Windwitch (The Witchlands #2)v(16)

“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.