Chapter 31
THIRTY-ONE
Safi awoke sweating. Thrice-damned city, she thought blearily. Why is it always so hot in Venaza City? She opened her eyes, expecting to see the top of her four-poster bed, to find she’d forgotten to open her bedroom window the night before …
But it was not a white ceiling above her, nor the wooden beams of an attic where heat could gather from Mathew’s kitchen.
Instead, Safi stared at densely woven branches lit by a hanging lantern.
There was a scent in the air—a cold, wintery scent laced with peat and cedar.
Outside, sounds of people clattered and clanked and hummed.
Her left arm pulsed, but with a distant throb like music that plays from several streets over.
Iseult. This was Safi’s first thought once clarity wedged in.
She’d lost Iseult. Where was Iseult? She tried to rise, but the movement defeated her.
Pain speared through her. Then gentle hands pressed against her chest. A voice she didn’t recognize murmured in Marstoki, “You are safe. You are protected.”
The voice was attached to a brown face blessed with age. She smiled. “You are safe,” she repeated. “You are protected. I am Riness, a healer.”
Safi’s magic hummed with the truth of this, even as the Cahr Awen souls argued, But we need the dark-giver! We are so close to the Well!
“I … don’t care about me,” Safi said. “Where is Iseult? And Knifey? I mean … the…” She had to pause. To gasp in air as her gaze fastened on her caretaker. “The Bloodwitch. He’s a Carawen monk. I was with them.”
“And my people will search for them,” came a different voice. One Safi knew. One that made no sense yet comforted her all the same. “I promise we will find them,” Merik said.
True, true, true.
It was exactly what Safi needed to hear.
It didn’t quell the Cahr Awen souls, but it did at least quell her own.
Merik was here, Merik was true. He knew how to find Iseult and Aeduan, and Safi could have faith that he would.
It was safe for her to sink back into sleep now and let the waves of Venaza City heal her.
She closed her eyes. The woven ceiling vanished. The hands pressing on her chest withdrew.
Merik had spent most of his life trying to control the world around him. He could look back and see how this behavior had arisen in him. When your mother takes her own life, your sister blames you for it, then your father sends you away because your magic isn’t strong enough …
Yes, it was easy to look back and say, Ah, no wonder I grabbed on to anything that would obey me. And no wonder I was so angry when the world refused to listen.
Safiya fon Hasstrel had been one of the first people who’d refused to listen.
She had not, however, been the last. Nothing and no one Merik had met after Safi had followed his plans.
And rather than accept this fact, he’d spent all that time seeing only what he’d wanted to see and never accepting what truly lay before him.
He didn’t like thinking back to that version of himself.
He didn’t like realizing … and then counting how many people he’d harmed by being inflexible or letting his temper win.
His greatest regret of all, though, was how he’d treated the boy Cam, who’d been nothing but loyal and true.
Merik, in his stupid, almost hateful certainty, had refused to see what was actually right in front of him.
With Cam, with Vivia, with his own awful hunger for revenge fastened onto the wrong enemy.
Now here Merik was, once more forced to accept that he had no control—that as much as he’d wanted to see only clear skies, Noden had actually prepared many waves and storms to fling his way. If he didn’t bend like the palm trees of the Nihar lands, then Merik was going to break.
An empress. Here, in the middle of his secret camp—and claiming she was also half of the Cahr Awen. Surely Noden was laughing at him.
“The raiders ran off,” Birdy said, leaning against Merik’s desk in that slouchy way only a young man could. All sharp angles and lines. “Soon as Rora came down out of the sky, her storms goin’, they ran.”
“Retreated,” Ulga inserted, an edge to her voice.
“They retreated.” She tried so very hard to be a proper lieutenant to Merik and his makeshift forces.
It annoyed her to no end that Birdy didn’t care.
“We watched until they were gone, sir, and then we watched a bit longer. We returned here once we were sure they weren’t doubling back. ”
“And Aurora?” Merik asked. “Where is she now?”
“Gettin’ fed.” Birdy grinned. He found it hilarious to watch Aurora eat since the entire affair involved a lot of mess, a lot of slobbering, and a lot of whining afterward for cuddles.
“Good.” Merik nodded at Birdy. Then at Ulga too.
“Thank you both.” Despite their age, they had become two of his closest advisors—if advisors was the right term for the ragged crew who helped him.
For weeks, the Raider King had not noticed Merik in Poznin …
until one day, all the forces had moved in.
From outside of the city, they’d shoved in like ants discovering a forgotten carcass.
Merik had barely gotten his new people out before the whole of the crumbling capital had been overrun.
Yet rather than flee, they had dug into the wet forests east of the river. Revan had found a tunnel near the Puppeteer’s tower. Following it had led them into this forest, into a strange place where the trees had been woven into structures and no one who might fly overhead would spy them.
It seemed too perfect to be real. As if Noden had created these buildings just for Merik to find. Some of the trees even looked recently woven, their branches green and pliant.
So Merik and his people had stayed.
After all, so many of Merik’s new people had families trapped in the Puppeteer’s cruel stasis or still loyal to the Raider King.
They wouldn’t leave, and he wouldn’t leave without them.
So he had named this place Last Holdout, and everyone had thanked their assorted gods for the safety of these strange trees.
Merik’s base of operations—his captain’s cabin—was like all the other buildings here: a crude assemblage of woven branches, roots, and vines.
He had layered it with canvas and furs and whatever else he could find to keep out winter and wetland.
Then he’d done the same to all the buildings, packing soil and dirt into walls and layering dried rushes across the earth.
Merik had rushes on his floor now too, and a brazier burned in the corner beside a mound of furs that made the space moderately comfortable.
His greatest luxury, however, was a large desk salvaged from the city, upon which he’d laid out maps.
Each day, he updated the maps as new people arrived at Last Holdout.
He also updated them as his nightly forays into the city afforded new intelligence on the Raider King’s forces.
“Where’s Sky?” Birdy asked. “And Loulou?”
“They,” came a new voice, sanguine and cocksure, “are already back.” Sky shoved into the tent, dressed in a wintery thick camouflage like the Baedyeds.
Loulou—one of those Baedyeds, whose real name was Loued—shoved in behind Sky.
He was a short man, stocky and square jawed.
His thick fringe of black eyelashes and glossy black curls softened him toward a beauty that Merik suspected Sky was slightly in love with.
And that Loulou was completely oblivious to, given he was ten years her senior.
With their powers, they were easily Merik’s most important advisors. “We saw where the horses went,” Loulou said in Marstoki, flipping his right hand toward Merik—and as such, flashing his Witchmark to the room: a square for Earth with an ox horn for Herdwitchery.
“In the … other part,” Sky added. She spoke a rougher Marstoki, recently learned because her Wordwitchery sponged up new languages as easily as the earth around them sponged up water.
“We walked in a few hundred paces too, just to be sure, but there were no hoofprints. No horses, and definitely no people.”
Loulou nodded. “I could find only the usual wild animals willing to exist in that … place.”
Merik felt his breath expel at those words.
That place. The other part. If Last Holdout and its unnatural buildings were strange, the other part of the forest was far stranger.
It was an area in the east where the air felt wrong and night’s shadows lurked long after the sun had risen each day.
Merik had been there once, just to see why his people were so afraid—why those trees frightened them when Last Holdout did not …
And he had promptly rushed back out again.
So if Iseult and the Bloodwitch were in there, then it would not be easy to find them. He twisted his attention back to Ulga and Birdy. “And you saw no signs of a monk or Nomatsi woman with the retreating raiders?”
“No, sir.” Ulga shook her head emphatically while Birdy’s face scrunched up momentarily. Then he too wagged his head. “Naw, no one that looked like prisoners with ’em.”
Sighing, Merik massaged his temples. Dramatic flourishes marked the corners of his map, while the city itself had been drawn with unnecessary detail.
But who was he to tell Revan to keep it simpler?
Who was he to deny distraction to a boy who just wanted to find his mother somewhere inside all those remaining Cleaved?
Plus, the boy made good maps, so long as Merik had the patience to wait for them.
He reached down and removed an acorn from the fringe of forest where the raiders had just attacked—and then retreated.
All the forces on the map were denoted by acorns or walnuts.
“I want a patrol sent out,” Merik said, directing this at Loulou.
“Tell them to comb the other part of the forest for the Threadwitch and the monk with her. I know not everyone is willing to go in there, but—”
“I’ll do it.” Ulga blurted this with far too much eagerness.
Merik studied her. Then Birdy, who less enthusiastically muttered, “Yeah, me too.”
They were neither of them great fighters or trackers, but they’d proven themselves loyal as any sailor, soldier, or guard that Merik had ever commanded.
And loyalty was something he’d learned by now never to waste.
“Hye,” he said slowly. “I will let you go, but not alone. Bring anyone willing to search with you. If you find them, bring them here. If you don’t find them, search for signs of why. ”
“And me?” Sky asked, glancing sideways at Loulou—who seemed to have forgotten (again) that she existed.
“Rest up, Sky,” Merik answered. “You’re coming with me into the city.”