Vivia hugged her arms to her chest. She should apologize now. Any delay and the storm would only stew and strengthen. Until eventually he would explode. Then no amount of apologies would calm him.

But what of Stix? The question tickled across her mind, and with it, Vivia found herself rising. Turning toward the door. Stix ought to be in the Battle Room by now, waiting to give Vivia her morning briefing. Surely taking a few minutes to speak to her best friend—and to bolster her resolve before facing Serafin—would be all right. Besides, she desperately wanted to tell Stix about Marstok, about the Empress, about the Wordwitched paper now tucked into her frock coat. Stix would know what to make of it all. Stix would know how Vivia should proceed.

Except that Stix was not waiting for Vivia in the Battle Room. Worse, none of the servants nearby had seen her that morning. There was no note on the table, no message sent by courier, and no sign at all that anything in the room had been touched since Vivia had last entered yesterday. And certainly no sign of Stix.

Vivia left the palace, barking at her guards to leave her be! before retracing her steps from the night before. No amount of knocking at Stix’s apartment earned an answer, though, and the cobweb between the door and the ceiling suggested the door hadn’t been opened in quite some time.

Vivia’s stomach spun all the harder, pressing against her lungs now. Stix wasn’t where she ought to be, and she’d not come home in at least a day. The latter part was not unusual—Stix was, in her own words, “a restless soul.”

Maybe she is at the barracks.

Except Stix was not there either, and none of the sailors or officers had seen her. Nor had anyone at Pin’s Keep, the Cleaved Man, or Stix’s father’s house on Queen’s Hill. Not since two whole blighted days before. It wasn’t until Vivia decided to sail herself out to the Sentries of Noden that she got any clue to where Stix might have gone.

Their skiff was missing. And sure enough, when Vivia questioned a fisherman named Aben—a young fellow who spent every morning anchored to the dock with his line plunked into the murky waters and from whom Vivia and Stix received regular updates on the health of the local fishes—he said, “Hye, I saw her take the boat out yesterday. Didn’t say where she was going, but she looked none too pleased.”

“Which way did she go?”

He waved south. “I lost sight of her before she hit the bridge.”

Vivia huffed a thank-you, already scooting off. She could borrow a skiff at the wharf, and from there she could get to the southern Sentry. For surely, Stix would be there.

The morning shadows were long, the waters crowded, yet even with her mind racing over and over—where was Stix?—sailing came as naturally to Vivia as walking. She slipped past every vessel in the harbor before coasting onto the southern water-bridge.

The Water-Bridges of Stefin-Eckart carried the River Timetz across the valley of farmland surrounding the Lovats plateau. So high were they that clouds drifted alongside the ships fighting to enter the city. Racing to evade the war everyone knew was coming—and all in need of housing that Vivia was racing to provide. The ninth chime was already humming by the time the Sentries of Noden took shape, their weathered faces as large as warships, their stone helms adorned by plumes the size of pine trees. Long, rounded parapets jutted out in gradually widening levels from their stone-cloaked lower halves, while their towering torsos were packed with narrow windows and arrow slats. On either side of the river, where it carved into the mountains, wide inlets climbed upward, carried by magic. They carried naval vessels into a gaping hole at the Sentries’ bases.

These ancient guardians of the city were also the primary home of the Royal Nubrevnan Navy and Royal Nubrevnan Soil-Bound. Brilliant blue banners hung from the battlements, flapping on the morning winds.

Vivia scarcely had to enter the hive-like hallways of the eastern Sentry before she had an answer regarding Stix. No one, military, civilian, or passing refugee, had seen anyone at all matching her description.

Stix was gone. She was missing.

As Vivia sailed numbly back, she could do nothing but stare with unseeing eyes. Even the barn swallows that swooped across her view, riding the warm currents carried up from the valley, could not distract her. They made their nests beneath the water-bridges, and normally, she and Stix would call out to them, some silly refrain about safe harbors and sprightly winds.

That thought only served to make Vivia ill now.

This was all her fault.