Windwitch

by Susan Dennard

  Vaness took the same approach. She never spoke. She never reacted, despite her heavy collar. Despite the mosquitoes that feasted on her more than anyone else. Despite the fat hives that welled up across her arms and legs from each bite.

  Safi almost wept at the arrival of dawn, when the jungle took hold once more, and as soon as they reached signs of humanity, she found her chest truly expanding. Her eyes stinging with tears.

  She no longer wanted to escape. She simply wanted to stop.

  They were at a cluster of huts beside a sluggish river, over which a wood-slatted bridge stretched. Beyond, a full city waited, surrounded by marble ruins stained brown with jagged edges and cooking fire smoke reaching for the sunrise.

  Safi wanted to enter that city. The Hell-Bards wanted to enter that city. The empress of Marstok, however, did not. She dug her heels into the dark road and barked, “You cannot take me there.”

  Her gaze swung back to the commander, even as Zander tried to yank her along. “That’s Baedyed territory, and I will die if I enter.”

  A flick of the commander’s wrist told Zander to stop hauling the empress onward, and everyone paused at the boundary between nature and civilization.

  “How do you know it’s the Baedyeds in there?” The commander’s voice was strained, drawing Safi’s eyes to his shoulder. Yet if he felt any pain, his posture betrayed nothing.

  Vaness glowered at a banner hanging atop the ruin walls. Green with a golden crescent—almost identical to the Marstoki naval standard … yet not. “The serpent around the moon,” Vaness explained, “is the emblem of the Baedyed Pirates.”

  “Well,” the commander mused aloud, “that’s the only way I know into the Pirate Republic of Saldonica, so that’s the way we will be taking.”

  “They will kill me on sight.” Vaness’s words, her face—they exuded panic and terror. Yet the truth grated against Safi’s magic, prickling gooseflesh down her muddied arms.

  The empress was lying.

  Instantly, Safi was alert. The exhaustion, the burning muscles, the thirst all scurried away in a great upward rush of interest. The empress saw something, some chance for escape, and Safi tried to think back to all the lectures she’d endured on the warship. There had been something about the Baedyeds, hadn’t there?

  Hell-gates claim her. Mathew had been right all these years—Safi should have learned to listen better.

  With a long inhale, Safi warped her face more deeply into exhaustion. She might not know what game was up, but she could still play along.

  “Why should Baedyeds want you dead?” Lev asked.

  “Because a century ago my ancestors were at war with their ancestors. When the Baedyeds lost, they were forced to join the Marstoki Empire. Some of the rebels never stopped the fight, and they formed what are now the Baedyed Pirates. Ever since, those Pirates have had a kill order on my family.”

  For several long breaths, Caden’s attention flicked from Vaness to the bridge to his Hell-Bards. Vaness, bridge, Hell-Bards. Then he sighed. “Gods thrice-damn me,” he muttered at last. “I hate politics.”

  “Yet,” Vaness said, standing taller, “that will not change the fact that the Baedyeds want me dead.”

  Lie, lie, lie.

  “Nor,” the commander shot back, “will it change the fact that this is the only entrance. The Red Sails are to the north, and they will kill us all on sight. Or they’ll sell us to the arena, in which case we’ll still die, just in a more painful manner.”

  “There is another entrance, sir.” Zander’s soft rumble was almost lost to the jungle’s endless song. “It’s a bigger bridge. More traffic. Easier to enter Baedyed territory unseen.”

  “That won’t be enough,” Vaness insisted. She puffed out her chest, tossing a wide-eyed look to each Hell-Bard. Pleading, scared, and absolutely false. “I am worth more to you alive than dead.”

  “You aren’t the first person to say that.” The commander breathed those words with such weariness that despite everything inside her, a flash of pity ignited in Safi’s belly.

  Until she recalled the meaning behind his words. He referred to heretics. Heretics he’d killed.

  “But for once,” Lev offered hesitantly, “it’s actually true. She is worth more to us alive than dead.”

  “Fine. Fine. Good enough.” A sigh from the commander. “We’ll take your way into the Republic, Zander, and then we can finally get on our ship and leave this place far behind. Lev, give the empress your helmet.” Caden pivoted toward Safi, yanking off his own steel helm. “I will give mine to the heretic.”

  Caden plunked it over Safi’s head before she could recoil. Heat, darkness, and the stink of metal and sweat crashed over her. Yet she didn’t argue or protest, even as her vision was cut in half, even as the world took on a ringing, echoing quality. And even as Caden shoved her into a hard pace through the jungle.

  None of that mattered, for Vaness seemed to have a winning taro card up her imperial sleeve, and when she played it, Safi had to make sure she was ready.

  SIXTEEN

  Vivia did not appreciate being awoken before the sun began its ascent.

  Especially not by Serrit Linday.

  It didn’t help that her skull was pounding—or that her rib cage felt carved out and hollow. Three hours of broken sleep had done nothing to dull the darkness that had closed her day.

  First, Vivia had gone to Pin’s Keep to find her office in tatters. No one knew why. No one knew how. Stix had been there, they all said, yet no one had seen the first mate in hours.

  So Vivia had waited for Stix. Well past midnight she’d stayed in her office, first cleaning, then checking records. Then simply staring out the window. But the first mate had never shown, so Vivia had shuffled back to the palace alone.

  Each step had been worse than the last, for Vivia could guess exactly where Stix was. No doubt, the first mate had found someone to warm her bed. Yet again. And no doubt, that person was beautiful and charming and buoyant in a way that Vivia never could be.

  Now, here Vivia was, tired and aching and following Serrit Linday through his family’s greenhouse with twelve Royal Forces soldiers tromping behind. Magnolias shivered in the corner of her vision, so bright. So out of season.

  The power of a Plantwitch, she thought, and fast on its heels came a second: Why does Serrit have to be so selfish? We could use this space to grow food—we could use his magic too.

  Yet for all the lushness here, there was also no missing the damage. Entire hedges were smashed, and flowerbeds trampled to mush. Nothing at all like the last time Vivia had visited. Ages ago, it seemed, though it had really been only five years.

  Serrit had confessed feelings Vivia knew he didn’t have. She had seen in her own father just how men wielded lies and marriage to win power. Her friendship with Serrit had dissolved from there.

  Vivia forced away that memory, squaring her shoulders and smoothing her captain’s coat. Two paces ahead, Linday’s feet limped unevenly over the gravel pathway that led to the greenhouse’s center.

  He glanced over his shoulder, fretting with the high neck of his robe as he did so. “I deeply appreciate you looking into this, Your Highness.” Nothing in his tone sounded grateful, and he was being unusually whiny. “The princess herself coming here. What an honor.”

  Princess. Vivia felt the barbs on that word. A reminder that she was still not queen, for of course Linday and the rest of the Council wouldn’t permit her to claim her rightful title.

  She let frustration flash across her face. “Of course, my lord. I would do no less for any of my vizers.”

  “Oh?” Linday’s eyebrows lifted. Warped, though, as if the muscles of his face wouldn’t follow orders. A trick of the light, no doubt. “I thought perhaps you came because of your men’s…” He lowered his voice. “Your men’s ineptitude. For is it not their failures that have left this man called the Fury still out there?”

  Ah, he was baiting her—and the soldiers behind too, for they certainly
heard him. So Vivia ignored him.

  Moments later, after rounding a bellflower, its violet flowers in full bloom, the greenhouse’s central courtyard opened up before them. The fountain spat halfheartedly, its spout bent in half.

  At its base was a dead man.

  “There. Look at that.” Linday pointed emphatically, as if Vivia couldn’t see the mutilated body. His voice was abnormally high-pitched as he went on: “Look at what the Fury did to me!”

  “You mean,” Vivia countered, “what he did to your guard.” She flipped up her hand, and the soldiers settled into a perfect waiting row. Then Vivia approached the corpse.

  He was scarcely human now, with shadows crawling across his skin. “Vizer,” Vivia began, smothering the bile in her throat, “why don’t you tell me happened here.” She knelt.

  Lines of darkness spread over the man’s body, thin as a spider’s web in some places and clotted together in others. His extremities had turned into shiny, charred chunks. Blackened fingers—only nine of them, Vivia noted absently—a blackened face, and a blackened, hairless scalp.

  Behind her, his hands wringing with enthusiasm, Linday relayed how a scarred man had attacked while he tended the garden. “A habit for those nights when I cannot sleep, as I’m sure you can understand.”

  “Hmmm,” Vivia replied, listening about as closely as she listened to her father. She couldn’t help it. There was something alive about the marks. When her gaze unfocused, they seemed to move. To pulse in a way that was sickly fascinating and viscerally familiar.

  “Cleaved,” Vivia murmured at last—although that wasn’t quite it.

  “Pardon?” Linday scurried in closer, his limp more pronounced, fidgeting with his robe’s collar as if it wouldn’t go high enough.

  Vivia pushed upright. “Did the attacker—”

  “The Fury,” Linday cut in.

  “—hurt you?” She waved to Linday’s left leg, which he was favoring, and pretended not to have heard his use of the label the Fury. Naming the criminal after a saint, particularly in front of her troops, would only give the man power.

  “The Fury did hurt me.” Linday rolled back his sleeve to show blackened slashes down his inner forearm. “There’s another like it on my leg.”

  Vivia’s eyes widened. “What caused that? Magic?”

  “Oh, certainly he was a witch. A corrupted Windwitch. Powerful.”

  Vivia’s brow knit. A Windwitch did narrow down the pool of potential murderers—particularly since it would allow her to look at a registry. “Did he have a Witchmark?”

  “I didn’t notice. It was lost in all the scarring. Scars,” Linday emphasized, “like those.” He looked meaningfully at the dead body.

  “So … you think the attacker was cleaved.”

  “It is a possibility.”

  Except that it isn’t, Vivia thought. While cleaving would indeed explain why this corpse looked the way it did, it would not explain how the man posing as the Fury could hold conversations. Nor how he could live this long. Once the corruption began, it combusted a person’s witchery in mere minutes.

  “Did the attacker tell you why he came?” Vivia scooted a bit closer to Linday. Though holy hell-waters, was he always this sweaty? “Or did he make any demands?”

  “He did make a demand,” Linday oozed. “But forgive me, Your Highness, for you won’t like what I have to say.”

  This was going to be good.

  “The Fury said I must find the missing Origin Well.”

  Vivia stiffened. “Missing … Origin Well? I didn’t realize one had been lost.”

  For several breaths, Linday held Vivia’s gaze as if he didn’t believe her. Then at last, he smiled lopsidedly. “And here I had so hoped you might know what the Fury was referring to, for he said if I did not find this Well, then he would kill me.”

  “Why exactly does this man think you can find it?”

  A bob of Linday’s crooked shoulder. “I cannot say, Your Highness. Perhaps I misheard. It was the middle of the night.”

  And it still is, you fool. But Vivia was intrigued. A missing Well. A man called the Fury. A body half cleaved …

  “Vizer,” she offered eventually, her tone bored, “would it be possible to get something to drink? I’m parched, yet I wish to continue examining this corpse.”

  Linday opened his arms. “Of course, Your Highness.” While he shuffled past the soldiers, squawking for someone to “bring her highness some refreshment,” Vivia made her move and squatted roughly beside the dead man.

  Spiders of all sizes scuttled across the grass. They were hidden within the blades if you weren’t looking, but Vivia was looking.

  Not just spiders either. Smaller mites and beetles too. They scuttled toward Vivia, then past, as if fleeing something in the greenhouse, deep in all the jungle-thick foliage.

  It was just like what she’d encountered underground.

  After a hiss for her men to wait where they were, Vivia followed the line of insects around a cherry tree. Then a plum. Moths—an ungodly number of them—took flight with each brush of her hip against the branches until at last she reached the source of the escaping insects.

  A trapdoor. Wood, square, and stamped into the grass behind a massive frill of ferns. The wood was cracked at a corner, and from it crawled a trail of ants. A spindly harvestman too.

  Vivia’s lips rolled together. This trapdoor looked strikingly like the one in her mother’s garden. She cocked her head, waiting for Linday to leave the greenhouse entirely. Three heartbeats later, the sound of his screeching faded away.

  Vivia heaved up the trapdoor. No protest from the hinges. Well-oiled and oft-used. More spiders crawled free, and she found herself staring into a black hole with a rope ladder dangling down.

  She had no lantern, but she didn’t need one. The smell of the damp air, the charge in her chest—they told her what was below.

  The underground. Her underground, beneath the Cisterns and calling to her, Come, Little Fox, come, humming into her heels, her hands.

  The ancient lake was that way. Blocked by hundreds of feet of limestone and darkness and tunnel, perhaps, but it was down there all the same. Dread unspooled in Vivia’s veins. Jana had always insisted the lake remain secret. No one could know of it. Ever.

  Yet somehow, Linday had discovered the underground passages leading to it. The question that remained was if he had found the underground lake too.

  Then a new thought hit. The missing Origin Well. It couldn’t be the lake … could it? Origin Wells were said to be the sources of magic—and Nubrevna already had one in the south. A dead Well, but there all the same.

  Had Vivia’s soldiers not been waiting nearby—if Linday hadn’t been likely to return at any moment—Vivia would have scrambled down the hole immediately. She needed to know where it led. She needed to know how much Linday knew about the underground, and why he even cared in the first place.

  Yet Vivia’s men were here, and Linday too. Not to mention, the fifth-hour chimes were riding in on a honeysuckle breeze. This was the hour at which she normally awoke.

  So with the sickening realization that this would have to wait, Vivia shouted for her men to begin clearing out the dead guard. Then she followed, once more, the ants and the spiders and the centipedes. Away from the trapdoor. Away from whatever frightened them underground.

  * * *

  Merik did not drown.

  He should have, but somehow, the water—stark and cold—carried him ashore. He awoke with his back on a low lip of the Hawk’s Way canal. He awoke to Cam’s voice.

  “Oh, come on, sir.” She was shaking him. He wished she’d stop. “Please, wake up, sir.”

  “I’m … up,” he gritted out. His eyelids shivered wide. Cam’s dappled face swam into view, a gray dawn sky behind.

  “Thank you, Noden,” she breathed. And finally, finally she stopped shaking him. “You really should be dead, sir, but you’ve the blessing of Lady Baile on your side.”

  “That,
” Merik croaked, his throat more wasted and sore than it had been in days, “or the Hagfishes think I taste bad.”

  She laughed, but it was a taut sound. False. Then her words blurted out, too fast to stop. “I was so worried, sir! It’s been hours since we went to Pin’s Keep. I thought you were dead!”

  Shame spun in Merik’s chest, while she helped him to rise. “It’s all right, boy. I’m all right.”

  “But I saw you go upstairs, sir, and I waited … and waited—just like you told me to do. But then that white-haired first mate went up, and I thought for sure you were in trouble. Except nothing happened. The woman came back down, and … you didn’t.” Cam thumped her stomach. “My gut was sayin’ you were in trouble, but by the time I got up there, you were gone—are you sure you’re not hurt?”

  “I’m fine,” Merik repeated, pulling his hood into place. “Just soaked through.” It was true; he was drenched all the way to his small clothes. And cold—he was cold too.

  “Why did I just fish you from the Timetz, then? Where’d you go, sir?” She fixed him with an expression that was a cross between a glare and plea. As if she desperately wanted to be annoyed with her admiral but just couldn’t quite bring herself to it.

  “I’ll explain once we’re back at the tenement.”

  “Hye, Admiral,” she murmured.

  Merik’s shoulders tensed for his ears. It felt like a lifetime since anyone had called him that. He didn’t miss it.

  Motioning for Cam to release him—he could walk on his own—Merik set off for the stone steps leading out of the canal. He owed the girl an apology. But not, he thought, an explanation. Stacia Sotar and the Fury, a shadow man with frozen winds, a dead vizer in the greenhouse—it wasn’t a story easily relayed like one of Cam’s melodic tales.

  Besides, the less she knew, the safer she’d be.

  As he walked, Cam scurrying behind, he re-created the greenhouse in his mind. He re-created the shadow man.

  That creature had killed Vizer Linday as easily as Merik might crush a spider. If Merik hadn’t fled when he did, he would have been next.