“We are at an interesting crossroads,” Corlant said over his shoulder. “You see, I need something done, and you need something hidden.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Corlant’s eyes flashed. “You seem to think you have more power than you actually do, boy.” He paused before an open door. Beyond, a set of stairs sank into filmy darkness below the earth. “You may be Ragnor’s son, but I have known Ragnor for far longer than you. When it comes to where his loyalties lie—”
“Neither of us,” Aeduan interrupted. “The king would sacrifice us both if it meant winning this war.”
Corlant sighed, a frustrated sound, before ultimately conceding, “You are right in that regard, boy. Which is all the more reason for us to cooperate. I need someone found. My men have had no success, but perhaps your … skills will prove more capable.”
Aeduan’s interest was piqued, for anyone this filthy priest wanted found was likely someone of interest—and likely a weakness for Corlant as well.
However, Aeduan forced himself to first ask, “What are my father’s orders?”
“To do whatever I need.” Corlant smiled.
Leaving Aeduan to imagine, once more, smashing the man like an earwig.
“What I need, boy, is for you to find a Nomatsi Threadwitch. Last I heard, she was in a town called Lejna on the Nubrevnan coast.”
Something dark and vile tickled over Aeduan’s skull. “Her name?”
“Iseult det Midenzi.”
The shadows spread down Aeduan’s neck. “Why do you want this girl?”
“That is none of your concern.”
Aeduan moved his hands behind his back, fingers curling into hidden fists. No expression on his face. “What can I know, then? Information helps me track people, and I assume, Priest Corlant, that you want this girl found quickly.”
Corlant’s eyebrows lifted, the three lines returning. “Does this mean we have a deal, boy?”
Aeduan pretended to consider the proposition. Four breaths passed. Then: “Is it not against your oath to work with someone of my … talents?” He didn’t want to declare his power aloud, not among people who opposed magic of any kind.
Corlant understood the implication, though, and anger flashed in his eyes. “You are unholy, yes, but you are also the king’s son—and just as you need something, I need something. I will tell the king your money arrived as planned, and in return, you will hunt down this young woman.”
Aeduan’s fingers flexed taut. The urge to freeze Corlant’s blood—to wrest the answers directly from his throat—pumped through Aeduan’s veins. Questions, however, would only raise more questions.
He nodded. “I understand.”
Corlant’s forehead smoothed out. “Excellent.” He smiled his foul smile and slid a hand beneath the collar of his robe, fumbling with some inner pocket, until at last he withdrew a sharp strip of iron.
A needle arrowhead. Nomatsi in style, and bloodied.
“This is her blood.” Corlant offered the iron to Aeduan, who accepted it, his face carefully impassive. “When you reach her, boy, you will not kill her. She has something that belongs to me, and I want it back. Now tell me, how long until you find her?”
“As long as it takes.”
The smile fell. “Then pray that it happens quickly, before my patience drains. Pray to the Moon Mother or the Cahr Awen or whomever it is you worship.”
“I pray to no one.”
“Your mistake.”
Aeduan pretended not to hear. He was already spinning away.
After all, he had no time for prayer. Particularly since he knew no one ever listened.
SIX
Merik’s steps were long and brisk as he followed Cam’s wet, fuzzy head into Old Town.
He still wasn’t used to her shorn hair—she’d chopped off the braids that all Nubrevnan ship boys wore only that morning. What’s the use in lookin’ like a sailor when I’m not one anymore? she’d asked on their ferry ride into the capital. Besides, this way, no one will recognize me.
Merik wasn’t so sure about that. Though he’d seen others with dappled skin, it was rare—and Cam’s lighter patches were especially pronounced against her dark skin. Plus, with that mangled scar on her left hand, she wasn’t a person one was likely to forget.
She kept her hood low like Merik did, as they trekked onward through storm-soaked streets. Here in Old Town, in the northwest corner of the city and miles west of Judgment Square, the buildings sagged in on each other. Four families were often crammed into a single narrow house, and the streets seethed with humanity. Here, Merik could find shelter and ready himself for the trip to Pin’s Keep.
Cam moved purposefully through traffic, her skinny legs nimble as a sandpiper’s. Having grown up on the streets of Lovats, she knew the best routes through town—and she had keen sense for when soldiers might appear.
Good thing, for soldiers strode everywhere, attempting to round up anyone with the Judgment Square tattoos beneath their left eyes. Every few blocks, Cam would twirl back, ready to guide Merik down a damp side street.
Even when there weren’t soldiers, she would twist into alleys or shadowy thoroughfares, until Merik finally caught sight of a familiar building.
“Stop,” he ordered. “We’re going in there.” He pointed to a narrow row house. Its sign declared a toy shop within, but its closed shutters suggested something else. “It’s tenements now,” Merik told Cam, as if this explained why they had come here.
It explained nothing, but Cam didn’t ask for more. She never asked for more. She trusted her former admiral, former prince, even when Merik so clearly lacked any real plan. Any real clue.
Merik was the fish from the fable, lured into the cave after Queen Crab’s gold, and Cam was the blind brother who followed happily. Foolishly. Right into the clacking maw.
Inside the decrepit shop, Merik sidestepped playing children and stretched his legs over huddled, hungry grandmas. It was far more crowded than the last time he’d come here, the hallway having become a living space of its own. An extension of each makeshift home.
Food is coming, Merik wanted to tell them, for no matter what Vivia had declared to him weeks before, he didn’t believe that Nubrevnans would refuse food simply because it hailed from one of the empires.
Merik’s thighs burned as he and Cam ascended three floors. He savored that pain, for it distracted him from what waited ahead.
And it reminded him that he could be truly dead. That he owed every of inch of his still living skin to Noden’s beneficence and Cam’s prophetic gut.
My gut, she’d told Merik after she’d first found him. It always warns me when danger’s coming, and it ain’t steered me wrong yet. It was exactly the sort of nonsense Merik was inclined to dismiss … Except that Cam’s gut was the sole reason Merik still lived, and that mysterious organ had saved their skins at least six times on the journey to Lovats.
“Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen,” Cam counted behind him. Each step got a number, and each number was breathier than the last. The girl’s shoulders had started poking through her shirt these past few days, and Merik hadn’t missed how Cam divvied out the bulk of their rations to Merik. Although he always argued that they should each get half, he suspected she didn’t always obey.
Cam hit twenty-seven, and she and Merik shuffled onto the top floor’s landing.
Twelve more steps down the crowded hall brought them to a low pine door. After a cautious glance up the hall and down the hall, Merik set to tapping a lock-spell rhythm on the frame.
His heart thumped faster. The wood melted into a distant, fuzzy grain.
Then the spell clicked. An iron bolt within slid free, and Merik found himself immobile, staring at the latch. At the familiar dent in the wood below it.
He couldn’t do this. He’d thought he could face it, but now that he was here, it was a mistake.
“Sir,” Cam murmured, “are we going in?”
Merik’s blood was thu
dding like a hurricane in his ears. “This was … Kullen’s.”
“The first mate’s.” Cam dipped her head. “I guessed as much, sir.”
In a burst of speed, Merik pushed open the door and charged inside. His eyes met the familiar space, and he listed sharply forward, only to freeze, tilted. Hanging in midair like a corpse forgotten at the noose.
A single beam of light crawled into the room from a narrow window. Almost cheerfully. Certainly mocking, it whispered over wide-plank floors, red-washed walls, and exposed low beams.
Too low for Kullen to ever move comfortably about. He’d knocked his head on them every time he’d passed through, just as he had on the Jana. Just as he had in the cabin he’d grown up in on the Nihar estate far to the south.
“Come, sir.” Cam’s calloused hand settled on Merik’s arm. “People are watching. We oughta shut the door.”
When Merik didn’t move, Cam just heaved him forward two paces. A loud thump shook through the room, and power frizzed behind Merik as the lock-spell resumed.
“Ignite?” There was a question in Cam’s tone, as if she hoped the lamps looping over the low beams were Firewitched. They were, and at the voiced command, they brightened to life, revealing a dining area to the left.
Books were strewn across every surface. Each cover a different color or a different animal hide, and each spine with a different title stamped into it. Books in the cupboard, books on the table, books stacked on three mismatched chairs.
One chair for Kullen. One chair for Merik. And one chair, the newest of the three, for Kullen’s Heart-Thread.
Ryber. Merik’s chest tightened at that name—at the beautiful black face it conjured. She had vanished after Kullen’s death, leaving Merik with nothing but a note. While it was true that Merik had never grown close to her, never quite understood what she and Kullen shared, he would’ve welcomed having Ryber with him now. At least then one other person might understand what he was feeling.
Merik’s gaze tilted right, to where Cam waited warily several steps behind.
“I can leave you alone, sir. If you want. Maybe go find us a real meal.” She clutched at her stomach, which showed just how inverted her belly had become. “Don’t know about you, but that lamb didn’t fill me.”
“Hye,” Merik breathed. “There should be … martens…” His words faded off. He stumbled to the bed. Unmade and with more books tossed everywhere.
Tucked beneath the pillow was a coin purse from which Merik withdrew a single silver marten. But Cam’s head wagged; her cheeks turned starfish red. “I can’t use that, sir. People’ll think I stole it.” She waved at her dirty clothes, as if this explained everything.
Merik supposed it did. “Right.” He dug deeper into the purse until he found a wooden marten. Then two more. “Here.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll be back soon.” She banged a fist to her heart, then waited for a dismissal. A reaction. Something.
Merik had nothing to give. He was a well run dry. No fury. No magic. Just …
Nothing.
He turned away, and Cam took the hint. Moments later, magic hissed behind Merik as the door opened, closed. He was alone.
He aimed for the dining area. Toward the books atop the table and chairs. Ryber had turned Kullen into a reader, beginning with a book gifted to him early in their courtship. The Airwitch had gone from reading nothing in his life to never stopping, buying every novel or history book he could get his hands on.
And it was the only subject he and Ryber ever discussed. Constantly, they hunched over a shared book or debated the finer points of some philosopher Merik had never heard of.
Merik’s attention snagged on one spine now, a familiar title he’d seen Kullen reading on the Jana only hours before his death.
The True Tale of the Twelve Paladins.
Merik’s breath caught. He yanked it off the table in a rasp of leather, a puff of dust. He peeled back the cover …
Different copy. He exhaled—hard. This edition had a torn first page; the one on the Jana had been smooth. And this one had white dust on the pages, paragraphs underlined and sentences circled, where the copy on the Jana had been clean.
Of course it was a different copy. The one on the ship was now ash—and even if it had somehow been the same edition, it would have made no difference. A book could not replace a Threadbrother.
Merik let the pages fall open naturally, to where a gold-backed card winked up at him. He peeled it over. The King of Hounds. It was from the taro deck Ryber always carried—that much he could recognize—and beneath it was a circled paragraph: The paladins we locked away will one day walk among us. Vengeance will be theirs, in a fury unchecked, for their power was never ours to claim. Yet only in death, could they understand life. And only in life, will they change the world.
Well, Merik was neither truly alive nor truly dead, so where did that leave him? No ship. No crew. No crown.
But with a clue to follow. A link between the assassin named Garren and Vivia, and a first step toward proving the princess was behind the explosion, the attack. Surely with such evidence, the High Council would never allow Vivia to rule.
Merely thinking of Vivia sent a fresh wave of heat down Merik’s spine. It radiated into his arms and fingers. Burning, violent, delicious. All these years, Merik had tried to tame the Nihar rage. Tried to fight the temper that had made his family famous and uncrossable. After all, it was his temper that had propelled him into the Witchery Examination too young—that had convinced King Serafin Merik was more powerful than he truly was.
And all these years, Merik had tamped down the anger in an attempt to be as unlike Vivia as he could be, yet where had it gotten him?
It hadn’t saved Kullen from his own storm.
It hadn’t saved Safiya fon Hasstrel from the Marstoks.
And it sure as Noden’s watery Hell hadn’t saved Nubrevna from starvation and war.
So Merik embraced the rage. He let it course through each of his breaths. Each of his thoughts. He could use the anger to help his hungry city. To protect his dying people.
For although the holiest might fall—and Merik had fallen far, indeed—they could also claw their way back up again.
* * *
The fourteenth chimes were ringing on stormy winds by the time Vivia found a moment to herself to trek beneath the city, deep into the core of the plateau.
Vivia had come here every day, without fail, for the past nine weeks. Her routine for each visit was always the same: check the lake, then search the tunnels for the missing, mythical under-city.
Vivia had left the Battle Room to find chaos. Wind-drums pounded the alarm for help in Judgment Square, and a full riot was under way by the time she arrived.
After an hour of ineffectually trying to wrangle escaped prisoners back into the irons, the sky turning darker and darker each minute, Vivia had ordered the soldiers to stop.
There was no point, not once the rain began to fall. Most people in the irons had committed crimes solely for the purpose of getting arrested, led by some misguided belief that if they could somehow get into prison, they could enjoy two meals a day. But the Lovats prison was already full, and so these fake, desperate criminals were left to time in the irons instead—where, of course, there was no food.
Still, a few dangerous convicts remained on the loose. Not to mention this new beast of a man who had freed the prisoners in the first place.
“The Fury,” Vivia whispered to herself as she hiked deeper underground. It was such a stupid thing to call oneself, and just begging for the Hagfishes’ wrath. While those people in Judgment Square might have been gullible enough to believe Noden’s vengeful saint had come to rescue them, Vivia knew whoever he had been, he was just a man.
And men could be found. Arrested. Hanged.
She stalked faster. This far beneath the surface, the air never warmed and few creatures lived. Vivia’s lantern light crawled over rough limestone tunnels. One after the next. Nothing like the
symmetric brick-lined Cisterns above, where sewage and Waterwitched plumbing moved. Whenever Vivia hauled herself back to the surface, dust would streak her skin, her hair, her uniform.
Which was why she always kept a spare uniform waiting in her mother’s garden, tucked in a dry box. She also always worked alone, for these honeycombing caves were forever empty, forever secret. As far as Vivia was aware, she was the only person alive who even knew this world of magic and river existed.
Or so her mother had told her before bringing Vivia down here fifteen years ago. Jana had still been queen then, ruling and in power. The madness—and the High Council—had not yet taken her crown. This is the source of our power, Little Fox, she had told Vivia. The reason our family rules Nubrevna and others do not. This water knows us. This water chose us.
Vivia hadn’t understood what Jana had meant back then, but she understood now. Now, she felt the magic that bound her blood to these underground waterways.
She marched into the final tunnel, where an ancient Firewitched lamp warmed her vision. Brighter than her lantern, it made her eyeballs pound.
Keep moving. At least here, she wanted to keep moving. Here, she could stare into the darkness beyond, and it didn’t matter if her mother stared back.
Inky water spanned before Vivia for as far as her squinting eyes could see. A vast lake where miles of underground river fed and flowed, a heart inside the Lovats plateau. This was where Nubrevna’s true power lay. This was where the city’s pulse lived.
On the lake’s shore rested the skeletal ribs of an ancient rowboat, where Vivia always set her lantern and draped her clothes—and where she did so now, starting with the linen strip of iris-blue wrapped around her biceps.
Protocol demanded all men and women in the Royal Forces wear these mourning bands until the funeral, but they were a nuisance. A lie. Most of the troops had never known their prince, and they’d certainly never cared for him. Merik had grown up in the south, and unlike Vivia, who had risen through the ranks by her own sweat, her own strength, Merik had been handed a ship, a crew, and shiny captain’s buttons.
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