Chapter 36
THIRTY-SIX
Merik called them Wakers, the Cleaved who’d returned to life. He found only a few each night, but a few had quickly added up to nearly a hundred. Sometimes the Wakers returned to life during the day, and those people often wound up in the clutches of the Raider King.
But any Cleaved who awoke at night—they were for Merik to find. For Merik to protect. Thus far, the Raider King hadn’t learned Merik was slipping in, hiding himself in shadow and snow and city ruins. And Merik planned to keep it that way.
If Ragnor knew the Cleaved were being stolen away, he might make it so none of the Cleaved could ever leave again.
Tonight, Merik took the tunnel into the city. Occasionally, he would fly—but only if a storm churned to mask his approach. Usually, there was too much risk. Too much visibility in the sky.
As always, Merik would look for Wakers tonight. But first, he needed to fulfill his promise to the domna. No, to the Empress. That new title was going to take some getting used to.
“I hate these tunnels,” Sky groused behind him. “Everything is so cursin’ wet.”
Merik didn’t respond. Sky loved to hear her own voice, and she loved even more to complain.
Plus, in the end, she wasn’t wrong: everything was so cursin’ wet inside these tunnels.
She and Merik splashed through water that reached almost to their calves.
So cold, it made Merik’s bones ache inside his boots.
Like Sky, he wore nondescript Baedyed gear—borrowed from Loulou and Riness—and the sand-scarves they’d wrap over their faces now clung like wet seaweed to their necks.
For the water not only burbled at them from below, but also dripped constantly from a collapsing ceiling. The python weight of the river pressed down, squeezing water into any cracks it could find. One day, this whole thing would fall.
But not yet.
Foxfire glimmered around them, casting the water—drip, drip, splash, splash—with a green glow. It made Merik think of Vivia. It made him think of a home that had never felt like home.
“Ugh,” Sky groaned now. “I think that was an eel that just scraped me. I hate eels, Merik. Slimy little things that look too much like snakes—”
“All right,” Merik cut in, trying not to laugh. Sky’s complaining had a way of lightening the mood, and whether that was a function of her magic or just her own general good nature, he hadn’t yet sorted out. “We’re almost to the tower now, Sky. Time to wrap up and get quiet.”
“Hye.” She used the Nubrevnan word for yes. That was another language she’d been toying with recently. “I’ll wrap this sodden scarf around me—which has basically become an eel itself—and then enjoy the way it freezes against my face as we sneak into the night. I can’t wait.”
Again, Merik found himself laughing. And his own scarf was ice against his skin, as he wrapped it in the style Baedyeds used to ward off their Sand Sea.
They traveled the remaining two hundred paces to the tunnel’s end.
Here, the river relented her hold on the land, and the water stopped falling.
The puddles shifted into ice that crunched under their heels.
As the tunnel’s elevation rose, the floor turned to steps.
The foxfire dimmed to darkness, and the final fifty paces were thick with shadows.
It reminded Merik of the Cisterns back in Lovats. Which in turn, always made him think of Cam. He wished the boy were with him now instead of Sky. Which wasn’t fair to Sky, of course—she was loyal and useful. But she wasn’t home, and home was all Merik dreamed of most days.
He shook his head, clearing the thoughts as if he were Aurora shaking off the snow. Then he rubbed once at his chest, a motion that was almost a Nubrevnan salute.
A king does not rule, his mother had once told him, but serves.
The steps stopped, and Merik stopped with them. Sky grunted, part acknowledgment that she was ready to move on when he was. Part annoyance because the ice on these ancient stones had almost tripped her.
She had quite expressive grunts.
The door before them was one that Merik had installed before they’d fled the city—and door was a generous term for it.
It was more like an octopus’s hoard: shells and rocks and strands of seaweed meant to hide it from sharks and men.
Instead of shells, Merik had found ancient planks; instead of rocks, he’d gathered bricks; and instead of seaweed, he’d moved dead, dried vines together like nets.
The vines rattled as Merik pushed out of the tunnel, his eyes squinting to see beyond.
They were in a building beside Esme’s tower—a space Revan had found while poking around for useful supplies.
It must have been a shop once upon a time.
Perhaps even an illegal one, for why else would they need such easy, secret access across the river?
Either way, the shelves that had once clung half-heartedly to the walls were now what made Merik’s door.
“No one’s here,” he whispered, before twisting sideways to squeeze through his arrangement of bricks.
Wind plied him. His face, already half numb, turned to ice.
In seconds, Sky was beside him and scooting toward the exit while Merik rearranged the planks and vines.
When he glanced at her, she was waving an all-clear sign.
So far, so good. Now came the hard part—the part where Sky would take the lead. Normally, they would travel east from Esme’s tower, aiming for the Well, where most of the Cleaved clustered, and therefore where most of the Wakers formed. But not tonight.
Merik strained onto his toes and peeked out the window. Then gave Sky the all-clear sign.
“Don’t speak,” she told him, moving to his side. “Leave it all to me.” She spoke in Marstoki now.
And Merik glared at her—his eyes being the only thing she could see through his frozen sand-scarf. “I know,” he grumbled, even though he hated saying it. Hated giving up control to her. “Just please don’t get us killed, hye?”
Sky gave another expressive grunt; this one said, Obviously. She tugged at her scarf, checking it was in place, and without another sound or even a backward glance, she set off into the city.
Merik hurried behind.
Back when Merik had still been a prince of Nubrevna, back when he’d still had access to spies and intelligence, the origins of the Raider King had remained an empty space.
A mystery no one had been able to answer, and even now—as close as he lived day in and day out to the man—Merik still had few answers.
For one, he had never seen Ragnor. Neither up close, nor from afar. For two, he didn’t understand Ragnor’s strategy. The Raider King had gone fast and hard against all the empires, yet now he was content to simply wait.
Waiting was never good for morale. It was why Sky, Ulga, and Birdy had been poking through Poznin that day Merik had found them: they were bored and too young to stay loyal without clear cause.
Merik hurried out of cover, Sky stepping lightly ahead.
A large pool had hardened to ice on their left.
Marsh reeds poked up, rattling quietly against the night’s winds—and against Merik’s winds too.
Just the occasional gust to mask their footsteps.
To kick up old snow. To draw ears toward other sounds instead of toward him and Sky hurrying past.
Not that his Windwitchery was reliable. It always stuttered and coughed when he came into the city and got too near to the Air Well.
But that is why Safi is here, Merik thought for the hundredth time. Because the Cahr Awen is real. Because Aunt Evrane was right. Because somehow Safi and her Threadsister are going to heal the Well and save all the Witchlands.
It was a thought that kept repeating in his brain without ever settling in. An assemblage of words that didn’t make sense. He hadn’t even fully accepted that Safiya fon Hasstrel was currently in Last Holdout, so how was he supposed to also accept she could heal all magic in the Witchlands?
Merik and Sky reached the first building where guards usually patrolled. They weren’t there tonight. Clouds drifted overhead, tatters from the storm above the forest. They looked like fish escaping their school.
“I’m going to have to find better ground,” Merik whispered to Sky, who crouched beside him. “I can’t see ahead clearly.”
“S’a bad idea.” Sky’s magic latticed around the words. Not on purpose, but because she felt her point so deeply, she wanted to convince Merik too. “We shouldn’t split up.”
“I’ll make the signal when we can keep moving.” Merik drew in his winds and vaulted to the building’s crooked rooftop. He folded onto his hands as soon as his feet touched icy shingles. He could spy many rooftops now, most half-tumbled or entirely broken …
And all of them empty as far as Merik could see. He withdrew a spyglass from a slot on his belt. The rooftops sharpened through the lens. The snow and shadows lurched closer. But all was still empty, still silent.
Merik gave the signal. A whistle so soft, it could only be heard when he coaxed his winds to carry it down, directly into Sky’s ears. Her figure was soon a vague shadow across the snowy ruins.
Merik floated to the next rooftop, repeated his scan through the spyglass, repeated the signal to Sky.
Again, again, as the horizon remained clear.
Soon, however, they were too near the Well—so Merik’s winds began resisting his command.
It forced him to choose a path with narrower gaps between rooftops.
He and Sky went half a mile this way before Merik finally found any life—but it was not the usual arrangement of raiders he’d seen in the past. These were not rows of protective sentries meant to keep out intruders, but rather camps of soldiers with only a few tired guards huddled around burning fires.
Orange flames beckoned with warm fingers. Merik shivered. There were entire streets left empty; it would be so easy to navigate between encampments. And that felt wrong. Why would Ragnor drop his guard now?
Merik didn’t whistle to Sky this time as he took flight. Instead, he skipped to a rooftop next door where the shingles were black and devoid of snow.
He should have noticed that—the lack of snow. He should have sensed how warm they felt through his wet boots. But he was more worried over the absence of soldiers, more worried he and Sky were blundering into a trap.
A plank shifted beneath Merik’s foot. A shingle scraped on wood, and the sound split the night like a pistol shot.
Then came a groan, loud as Aurora baying, and suddenly the roof beneath Merik collapsed.
It happened so fast—one moment, he was upright; the next, he was being eaten alive by splinters and slate and heat.
He hit a floor he couldn’t see and grappled for his winds.
But of course they chose to fall silent.
To slam their hands over their ears and ignore his desperate calls.
The heat of a stove clogged his lungs. There was pain too, in Merik’s ribs, in his neck, and above all, in his leg. A splinter had gotten him. He was bleeding.
He grappled for purchase and tried to rise. He was in someone’s bedroom. A crude space repurposed into something almost cozy.
He was also not alone.
A woman gaped at him. The gap between her front teeth was familiar, as was her pale hair pulled back like a Nubrevnan sailor’s and the sharp, pointed tip of her chin.
“Stix?” Merik tried to choke out. “Stix, it’s me.
” The words never left his throat. Not before ice rose over him, hungry as the ice from the mountain—but without the soothing song to accompany it.
This was Stix’s magic, as wildly powerful as Kullen’s had been but with control over a different element.
The ice claimed Merik’s chin. His forehead. No, no, no. He drew in a final breath before it claimed his mouth. Please, winds, come to me. Please, break me free.
They did not come. They did not help him.