“Three,” chanted the crowd, watching the same rope Stix watched. “Two.” It was burning fast. The next white mark would be gone in …
“One!” The final fibers snapped. The flame hawk screamed its awful scream, and launched at Stix, fire winging wide. While it gained altitude and the crowd of the Slaughter Ring bellowed and bet and washed her in sound, Stix flung out her arms and summoned all the water she could find.
She didn’t have to think about it, the magic was simply there, just as it always was and always had been since she’d first discovered it ten years ago. Her father might call her boastful, but when she spoke of power, it was merely truth. If she called, the water answered—and in a place as humid as Saldonica, the air itself was laden with droplets for her to use.
Freeze, she thought, imagining ice. Becoming ice, from her toes to her white eyebrows. She was a winter wasteland, and this water would be too. Freeze. Fog formed around her. Thick, heavy fog that frosted the skin and hid Stix from view.
The crowd shrieked their approval.
Overhead, the flame hawk reached its zenith, flipped, and dropped fast. Its fire feathers whistled, its flame throat screeched. Stix sprinted through the fog, her already weak vision reduced to near invisibility. She should have taken the spectacles with her, but the risk of broken glass in her eyes had scared her. A mistake. She’d gotten too used to clear sight.
Heat thundered against her scalp. Light and sound seared in, and the flame hawk arrived. Claws out, gullet wide.
Stix shot sideways, a frantic flinging of her body while her magic scraped for water. Humidity turned to ice again, then those ice droplets thickened into shards.
She hit the ground next to a shredded dog from the previous fight. The stench of roasted innards filled her nostrils. A fraction of a heartbeat later, the flame hawk hit the earth too. The ground undulated; heat rolled across Stix. So dry, so close.
She sent her ice shards flying, already pushing to her feet and grasping for any other water she could find. She needed more than this. She needed a river, a pond, the bay beyond the Ring. She couldn’t snuff out eternal fires with only fog.
Stix resumed her sprint. The flame hawk had stopped its screaming, and the heat had faded. It must be on the rise for another attack.
She reached the wooden stall she’d entered by, knowing full well it would be locked now. Knowing full well that the guards would only laugh at her and wave their heated pokers in warning. She had watched enough of these fights to know the rules.
Arms rising as she pounded closer, she felt for a bucket of water that waited beside the door. The crowd blared their disapproval. They thought she was fleeing, and a tiny piece of her wanted to glare. She never backed down from a fight. Not at the Cleaved Man, not at sea, and most certainly not here.
She didn’t have to. She was a full Waterwitch. People ran from her.
In a vine-thin line of power, the water snaked up from the bucket and sliced through the tiny, barred window at the door. Then it was to her, then it was touching her—and just in time. The flame hawk had almost arrived. It barreled toward Stix, once more drowning everything in its violent heat.
Stix tossed her hands high, fingers shaped like claws, and the water obeyed. It split in two, forming arms like hers, yet with the fingernails hardened to ice. She jabbed out her left arm—quick, distracting—then followed up with a right power strike.
She’d always been proud of that punch. After all, it had earned her the title of Water Brawler at the Cleaved Man, and it had won her many a brutal fight.
Her water arced out, pure speed, pure power, and slammed into the flame hawk’s head. Where a true arm would stop, Stix’s water simply shot onward. A pillar of water to pound the hawk’s skull. To wash over it with targeted precision aimed right for the hawk’s eyes.
Where Stix turned it into a mask of ice. Suddenly the bird couldn’t see, and it toppled like a graceless fledgling to the ground. It slid toward Stix, heat coursing against her. Cotton burned, her hair singed, and her skin blistered. But she launched sideways before any real damage could be done.
The crowd erupted with delight, and Stix couldn’t help but revel in that sound. Just as she had at the Cleaved Man, even if her father told her it wasn’t seemly for a Sotar. She readied her second water whip for the final knockout …
And that was when it happened. Because of course that was when it happened: the voices returned and the memories punched into her. Hye, she had come here for those exact memories, those exact voices, but did they have to show up now?
“No,” Stix snarled, watching as the world dissolved around her. Listening as the crowd’s cheers fell away and the past shoved in. “No, no, no.”
But the old lifetimes didn’t care what Stix wanted. They had been waiting for her to come here, so now they had something to say. And as it always was, they spoke in a language she could not understand. A hundred languages all clashing together.
Stix didn’t need words to know they were angry. Come this way, keep coming, they seemed to cry. Come, come, come this way, keep coming. Light flickered at the edge of her vision, eating her sight like flames eat paper. Like this flame hawk would eat her. But she couldn’t see the bird anymore, for the past had arrived and it would not be ignored.
* * *
Her Heart-Thread is on fire, flames from an Exalted One named Lovats. Laughter from him too. “Food for my flame hawk. Food for my pet.”
Stix’s voice breaks as she begs Lovats to release Bastien.
“You should not have turned on us,” Lovats says in reply. “You should not have turned on me.”
Stix’s eyes meet Bastien’s eyes. “Blade,” he screams through the flames. “Use the … blade.”
* * *
The vision ended. The voices vanished. And Stix found herself on her knees with her face in her hands. She was weeping—but it was not her. It was the Old One. The one they adored here, patron saint of change, seasons, and crossroads. The one who lived inside of Stix along with so many other souls.
There was no time when the voices took control. Stix had learned that after the first intense memories had overwhelmed her—that whatever passage of time she might experience did not match the rest of the world. She might slip into a memory and half a day had passed, or she might drift off and it had been only breaths.
Right now, thank Noden, it seemed to be the latter. Stix dragged to her feet and faced the flame hawk again. Ice still covered its face; its body was still prone—though not for long. Smoke coiled into Stix’s nose.
She swung. Water loosed like an arrow, long and true. It hit the hawk’s feet, then circled and circled before finally cinching in place and freezing. The bird was stuck. The bird was masked. It could not even scream its defeat.
Stacia Sotar, the Water Brawler, had won her first Slaughter Ring.
* * *
Immediately after the fight, two guards escorted Stix to Kahina’s private box. Ryber was not allowed to join, and though she put on a good performance as a trainer offended by the separation, the guards were intractable.
When Stix arrived, she found Kahina alone, sprawled across her long chair. She seemed thoroughly disinterested as Stix was nudged to a floor cushion several steps away, as if she hadn’t invited Stix here at all. As if Stix was just another piece of furniture on her towering private space.