Windwitch (The Witchlands #2)v(9)

“Don’t get too excited,” her companion muttered back. “I heard there might not be a funeral.”

This hooked Merik’s attention. He slunk behind the throne and listened. “My nephew Rayet is a page at the palace,” the second woman continued, “and he told me that the princess didn’t react at all when she heard the news of the prince’s murder.”

Of course she didn’t. Merik’s arms folded over his chest, fingers digging into his tender biceps.

“Did your nephew know who killed the prince? That butcher at the end of Hawk’s Way told me it was the Marstoks, but then my neighbor said it was the Cartorrans…” Her voice faded into muffled nothing, and Merik didn’t try to follow.

He’d heard enough. More than enough. Of course Vivia would cancel the funeral. He could practically hear her drawling voice: Why waste food on the people when the troops could use it instead?

She cared only for power. For claiming the crown that the High Council had, thank Noden, still not given her. But if the king’s illness worsened—if he passed on as everyone believed Merik had—then there would be no keeping Vivia from the throne.

Abandoning the statue of the god, Merik moved to the two frescoes on the back wall.

On the right stood Lady Baile, patron saint of change, seasons, and crossroads. Noden’s Right Hand, they called her, and the lamp’s fire shimmered across golden wheat in her left hand, a silver trout in her right. Her skin was painted like a night sky, black with pinpricks of white, while the fox-shaped mask across her face shone blue. She stood upon a field of green, all colors on the fresco recently refreshed, as were the golden words beneath her:

Though we cannot always see

the blessing in the loss.

Strength is the gift of our Lady Baile

and she will never abandon us.

Merik’s gaze flicked to a copper urn resting before her, overflowing with wood and silver coins. Offerings for her kindness. A petition for her to whisper in Noden’s ear, Help them.

In vibrant heaps at the urn’s base lay wreaths of last year’s leaves, of sage and mint and rosemary—gifts to honor the dead. Merik wondered if any had been placed for Kullen.

Then his chest clenched. He twisted away, fixing his gaze on the second fresco. On Noden’s Left Hand. The patron saint of justice, of vengeance, of rage.

The Fury.

That was what the woman in Judgment Square had called Merik. She’d meant it as a title. She’d meant it as a prayer.

Bald, scarred, and hulking, the saint of all things broken bore only the name of his true nature. His one calling. He brought justice to the wronged and punishment to the wicked, and while Lady Baile was as beautiful as life itself, the Fury was more grotesque than even the Hagfishes.

The crimson and black pigments of his body had faded, never to be refreshed, as had the gray cavernous backdrop behind him—and the words below the Fury’s clawed feet:

Why do you hold a razor in one hand?

So men remember that I am sharp as any edge.

And why do you hold broken glass in the other?

So men remember that I am always watching.

“And this,” Merik murmured to himself, “is who that woman mistook me for.” This was the monster she had seen when she’d looked upon him.

He turned to the Fury’s empty urn. Always empty, for no one wished to accidentally attract his eye, lest they too be judged.

Outside the temple, the storm finally broke. Rain clattered down, loud enough for Merik to hear. Yet when he glanced back toward the columns, expecting to find people rushing in for shelter, he found only a single figure loping inside. She dripped water to the flagstones with each of her long steps.

Cam. Merik’s only ally.

“Dried lamb?” she called once she was close enough. Her voice echoed off the granite flagstones. Like Merik, she wore a hooded tan coat atop her beige shirt and black trousers—all of it homespun, all of it filthy. “The meat’s not too wet.”

Merik forced himself to summon a glare. To scold: “What have I said about stealing?”

“Does that mean,” she began, her black eyes glittering with lamp-lit mischief, “that you don’t want it? I can always save it for myself, you know.”

Merik wrested it from her grip. Hunger, he had learned, beat morality every time.

“S’what I thought.” A gloating grin split her face, stretching the white patches on her brown cheek. “Even dead men gotta eat.”

Cam’s whole body was speckled with those swaths of white skin. Down the right side of her neck they spanned, stretching onto her left forearm, her right hand. Obvious, if one was looking; invisible if one wasn’t.

Merik had certainly never looked before. He’d never been able to recall her name—she’d simply been the new recruit. Then again, he hadn’t known she was a girl either. She’d looked the part of a ship’s boy on the Jana, and she’d played it well enough too.

Not once had Merik commented on Cam’s sex though. And since she seemed determined to keep her secret, he had continued to address her as “boy.” After all, what did it really matter in the end? She was the one who had stayed behind while the rest of the crew went to the village of Noden’s Gift.

My gut told me you weren’t dead, she’d explained to Merik, so I searched and searched and searched until I found you.