Even the torches sputtered in their sconces.
“What’s that?” one of the sailors asked.
“It’s coming from the arena,” said another.
“Which is why we won’t go into the arena.” Lev pushed ahead and reached the forked pathway first. Then with a holler for everyone—“Hold up a moment”—she launched left into the darker tunnel.
The moments slid past, and everyone gathered at the fork. Safi’s pulse beat with the same rhythm as the vibrations through the stones—faster, faster—until she was certain the blackened hallway Lev had chosen was wrong, wrong, wrong.
She rounded on Caden. “Call her back. Something’s down there.”
“What—” Caden began.
Wrong, wrong. Safi shot past him, cupping her hands. “Lev! Come back!”
“Just a moment!” came the distant reply. “I see something—” Her words broke off, swallowed by an ear-splitting shriek.
Then orange light blazed at the end of the tunnel, and Lev’s voice came clattering down the stones: “FLAME HAWK! THEY HAVE A RUTTING FLAME HAWK! RUN!”
“Oh, shit,” Caden said. Or maybe that was the crew. Or maybe Safi herself had said it. She was certainly thinking it as she turned tail and ran as if demons of the Void were after her.
Flame hawks. Demons. Close enough.
Noise built behind her. A growing roar like a waterfall approaching fast. Except not. Definitely not, for waterfalls did not make the ground wobble or turn darkness into day.
Next came the heat. She felt it searing against her, clawing and nipping at her shoulders, long before the fiery glow caught up.
And when the glow did catch up—holy hell-gates, Safi had never run so fast in her life. She passed sailors, she passed slaves, she passed Caden and Zander, and oh, there was the empress, just stepping through a sunny doorway.
“RUN!” Safi screamed. She reached Vaness and clapped her hand on the empress’s arm. With all her strength, she shoved. Out the doorway, out of the flame hawk’s path.
Yet what Safi shoved herself and Vaness into wasn’t much better than the flame hawk. They had reached the arena.
All across the gravel-floored basin, Baile’s Slaughter rampaged. Lightning sliced out, singeing Safi’s cheek before it crashed against a stalagmite now punching up from the earth. A Stormwitch battling an Earthwitch. Excellent.
Safi vaulted left, scarcely avoiding a flurry of ice shards that were quickly sizzled up by a wall of flame. All lines had faded between friend and foe, slave and slaver, Red Sail and Baedyed. Everyone fought. Every single thrice-damned person alive in this arena grappled body to body, blade to blade, or magic to magic.
Oh, and there was the matter of the flame hawk. It had reached the arena’s surface and now careened from the tunnel in a streak of white heat.
Thank the gods Safi’s muscles were smarter than her brain, for at first sight of the beast—a streak of fire as long as a galleon with wings twice as wide—she would’ve happily stood there, awestruck.
Her legs, however, wanted to move. She dove for a stalagmite, but it crumbled the instant she got close. So she scrabbled on—cover, cover. She needed cover. For the hawk was circling now and screeching its rage to a keen, blue sky.
Then it folded its wings close and dove. Directly for Safi.
She tried to bolt, to duck, to wheel sharply aside, yet even as she evaded, she knew—in that base, survivalist part of her brain—that this wasn’t a creature one could escape by simply twisting fast.
Her hearing was swallowed by noise, her sight a raging inferno. There would be no escape. Not this time.
A body rammed into her from behind. She hit the ground, chin cracking hard on the gravel. “Close your eyes!” Caden shouted.
Safi closed her eyes. The flame hawk hit.
The old life ended.
When she was a child, Habim had told her that the Marstoks believed flame hawks to be spirits of life. Of birth. To meet a flame hawk—and to survive—was to be given a second chance. A new beginning. A clean break.
Safi believed it, for in that space between one heartbeat and the next, while the beast roared over her with light and heat and sound, Safi’s entire being focused into a flash of thought. A memory, sharpened like the finest of blades.
Everything you love, her uncle had said, gets taken away, Safiya … and slaughtered. But you will learn soon enough. In all too vivid detail, you will learn. Then he’d told her: If you wanted to, you could bend and shape the world. You have the training for it—I’ve seen to that. Unfortunately, you seem to lack the initiative.
Well, Safi was calling horse shit on that. She didn’t lack initiative—she was initiative. Through and through.
Initiate, complete.
Safi was ready to bend the world. Ready to break it.
And with that thought, a new life began.
The flame hawk shrieked past. Caden clambered off Safi’s back. Her hair was incinerated to half its length. And her gown had enormous holes along the edges.
Caden offered a hand. As before, his scars oozed with darkness that whispered of wrong. His pupils had spread to the limits of his irises.
“Next time,” he panted, the words mingling with shadows, “you see a flame hawk, how about not standing in its way.” He turned as if to stagger away.
But Safi’s fingers whipped out. She grabbed his noose and yanked him close. “What,” she hissed, “are you?” Even as she asked the question, the shadows were already receding. His irises were melting back into brown, and no more smoke-like darkness curled off his tongue.