Page 132 of Bloodwitch

Never had Pin’s Keep been so quiet. Never had Vivia felt so many eyes upon her inside these stone walls. This was her haven. This was her den, and this moment was worse than the opening of the under-city. Now she had to lead. Now, pretty speeches wouldn’t be enough.

She stood at the front of the main space, atop a footstool so she could scan and assess. Count and quantify. Before her stood soldiers, sailors, guards, and anyone who was willing to defend Lovats and defy Serafin Nihar.

There weren’t many of them. Three hundred, Vivia estimated, and they were woefully underarmed and underarmored. She still had time, though, to find more fighters and equip them as best she could. The Royal Navy and Soil-Bound forces her father had sent north would slow the Raider King, even if Vivia did not believe they could stop him.

Noden curse her, she’d thought her list of tasks long yesterday. Now it ran for two pages, scribbled quickly onto a paper taken from her office overhead, and as she scanned the main room, she continued scrawling more. No real order to the list; simply what came to her as she assessed readiness.Whetstones. Fletching. Lanolin. Boots. Painstones. Gauze.On and on and on.

Once she had finished her furious writing, she stepped off the stoolto hand the list to Vizer Sotar’s head guard, an older woman with a sharp chin and sharper eyes.

Except before she could touch down, the earth jolted. A hard heaving that shuddered through the Keep, through Vivia’s knees. Her arms windmilled. She fell toward the shaking wall—and a second judder hit. Then a third and fourth, closer together until everything simply shook.

Then as fast as the quake had come, it quelled. A slow dissolution of movement that eventually ended in calm. Not without damage, though. Already, Vivia heard shouts from the Skulks. Shouts from the cellar of Pin’s Keep.

And for half a breath, all Vivia wanted to do was scream. Did she not have enough to do? Had Noden and his Hagfishes not already dragged her peoplefar enoughbeneath the waves?

Then Vizer Sotar’s head guard was there, helping Vivia to rise. Dust coated the woman’s face. The whole room had clouded to gray. “The under-city,” Vivia said. “We must check the under-city.” She did not wait for an acknowledgment before turning toward the next person within reach—Vizer Sotar himself. “The streets,” she barked at him. “Get people into the city to check for damage—”

“Sir!” A voice slashed through the room, high-pitched and strained. Then louder, “SIR.”

Vivia turned, terrified by what such urgent shouts might mean. Terrified what damage this person would report to her. What she found, though, was a boy staggering her way. Familiar and young with dark eyes bulging and dappled brown skin flushed to russet.

She knew him… Sheknewhim, but Noden save her, she couldn’t recall from where.

“Sir,” the boy repeated once, stumbling right up to Vivia. He was covered in white dust, as if he’d just come from the underground mid-quake—and he was unconcerned by the guards moving to stop him.

“Sir,” he said once more, and this time, he doubled over.

Vivia lurched forward and caught him before he could collapse. His skin was damp and chalky.

“First… Mate,” he panted, dragging up his gaze to meet Vivia’s.Even his lashes were thick with dust. “I mean,CaptainSotar… sent me.”

Stix.Vivia’s breath hitched. Cold doused her. “What is it? Where is Stix?”

But the boy only shook his head, a desperate movement. “It’s the… the raiders, sir.” He coughed, one hand clutching tighter and tighter onto Vivia’s arm.

And distantly, she realized the whole room had fallen silent again. It was as still as the open sea before a storm.

“The raiders… are coming,” the boy finished at last.

“I know,” Vivia tried to say, but the boy shook his head harder.

“And they’re coming through the under-city.Soon,sir. So you gotta… you gotta empty it. And then you gotta defend… the door.”

Now it was Vivia’s turn to shake her head. The boy made no sense. Where had he even come from? “What door?” she asked. “And where is Stix?”

“Thedoor,” the boy insisted, voice pitching higher. “Underground, sir. I’ll… I’ll show you.” He pulled away, already rising and turning, as if to race for the cellar.

And that was when Vivia noticed the bloodied bandage on the boy’s left hand. That was why she knew him. He had been with Merik in the under-city.Cam,Merik had called the boy—though Vivia had foolishly mistaken him for a girl two weeks ago.

Yet that didn’t explain how Cam had ended up with Stix. Nor where Stix was now—nor whatanyof what the boy was saying actually meant.

Before she could press him or even stand to follow, he added, voice low and private, “I was supposed to tell you somethin’ else, sir. Something to make you believe Captain Sotar really sent me and that raiders are really coming. She said, ‘Noden and the Hagfishes ought to bend to a woman’s rule.’”

At those words, a dullness settled over Vivia. An icy, seeping weight that numbed her limbs and brain.So this is what drowning feels like,she thought, and now she knew that she’d reached the last of the sunlight, the last of her air.

FIFTY-TWO

Merik’s body was pummeled, his mind stretched long, his magic shrunk down to a pinprick yet somehow inflated to enormity at the same time.