Bloodwitch (The Witchlands, #3)

The Northman tried the next step, but it too collapsed beneath his weight. And now the pool was filling at a rate that would soon leave Merik and the Northman cornered. Trapped. They could not tread water forever, and the Cleaved could not keep rushing in. Eventually, the pond would fill and then Cleaved who still lived would simply walk across the bodies.

The water seethed around Merik. Corpses bumped against him, and the Northman splashed and sprayed, trying over and over to reach higher stairs.

This was it—this was the best Merik was going to get for time. If he couldn’t make his magic work now, if he couldn’t coax it back to life, then this was the end. Not just for him, but for the Northman who had come to save him.

And for Nubrevna, exposed and unready for a Raider King’s attack.

Merik wasn’t ready for that end. He closed his eyes.

Come, the water sang around him. Come and find release. There was power in that water. Where it came from or what it meant, he couldn’t guess. But the magic was there all the same.

Listen, he told the spark in his lungs. Listen and see.

All his life, Merik had been a weak witch. Barely able to earn his Witchmark as a child, he had disappointed his father. Disappointed himself. Only when his temper flared did he ever seem to have any power.

The Nihar rage, his family called it.

But in anger there could be no listening. In rage, there could be no sight. And in fury, there could be no understanding.

Esme had been right—just as Cam had been right. Merik saw what he wanted to see. He told himself he made all choices, good and bad, to help Nubrevna as if this somehow justified his willful blindness. As if this somehow vindicated his dependence on blood-boiling rage.

And Safiya fon Hasstrel had been right too: Merik loved to feel needed. It did give him purpose—and it also gave him excuses.

For almost two days he had lived without his magic inside him. For almost two days he had moved where someone else willed, and he had seen with eyes unclouded by wrath. Words had freed him from Esme’s collar, not anger. And it was not anger—or even magic—that would free him from this pool filled with corpses.

Listen and see. Listen and see. The spark in his chest thrummed louder. The waters sang and pulled. The power at work here wanted him to reach that blue light. It wanted him to travel through. It wanted him to embrace the full magic that waited on the other side.

Merik’s eyes snapped wide. Water rocked and crashed against his face. A woman’s dead eyes stared into his. There were too many bodies now, splashing and piling and raising the water with each second.

He inhaled as deeply as he could, a desperate gasp with no grace or ease, but it was enough.

Wind rushed in.

A second breath, a second gale. Three breaths, four, ten—the winds writhed in stronger, wilder. Water spun and corpses spun too. Until at last, enough air cycloned around Merik for him to finally make his move.

He flung up his hands. Air rocketed beneath him, beneath the Northman. They shot up from the waves.

Merik flung his hands down.

Water and bodies and Cleaved ripped backward, away from Merik and the Northman. Away from the blue light still glowing below.

Power, power, power.

This was what magic was meant to feel like—this was what it had always wanted to be. No Nihar rage to fuel it. No dark magic from the Fury to taint it. If only Merik had listened sooner. If only he had bothered to see.

“Down!” Merik warned. Then he punched his winds toward the blue light below, and he and the Northman flew.

In seconds, they landed before the blue light and the stone wall that surrounded it. Behind them and above, held back by a wall of winds, the water waited. The Cleaved struggled and clashed.

“Go,” Merik told the Northman, pointing at a doorway made of blue light.

But the Northman took no steps forward, and Merik supposed he could not blame him. So he took the enormous man’s hand in his own. Then he towed him toward the light.

“We go,” he said, attempting a smile. “We go.”

Together, they stepped through the doorway.

Together, they entered the mountain that everyone wanted to claim.





FORTY-NINE


Stupid as it might seem, Safi always told Iseult, stupid is also something they never see coming. Except this time, there was no Iseult to save Safi’s hide. To complete what she’d initiated. It was Safi and only Safi flying straight down toward Lake Scarza with Vaness right beside her.

The lake swallowed them. Light and heat tore against them—boiling in its ferocity, curls of flame to claw beneath the waves—and with no glamour to hide the sinking naval ship right before them.

Beside Safi, Vaness jolted to life. Mathew’s control had ended, and the Glamourwitch’s magic too, so there was no missing the blood pluming around her.

Safi frog-legged to her and then propelled them both toward the surface. Vaness tried to swim, to help Safi rise, but her legs tangled in their waterlogged gowns, which then tangled Safi too.

Safi pushed on, though, and she pushed through. Even as heat and light off sinking boats made it impossible to see where they were going. Even as her lungs ached from a breath held too long and the world heaved from the pressure gathering in her ears.

At last, Safi’s head broke the surface, and Vaness burst up beside her. But Safi had no idea where to go now, or what to do. They were caught between ships aflame and an island overrun by the enemy.

Vaness took charge. Despite the jagged wound across her face, she raised a single, weak arm upward.

A rope of iron shot off her wrist, looping around Vaness’s waist, around Safi’s. Then it yanked them toward shore.

“Hold on!” Vaness screamed.

Safi held on. The rope hauled them through smoke and bursts of fire, past ships and corpses, over waves building higher with each new explosion upon the lake. Vaness knew where to go, though, and eventually, both women were pulled beneath the surface once more.

Water and darkness rushed over Safi. The iron rope cut into her hips, her belly. She couldn’t see, couldn’t gauge where they traveled. All she knew was that it was down and that her lungs howled.

Then her trajectory changed. No more flying forward. She was abruptly jerked up, and somehow, the water charged even harder against her. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t move. Her fingers brushed rough metal, and she prayed it wasn’t a sinking ship.

Safi erupted from the water. Carried by iron, carried by magic, she hurled from the darkness and rammed onto a narrow lip of stone. Gasping, coughing, squinting.

“Sewer,” Vaness said eventually, between sputtering breaths of her own.

Well, that explained the smell. It also explained the rounded shape of the tunnel overhead, and the constant current of water rushing past. As Safi’s eyes adjusted, she spotted a single lantern flickering nearby, a single ladder moving into a new tunnel above.

It was the blood that caught Safi’s attention, though. It dribbled in spurts from the top of Vaness’s forehead down to the edge of her right jaw. A deep wound had rendered her right eye completely useless. The Empress clutched it, still breathing hard.

The stone lip around her was already stained red.