Page 129 of Witchshadow

“Lady Baile,” Ryber said. “Noden’s Right Hand. A saint in Nubrevna. A saint in Saldonica. The Paladin of Water.” She swiveled toward Stix. “You.”

Stix ran her fingers over the relief, exactly as she had only a month ago, when the voices had first started speaking and the memories had first started rising. This relief was in better condition than the one beneath Lovats. Water had not weathered this limestone, and no fungus called it home.

“Though we cannot always see,” Stix murmured, “the blessing in the loss, strength is the gift of our Lady Baile, and she will never abandon us.” Those were the words beneath every relief in Lovats, where Baile stood with a trout in one hand and wheat in the other. Her fox-shaped mask speckled with stars, and a moon passed over her.

They were not the words here. “Three rules has she,” Ryber read. “Our Lady of the Seas. No whistling when a storm’s in sight, six-fingered cats will ward off mice, and always, always stay the night for…”

She paused. For here the words were different than what was written elsewhere. “For Baile’s slaughtering,” she finished.

“Slaughtering,” Stix repeated. “Slaughter Ring.” She frowned at the relief, but Ryber had read it accurately. It saidslaughteringinstead ofSlaughter Ring.” What does it mean?” She glanced at the tabby, who ofcourse did not reply, and Ryber merely shrugged, a helpless movement. “Still no voices?”

“Of course not.” Although Stix wasn’t sure she needed them. She could sense, all on her own, that something critical was here—the missing shard to finally give her the full picture.

She’d whistled and summoned a sea fox. Not because she’d known that was what her whistle would do, but because she’d had a hunch guided by Kahina, the woman who kept flame hawks as pets.The Paladin of Fire.

And now, though the cat hadn’t exactly warded off mice, that six-fingered tabby had helped her escape the rats. Which left only one line in the poem that perhaps was not a poem at all.

“Always, always stay the night for Baile’s slaughtering,” Stix repeated. “Slaughter Ring. Slaughtering.” Her eyes lit on the moon shining above Baile’s head. Another difference between this relief and the one in Lovats. “Midnight?”

The tabby nuzzled against Stix’s calf with a purr.

“What happens at midnight?” Ryber asked, but Stix only shook her head. The answer was so close. Within reach. She just needed the proper angle. Just needed the proper words. Damn the voices for always going silent…

Baile would never forget the tide comes at midnight.

“Oh,” Stix breathed to the relief. “Oh.” Kahina had already given her the answer—and really, it had been there all along. The tidal river beneath the Ring. The condensation that lived on the stones. The humidity that breathed in the very air of Saldonica. Lady Baile had built her palace here for a reason; Stix had simply been unwilling to see.

Unwilling to accept she didn’t know everything already.

With that thought, the memories finally awoke. The stone room disappeared.

“Only in darkness can we understand life, and only in life can we change the world.” Stix frowns at the paper, a torn edge from Eridysi’s diary. The Sightwitch has gathered a whole stack of young Lisbet’s prophecies, and now she is laying them out, one by one, for Stix and Rhian, the Paladin of Fire, to see.

Rhian palms one of the papers, her muscled forearms rippling and her large, round eyes widening. “Six turned on six,” Rhian reads. “And made themselves kings. One turned on five and stole everything. It means we will die, doesn’t it?”

Eridysi cringes. “I hope not.” She rustles through the stack for severalmoments. She has never been the most organized person—her workshop always makes Stix’s fingers itch to move, to rearrange, to label. But eventually Dysi finds the page she needs and thrusts it toward Stix and Rhian. “Lisbet also said this, the next day. I don’t know if it’s a correction of what she said before or if it’s a new prophecy…”

Stix takes the page and reads aloud, “Six turned on six and made themselves kings. Five turned on one and stole everything.”

Rhian’s frown—a constant on her olive face these days—briefly smooths with surprise. “Perhaps there are two possible outcomes?”

“Perhaps.” Dysi shrugs. “When I ask Lisbet, all she will say is, ‘A good question, Dysi. A good one indeed.’”

Stix sighs. Why the Sleeper chooses to speak through an eight-year-old, she’ll never know—and why the goddess can’t speak more plainly is an old frustration, rounded at the edges.

“We need to go,” Rhian says, her fingers moving to Stix’s shoulder. A gentle gesture, for she knows how much Stix despises returning to Lovats’s court. The jade ring she always wears rubs against Stix’s silken sleeve. “The Exalted Ones will wonder where we are if we do not return soon. Lovats will wonder.”

Stix nods and lays the prophecy atop the others. Before she can exit Dysi’s workshop, however, the Sightwitch calls, “Wait. There’s one more. For you, Baile.” She gathers up Stix’s hand and curls a large page into her palm. “Like most of Lisbet’s declarations, I don’t know what it means. But perhaps you will. Perhaps one day it will save you.”

Stix bows her head. She will read it later, in privacy. Later when there is time.

It is several days before such a moment comes and she can tuck herself away in her quarters at Paladin’s Keep on the edge of Lovats’s lush granite city. On the top floor with the door locked and no one but her tabby to see, she unfurls the page—wrinkled from several days tucked within her bodice. Then she reads:

Three rules has she, our Lady of the Seas.

No whistling when a storm’s in sight.

Six-fingered cats will ward off mice,