It worked.
A grin spread across her face as she sprinted through the trees. When the muscles of her legs began to grow tired, she felt a barely-perceptible shift. Yargen’s magic was in her bones. It was her flesh. The essence of the goddess was woven within her just as the power of the scythe was.
The trees were a blur and Vi was hardly breathless. She focused solely on heading to the southwest ridge as Deneya described. Vi skidded to a stop before she lurched through the treeline just east of Toris. Pressing herself against one of the tall trees, she crouched low, the leaves of the forest floor settling around her.
Vi squinted into the setting sun, focusing on the woman and young man speaking at the crest of one of the rolling hills that cascaded down to the humble fishing town. The woman sat on a rock, talking as much with her hands as her mouth, though Vi couldn’t make out the words. The sun glistened off the jewelry she wore, sparking in the light. Two large hoops pulled down her pointed ears. They were no doubt communication tokens, if the Adela of this world was anything like the Adela of Vi’s. The woman removed an earring and passed it to Fallor.
Vi scanned the surrounding hills.
The lone woman was high up—visible for a wide distance. Others were watching her, they had to be. But wherever her fellow pirates were hiding, Vi couldn’t see them.
Fallor talked with her for about an hour. At the end of their conversation, he tried to pass the token back to the pirate, but she refused with a sickeningly sweet smile. Anger flashed across Vi’s chest, bouncing between her ribs, making her breath hot. But she promptly squelched the feeling. This wasn’t her fight. She wasn’t here to help him.
She was here to get to Adela.
Yet… Vi saw someone else in Fallor. A young Jayme, impressionable and filled with hurt that Adela would fan into rage.
Fallor took to the skies with a pulse of magic. The woman watched the eagle, ignorant that someone else was watching her. Vi slid up the tree in tandem.
The pirate wasn’t a morphi, which meant she had to walk back to Adela. That meant there was a skiff somewhere nearby. Vi stepped from the trees and at the same time said, “Loft dorh.”
Immobilize.
The glyph that sparked at the tip of her pointed finger was no longer the bright white-yellow it had been. Now it was tinted with blue on the edges, glowing nearly the same color as crystals. Vi felt a surge of magic at her left. She could almost hear the inhale of a man emerging from his hiding place.
“Juth mariy.” An audiblecrackfilled the air as she destroyed the Lightspinner’s magic. There was one other pirate, at least. Vi began running toward the woman she had under her command.
She remembered holding Fallor withloft dorh. It had been a nearly impossible act. She’d keenly felt his every struggle against her magic tethers. But her grip now was so tight, the only thing Vi could feel was the woman’s panicked heartbeat under her grip.
A pulse of magic shot across the field.
The first pirate was a Lightspinner. The other was a morphi. Adela was nothing if not prepared.
Vi stopped her forward momentum, bracing herself as the morphi’s magic disruption washed over her. She focused on her glyphs. They wavered; the woman moved for a second as Vi’s control flickered. The pirate collapsed with a cry, but was then held in stasis again as Vi’s glyph sustained the shift.
Now, it was Vi’s heart that was racing. Her left hand burned with power from the glyph. Her bones singed against her muscles. She could feel Yargen within her, seeking release, seeking to be whole again, as Vi drew on the goddess’s essence.
“Get away from her!” a man shouted.
Vi didn’t give him a chance to say anything else, levying another “Juth mariy” in reply. There was another pulse of magic, and Vi’s glyphs nearly flickered out of existence. But they held enough for her to make it to the kneeling woman.
Ruthlessly, Vi grabbed the woman’s hooped ear and jerked her face forward.Loft dorhfaded. The woman was held in total shock of Vi standing over her. To the pirate’s eyes, Vi was a human who wielded Lightspinning that couldn’t be broken by the shift.
“Narro hath,” Vi uttered, almost with a sinister note.
She felt the magic spring to life, her suspicions confirmed. All their waiting and watching had paid off. Vi had finally tracked down the elusive pirate Adela.
No,more than that, she had initiated a direct communication with her.
“Adela,” Vi said sweetly, feeling the magic pull taut. “I have your crew. And while I know you don’t care all that much for their lives, I will tell you that I have something much, much better. Something that will make you rich beyond compare. Something that will ensure your name is uttered in fear and wonder by every child for thousands of years to come.
“Let me onStormfrostto parlay with you, and you’ll know what it is.”
Silence. Vi didn’t even hear the wind moving over the grasses or the other pirates readying their next attacks as she waited.
“And who are you?” Adela’s chilling voice was recognizable anywhere. Vi hated that it was as known to her as her own mother’s.
“Yargen’s Champion.” Vi smirked. “The one who broke your magic in Oparium.” Another pause. The other pirates stilled, some form of communication happening on the side. “Well? Don’t test my patience, pirate queen.”
