Minya’s brows knit together, then fell smooth as her face blanked with shocked recognition. Her ghosts paused, all as one, including Sarai. Lazlo had just reached her. He saw her expression freeze.
Nova saw, too. All the soldiers stopped moving at precisely the same moment, and, in a flash, she understood. Just like that, the army’s orchestrated movements made sense. This enemy she couldn’t hurt, these smoke soldiers she couldn’t stop, they belonged to this fierce little creature. They were doing her bidding. This was her magic.
And suddenly, this unstoppable foe wasn’t unstoppable anymore. With a pirate’s smile of vicious delight, Nova reached out and stole Minya’s gift.
Chapter 45
If Stabbing Were a Dance
There was no way Nova could have known.
Nothing could have prepared her. She was a pirate, her gift rarer than rare, her magnitude off the charts. She’d ripped power from elementals, shape-shifters, war witches. She’d fought duels and battles and never been bested. But seizing this gift, she found out at once, was like taking hold of a mountain, and with a sharp little tug, pulling it down on her own head.
It was impossible, the weight of it. A wave of blackness rolled across her vision, threatening to churn her under. She fought it with every fiber of her being, knowing that if she lost consciousness now, she would never regain it.
With an effort of will that burst stars across her vision, she fought her way free of the dark. Staggering, she stared at the little girl in the doorway and couldn’t fathom how she could hold such power. It was so much heavier than any gift she’d ever taken. She could feel it burning through her as though she were a candlewick. How was it possible for such a tiny thing to bear such magic and not be consumed?
…
If Nova was stunned by the weight of Minya’s power, Minya was stunned by its loss.
She had gathered her souls one by one over years. The weight had built up gradually, and she’d built up a tolerance with it. She didn’t know what she carried until it lifted. She didn’t know that she was crushed until she wasn’t. She couldn’t remember what it had been like before, when she was just a girl, and not an anchor for ghosts. She wasn’t like the others, using her magic only as needed—to light a fire, catch a cloud, send out moths, or grow the garden. She was using it all the time. If she let up, her ghosts would evanesce. There was no drawer she could put them in to give herself a rest, no hook she could tie their tethers to, to keep them in the world. It was just her, and the fist she imagined in her mind, with all those fine gossamers clutched in it.
Even in her rare snatched moments of sleep, she held on to them. She’d grown up under the burden of them—or rather, she’d not grown up. Minya used up every ounce of her energy in this colossal, incessant expenditure of power. She spent too much. She spent everything, and had nothing left over to grow on.
She was a candlewick, and her power was a fire burning her up every moment. But she was a candlewick that, by sheer cussedness, refused to be consumed.
Nova felt as though a mountain fell on her. Minya felt the same weight lift. The strain evaporated. As lungs fill with air, her body filled with life. She was as light as a dust mote, as buoyant as a butterfly. And it wasn’t just the weight of the souls, but the incessant drag of their hate-fear-despair. All that clamor and misery cut off, and the quiet of its absence was as soft as velvet, and as deep and rich as the night sky.
She felt reborn. For a brief, amazed moment, she felt something like peace.
Then the panic set in. She was powerless. Her army was her might. Without it she was naught but bird bones and rage.
Minya and Nova faced each other across the heart of the citadel—the one stripped of magic, the other overwhelmed. The ghosts, for the moment, were still, as Nova grappled to bear up under the threatening tide of darkness. She had no choice but to let go of the other gifts she was holding, though she knew that once she did they would be turned against her. She released Rook’s first, but not until after she severed the time loop and set Eril-Fane and Azareen free.
She didn’t have to. She could have left it to keep on going and going, and would have, but she saw that Rook was regaining consciousness, and she knew that if she didn’t break the loop, he would.
The thing about Rook’s time loops: They didn’t have to be opened in the same place as they’d been closed. That was the true beauty of his magic. It was for more than repeating an event over and over, or glutting a grieving goddess on vengeance. It was for reaching back in the flow of time—ten seconds at the most, but ten seconds could be everything—and saying: No. I don’t want that to happen. And fixing it so it didn’t.
Nova had made the loop after the stinger sliced through the two bodies. But she could, if she chose, break it open before. Rook would,
if it were up to him.
Eril-Fane and Azareen could have lived.
But Nova had no mercy. Even under the crushing avalanche of Minya’s magic, she held out for a second, then another, until the stinger cut its path, and blood painted its pattern, and the damage was done. Only then did she slash the loop so the bubble vanished and the capsule of trapped time spilled back into the flow, Eril-Fane’s and Azareen’s lives spilling with it.
As soon as it was done, she let Rook’s gift go, and felt a scintilla of relief.
The others all saw what happened. No matter how terrible the loop, as long as the warriors kept coming back to life, there had been some hope, and now it was lost. This time when they slumped over, it was final. They didn’t rise. Their blood flowed only outward, and there was just so much of it. Suheyla let out a cry and sagged against Feral, weeping. Lazlo stood with Sarai, who was frozen along with the rest of the ghosts. It was Sparrow who pelted down the walkway, heedless of danger, to try to press on the wounds as the warriors bled out.
Nova let go of Ruby’s and Feral’s gifts next, and they felt their return like missing pieces slammed back in place, and immediately called on them. Ruby kindled fireballs, and Feral clawed a thunderhead out of a far-off sky. Sarai’s gift returned, too, but it was useless as a weapon, even if she hadn’t been frozen with all the ghosts.
Nova struggled to wield Minya’s power. It was so big it was like trying to ride a wild creature that wanted to swallow her whole. She knew she couldn’t keep it, or it would annihilate her. And she couldn’t let it go, or the little girl would. The solution was simple. She’d done it countless times before, starting back at the beginning, with Zyak and Shergesh.
She managed to turn some of the ghosts toward Minya. She made them raise up their knives.
Minya’s eyes grew wide, and in a startled split second she got an inkling of the powerlessness she had inflicted on others. If stabbing were a dance, it would look like this: a score of blades flashing in flawless unison. They had her surrounded. She stood there, stunned, as they arced toward her.
Lazlo didn’t think. He just moved. He grabbed her from behind and turned away, holding her like a doll against him. His linen shirt stretched taut across his shoulders as he curled over her to shield her with his body.
To shield her with his own body.
Sarai, unable to move, watched the blades stammer to a halt mere inches from his back.
Nova almost didn’t manage to stop them. The effort used up the last of her strength the way a gasp uses up breath. She felt the rumble of thunder, saw the flash of a fireball, and knew time was up. She had to end this. Now.
…