Windwitch (The Witchlands #2)v(61)

“Oh, but you can’t force me.” She batted her lashes, hooking her arms behind her back. “As I believe I’ve mentioned before, I can smile at even the ugliest toad, and not once will he sense a lie.”

Now it was Caden’s turn to snort. “Oh, Heretic, you don’t even know it, do you?” He eased his knife into a hip scabbard. “It wasn’t my Hell-Bard protection that gave you away in Ve?aza City. It was you.”

Safi stiffened. Then against her better judgment, she took the bait. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” he said, closing the space between them, “that you have a tell.”

“I do not.”

“Oh, yes, you do.” He smiled now. A Chiseled Cheater smile that made Safi’s gut boil. Made her heels bounce. “So no matter what this admiral might say to me, I’ll know just by looking at you whether she speaks the truth or not. Now…” He placed his hands calmly on Safi’s shoulders, then twirled her around to face the Gilded Rose’s dilapidated door. “Let’s go inside and get this over with before we join those corpses hanging out to dry.”





TWENTY-ONE

“It’s not right,” Merik muttered as he and Cam journeyed deeper underground by the light of an old torch. Two damp levels below the Cisterns’ entrance, and still the squatters showed no sign of thinning out—nor did the rats, whose eyes glowed. “A man needs to see the sky.”

“Didn’t expect you to be scared, sir.” Cam flung a mischievous smile across her shoulder.

“I’m not scared.” Merik glowered. “There’s no wind here, boy. No air. I feel … suffocated.”

“Well, we’ve barely left the surface, so get used to it. Shite Street is much lower—and much smellier.”

The girl wasn’t exaggerating, and after circling six levels deeper, a stench began gathering in the air. Even as the ceilings lifted higher and the passages spread wider, the smell was soon thick enough to choke and sharp enough to burn.

It sent Cam doubling over, coughing, gagging, and spraying torchlight in all directions. “Shit,” she said, and Merik couldn’t tell if the girl swore at the stench or simply named its source. Either way, he agreed.

Three turns later in the tunnel, they reached the infamous Shite Street. Cam clapped a hand to her mouth, hefting the torch high. Light glistened over a lumpy expanse of bodily fluids (and bodily solids). There was also something oily and dark dripping from a crack between ceiling bricks.

Worse than the sight of it, though, was the ploop! ploop! that each droplet made in the pool—and the bubbles that gurgled to life right after.

“Can’t you fly us across, sir?”

Merik considered this, breathing through the edge of his hood as he did so.

But then he shook his head. “I need to summon winds to fly us. And though I could try, there’s just not enough air to carry us far.”

“S’better to fly halfway than walk through all of it,” Cam pointed out. “The tunnel is almost full, sir! That line”—she pointed to the opposite wall—“is as high as the sewage gets before the floods come through to clean it out. That’s as deep as our knees, sir!”

Merik held his silence while he contemplated just how badly he wanted answers about his sister’s enterprises in the Cisterns. Except … it didn’t matter what he wanted. The city’s people needed his help.

Merik set his jaw. The X on the map was straight ahead, and so straight ahead he had to go.

“Did you hear me?” Cam demanded. “The sewage is almost to our cursed knees, sir! That means…” Somehow, she managed to look even more sick. Her eyes screwed shut. “The floods’ll rush through at any moment.”

“Shit,” Merik said, and he meant the swear. “Cam, I want you to wait nearby. In a safer tunnel.”

She bristled. “I’m not leaving you. I know I’m moanin’ a lot, but this is my fault, see? I said those times were the floods, but I was thinkin’ it meant when they’d end—not arrive!”

“Don’t blame yourself, boy.” Urgency hardened Merik’s tone. “I’m the one who thought it was a meeting time—and it might still be. But it isn’t safe for you to go any farther.”

“S’not safe for you either,” she retorted. “And besides, if I don’t go with you, you’ll end up doing something stupid.” She pushed out her chest. “You can’t stop me, sir.”

A tense pause. Cam looked so small in this light. So blighted obstinate too.

Fool brother Filip led blind brother Daret

deep into the black cave.

He knew that inside it, the Queen Crab resided

but that didn’t scare him away.

“If you get hurt…” Merik began.

“Won’t happen.”

“… you’ll ruin your new boots.”

“Never did like shoes anyway.”

“Fine,” was all Merik said, and Cam’s teeth flashed in a victorious grin. It marked the end of the argument, though Merik almost wished otherwise, for now there was nothing left to do but trek through human excrement.

Hell-waters claim him, he had never imagined that hiking through underground sewage would one day be his life. Of course, he also hadn’t thought he’d be a dead man on the run from his own family.