He glanced back, squinting against the rain and hail. Then he ground to a halt. A cyclone, black and snaking, writhed across the lake. It moved impossibly fast toward Tirla.

In moments, it reached the ships, smashing through them as easily as a cleaver through bone. It was headed this way. It would reach Aeduan if he did not move.

He ran, pulling any magic he could find. Every ounce of his witchery, every drop of blood he drove into his muscles. Faster than before, faster than any human could run.

But it still was not enough. Nothing could outpace this cyclone. It was on his heels now. He could hear it getting closer, crushing buildings one by one. Great eruptions of wood and stone, and all while the winds screamed louder.

Aeduan could not escape it. His only hope was to take cover. Something stone, something strong. He dove sideways, aiming for the nearest building. Bodies, bodies—how were there so many bodies? He reached steps leading to a front door and dropped to the ground beside them. Then he curled into a ball and covered the back of his neck with his hands.

Wind crushed over him. Water gushed into his mouth. Hail the size of bricks punched against him, and he felt two ribs break. His left finger knuckles broke too. Any moment now, the full cyclone would hit him. The building above him would topple down. He wouldn’t die, but others would. Many others.

Except the attack never came.

Instead, the storm ended entirely. Between one shuddering breath and the next, the winds broke off. Hail stopped falling. Rain faded to quiet, a mere echoing throb in Aeduan’s ears. The eye of the storm, he thought, and he unfurled, ready to resume running.

Yet as he straightened, his broken ribs numbed by the Painstone, a blood-scent rippled into his awareness. Black wounds and broken death. Pain and filth and endless hunger.

Cleaving.

Instantly, Aeduan was on his feet, rounding backward. He unsheathed his sword, ready to face whatever madness now approached amidst the calm. When he turned, though, he did not find a man corrupted by magic. This man, towering and pale haired, strode toward Aeduan with clarity and purpose. His eyes shone black, rim to rim, and lines slithered across his skin. Yet with each step that he prowled closer, the more the darkness shrank.

Like maggots wriggling into a corpse, the shadows vanished. The cleaving scent vanished too, until all that remained was a young man whose blood smelled of rocky shores and gasping lungs. But there were other blood-scents tangled inside him, like a knot of worms pulled from the soil. Hundreds of them, too many for Aeduan to tease apart or catalog.

He’d never faced anything like it.

“Are you the Bloodwitch?” the man called in Nubrevnan, still approaching. His now-blue eyes scraped up Aeduan. Then down. “You certainly look like him.”

Aeduan sank into a fighting stance.

This only made the young man smile, a horrifying thing that stretched his face into inhuman proportions. Half his right ear was missing, blackened blood crusting the edges.

“Come no closer,” Aeduan called.

“Or what?” the man drawled, though he did at least pause his advance. “Your sword can do nothing to me. You should know this, Bloodwitch. Unless…” His head tipped sideways. He tapped his chin. “Unless your father hasn’t told you who I am.”

My father. Something dark and vile trickled over Aeduan’s skull.

The man laughed, a delighted sound. “I see from your face that he has not told you. Allow me to remedy that.” The man’s heels snapped together, his fist shot to his heart, and he bowed a Nubrevnan bow. “They call me the Fury. I have worked with your father for a long, long time—although I knew him as something else all those years ago. He still wears the same face.” The grin widened. “I do not.”

Incomprehensible words. They clanked around in Aeduan’s mind, useless.

“Your father sent me to find you,” the man went on, slinking a single step closer. “You were meant to check in weeks ago, Bloodwitch. He feared you dead, and yet…” The man opened his arms, thick eyebrows bouncing. “Here you are. And now it is time for us to go.”

“No.” Aeduan gave a curt head shake. “I have unfinished business in Tirla.”

“Which is?”

“How did you find me?” Aeduan countered.

“Easily.”

“And did my father tell you to destroy Tirla along the way?”

“This?” The man laughed, a throaty sound. “This is nothing, Bloodwitch. Where I travel, hurricanes reign.” He spun around, seeming to take in the destruction for the first time—and it only made him laugh louder.

The darkness spread down Aeduan’s neck. Voices were gathering, blood-scents too. As if people were stepping outside now, searching the streets for help. Some wailed, some screamed.

“Your father,” the Fury said, stopping abruptly, “will want to know what detains you. Do not make me return to him without an answer. He won’t like that. I won’t like that.”

“I will tell my father myself,” Aeduan said flatly. “Tell him that I will give him a full report when I return.”

“And when will that be?”

“Soon.”

Doors were creaking open. Footsteps splashing closer. More screams, more crying, more desperation to fill the city. Aeduan did not want to see what the Fury would do to anyone who came here.

“How many hours?” the Fury asked. “I can wait.”

“It will be days.”

Anger flashed across the man’s face now, and black lines hissed across his skin. “How many days, Bloodwitch? Stop evading my questions.”

“I do not know.”

A dry, vicious laugh, and the Fury pointed a crooked finger at Aeduan. “Then I do not know when I will return.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe next week.” He shrugged the other. “Or maybe tomorrow—and do not try to escape me, Bloodwitch. No matter where you go, I will find you. And if your business is not complete when I return, then you can be sure I will finish it for you.”

With those words, Lady Fate’s knife finally fell. A downward clunking of her will like an executioner’s blade. She was making Aeduan choose. Only one path lay before him now.

“It will be done,” he said because they were the only words he could say.

“Good,” the Fury replied. Black crisscrossed his face. Wind rushed in. Then a flash of lightning, hot and blinding, scored down. By the time Aeduan’s sight and hearing had returned, the Fury was gone.

TWENTY

Time had never moved so slowly as it did while Merik half tumbled, half ran, trying to move where Esme wanted him to go, except that he had no sense of where that might be until pain arced through him.

Mind-numbing flames meant he had gone the wrong way. Moderate bee stings meant he moved correctly.

Twilight held sway by the time the Poznin appeared before him, moonlit and shadowy against the horizon. A vast, swampy river oozed between Merik and the city’s fortified walls. Without human engineering and witches to hold back seasonal flows, the floodplain had grown and swallowed and consumed. Fifty years since the Republic’s downfall, and nature had staked its claim. Rooftops and crumbling walls thrust up from the waters.

Merik had no idea how he was going to cross the river, and the pain jangling along his spine was not helping.

There are bridges, Esme said, tone curious. Like she wondered what Merik might do.

“But,” he squeezed out, “they are all submerged.”

Then find the one that is not. And with that command, the pain reared back completely. He could think, he could breathe. He knew it wouldn’t last. He knew Esme was only playing games with him—experimenting, as she’d said.

Hell-waters, though, he welcomed the respite. And this time, he would not be so foolish as to run.

Merik picked his way along the marsh, following soft mounds of earth through sluggish waters, reeds and cattails, and though he was soaked through by the time he reached the bridge, it was better than swimming.

Marble bricks lifted from the river like a sea fox coiling from the sea, still intact even if it led to nowhere. The marble had once been white. Now it was nothing more than moonlit gray with algae and dirt clotted thick. At the center, two columns thrust up with storm hounds howling to the sky. One still had its head; the other did not.

At the end of the bridge, the marshes resumed more densely. Easier to muck through—but also more crowded with the ghosts of a fallen republic. Collapsed walls, decayed wood, stairs that led to nowhere. Historians claimed Poznin had once been a beautiful, flourishing city, but now it was nothing more than a corpse picked clean by the crows.