Once, as a girl, Stix had been swimming on the beach when fire had suddenly wrapped around her arm. It had moved down her torso and onto her leg, a spiraling line that had quickly flamed throughout her body from a jellyfish tentacle tangled across her skin. The jellyfish itself was gone, but the danger of its tentacle had lived on. A tiny, autonomous weapon that had needed no master to ensure pain.

The blister on Stix’s thumb was the same. A fire so sudden, so pronged, Stix didn’t react at first. Even when it spread across her body, too fast for her mind to follow, she was locked in place by shock.

Until suddenly, exactly as had happened on that day paddling through the waves, she was screaming and clawing and crumpling in on herself. And this was worse—so, so much worse—for no amount of wriggling or scratching could remove it.

She fell to the earth, vision blurring beneath pain. She thought she was screaming, but she couldn’t be sure. All she knew was agony.

When at last the magic flames receded, Stix found herself supine across the mud with Kahina gazing down. “My pet and I went all the way to that damnable mountain, Water Brawler, and all the way into that room of which you spoke, so imagine my consternation when there was no broken blade nor broken glass upon a pedestal. There were only the ghosts from our past, still whispering of treachery. A new treachery. Your treachery.

“Now I will give you a second try to do this properly: where are the blade and glass?”

“No,” Stix rasped.

Kahina’s face twitched at that word—a movement Stix would never have detected without her spectacles. As it was though, she saw the creasing around Kahina’s eyes. Awkward lines that she didn’t use often because she was not a woman used to disappointment.

The expression departed as quickly as it had come, and with it came a false calm. A loosening in her limbs as she emptied her pipe onto the mud. Tap-tap-tap. Ash floated down near Stix’s head. “I had hoped we would not come to this, Water Brawler. I had also hoped you would be the one I thought you were, but…” A brittle smile. “I should have realized the truth of you. Baile would never forget the tide comes at midnight. Bring her out!”

It took Stix a moment to realize Kahina didn’t shout her final words at Stix. That they were instead directed toward the wooden stall, to where a figure with broad shoulders now formed in the shadows.

The Hammer emerged a moment later, and stumbling behind him, her mouth and hands gagged by stone, was Ryber.