Windwitch (The Witchlands #2)v(46)

“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.”