Chapter 61
SIXTY-ONE
Merik had not flown with such power in months. Perhaps ever. He felt unstoppable. Like Noden incarnate. His winds came to him with only a thought, and he took flight out of the forest.
The monstrous Itosha followed—as he knew she would.
As he hoped she would. For this was his home.
This was his Last Holdout. He’d failed the people he’d vowed to protect, but there were still so many others left vulnerable.
The Cleaved army in Poznin. Aunt Evrane and all the Cartorrans she had come with.
Even the raiders, the Purists, the Nomatsis who would have happily killed Merik only yesterday. They must all have lost their magic now. Just as Merik should have too. There are advantages, he thought once more, to being a dead man.
He rocketed high above the burned tree line. The Paladin followed, screaming and cackling as if this were the greatest joke she’d ever heard. Lightning slashed. Merik spun. It should have hit him; it didn’t.
Then he was high enough to see what little remained of the forest—and far more shocking, what little remained of Poznin.
There was a crater where the Well had been, as if a comet had fallen from the sky to gouge out building and forest and stone. To erase all that had ever been. And still seafire burned down avenues and through buildings, with its black smoke to clot the sky.
Even the river had changed, churning and chopping with a violent speed like Merik had never seen before.
Another slash of lightning. Brilliant, scorching, thunderous. Merik flipped sideways, instinct moving his winds faster than his mind ever could. He needed to lead this monster called Itosha away from here.
Merik saw her again as he spun. She grinned, clawlike hands shooting up. More lightning spewed from her fingertips. Merik saw it coming; he flipped easily aside.
“So fast!” she crowed. “But with power that is not your own, I see.”
How she knew that, Merik couldn’t guess. He just knew that she was suddenly much faster too. She slung toward him, her hair streaming behind her. Her grin leering in close with those unnatural teeth.
A shark’s maw.
Merik flung out his own hands. Winds slammed outward from them like a shield. They thrust him backward before plowing into Itosha. They didn’t hurt her; he hadn’t thought they would. But they at least distracted her.
Merik dropped now. No winds, only gravity. He fell like the dead man he was toward the other part of the forest, which had not burned away as Last Holdout had. Here, trees still stood—as did the stones, in that otherworldly space his people had so avoided.
Yet smoke did gather in some pockets. Good places, Merik thought, for hiding.
Ten feet above jagged tree branches, Merik yanked wind to him. Just enough to clear a trail below—but not so much that all smoke fled.
He hit the earth.
And now, he ran. No magic, no winds.
Itosha shrieked from above, a sound like a bird of prey. Gone was her amusement. All that remained was the hunger. Her winds billowed downward. She did not land as Merik had, but instead blasted away the smoke.
Light and air closed in, exposing him like a mouse on the field. Then more winds attacked, this time razored by frozen rain.
Merik didn’t stop. Rain sliced into his back. His head. Fresh wounds that sent blood into the storm spitting down. And always, Itosha’s screams chased behind. Little Hound! Little Hound! I see you, I see you, you cannot get away.
Then the Paladin herself descended, carried by a funnel of electrified air. She ripped through the trees, cracking apart ancient trunks as easily as matchsticks.
Merik gave up running. Instead, he exploded forward on Kullen’s magic. His limbs flung back with the force of it. His body flipped nearly horizontal. He wove, he spun, he raced around trunks and stones.
So much power—had Kullen always had this? Had he always commanded this enormity of wind, as if he were not merely a witch controlling power but a vector through which all air could channel?
No, my king, I did not.
That voice was so unexpected, Merik lost control. Just a stuttering of a moment, but enough for him to almost slam into a tree. He swerved. His shoulder rammed. His arm ripped, and pain filled him.
And he felt as Kullen laughed. A warm chuckle that sang of their boyhood on the beach, and of hot Nihar sunshine. Be careful, Threadbrother, for I can’t protect you from in here.
“Where?” Merik tried to ask as Itosha howled behind. “Where are you? Are you awake?”
Yes and no.
“I don’t understand.”
You don’t need to. Kullen smiled then—Merik felt it bloom across their shared Threads. The strange, terrifying smile of a man who’d always been more comfortable alone than with others. These are the days that make sense to nobody except Ryber and the other Sightwitches.
“Is Ryber with you?”
Merik never got an answer. Not before a fresh screech hit him. A joyful, piercing sound that matched the winds scorching Merik’s back. Itosha was about to catch him; they both knew it.
Not yet, she won’t, my king.
It was at this moment that power coursed into Merik with such intensity, he could do nothing but be carried along with it.
Winds flogged him from behind, but they were his winds under his command, and they knew how to carry him.
How to lift him out of the trees, out of the seafire’s smoke and into the dawn.
Itosha followed, but she’d lost ground. She had the power of storm brimming inside her, yet in the end, Kullen’s magic across these Threads of binding were faster.
Merik flew high, high, until the forest disappeared below. Until the breath in his lungs felt too thin and his vision spun. Still, he kept climbing. He would reach the clouds. He would lose himself there, then lose Itosha.
But that was when Merik saw someone else. Someone who had no power, no winds, and who simply fell, streaking like a white-clad cannonball toward the earth.
Safi spun, out of control. She grabbed and flailed at empty air. The river would break her. Then feast on her if Merik didn’t change course now. Yet if he did change course now, he would lose his chance to lead the Exalted One away from Poznin.
Many for the sake of one. It was exactly what he’d punished Safi for on the Jana. But maybe it didn’t matter—maybe there was no evaluating cost in that way. A life was a life, and he couldn’t let hers crash into a place he couldn’t save her from.
Hye, Kullen murmured at the same moment Merik made his choice.
And so—with his Threadbrother’s vast power to drive him—he changed trajectory.
Sharp and hard, the move made Merik’s brain crush against his skull.
Made his organs climb into his throat. His vision went fully black.
He lost sight of Safi or the clouds or Poznin or Itosha still chomping at him with lightning and sharpened rain.
But Kullen’s winds knew what to do.
Merik hewed through the sky. If Safi was cannon shot, then he was the destruction that came in the aftermath. He drew more power to him, more winds, more speed—and all with a sense of certainty and an awkward smile that had always had faith in Merik’s strength, even when Merik had possessed none.
Behind him, Itosha laughed.
Safi had done this before: she’d felt her eyes sizzle, her heart fry, and each breath taste of burning death. This time, though, she wasn’t inside the mountain. This time, she was flying in a storm over Poznin, and she was certain she was going to die.
She screamed, a bereft sound lost to the winds. A sound swallowed by the eternal crack! of lightning.
Then, just as it had in the mountain, her body slammed against something solid. Something frozen while strong arms flung around her. “HANG ON!” Merik bellowed against her.
So Safi hung on, even as her mind fought to catch up.
I’ve done this before. Haven’t I done this before?
Winds charged beneath her and Merik. They rocketed up, up away from the river while the storm pressed down and the Exalted One in the skies tried to squash them, boil them, keep them from getting away.
Lightning slashed. A mere arm’s length away, so bright that the world turned bright and fully revealed Merik’s face before Safi. Dark, wet hair pressed against his head, while the scars along the side of his face shivered with a silvery glow—as if Threads ran through them.
Never had Merik flown Safi with such strength. It was as if his winds were muscles to be flexed. Extensions of arms and legs. He didn’t carry Safi, so much as cocoon her. In his embrace, in his magic.
Above them, fresh tempests shook loose, and a voice penetrated Safi’s skull: Little Hound!
You cannot get away from me! You should not have slowed.
Below, dark waters slung past, alive and writhing.
Ice no longer covered any part of the river—but Threads did.
They laced through, and there was no missing the masses of silver scoring within like sea foxes.
Safi and Merik left the river. They returned to the smoking remains of the forest. Nothing looked familiar.
If Safi had been in this part of the trees, she didn’t recognize it now.
Trunks blurred into rocks bled into charred earth.
Smoke seared into her mouth and eyes. And Threads—always there were more Threads, slithering through the soil like snakes returning to a charmer.
Merik held Safi fast against him, hugging her like the lover he’d briefly been.
And gods below, what she wouldn’t do to go back to that moment by the Jadansi, when the only trouble she’d faced was a Marstoki empress who wanted to claim Safi’s magic for her own.
When she’d said to Merik, I have a feeling I’ll never see you again.
Safi laughed. A hysterical sound that lacerated her lungs. She was seeing Merik again, and gods, what a thrice-damned miracle that was.
Faster they hurtled, while more unquenched rage thrashed behind them.
Boiling, relentless, alive. And just as she had done two months ago, clinging to Merik inside the mountain, Safi lost all sight, all sound.
Static expanded inside her, scratched against her skin.
She dug fingers like anchors into Merik’s hair.
Her face pressed against his neck while her thighs squeezed him with all her strength.
He didn’t let her go.
Until, as abruptly as he’d caught her, he did let her go. It was with winds more desperate than graceful this time, and he toppled them both to the charred earth where skeletal trees burned like dying candles around them.
“Hide!” Merik ordered, his voice a scratching, stretching thing as he yanked off his coat.
“Little Hound, I am coming for you!”
He shoved the coat into Safi’s arms, and now his dark, dark Nihar eyes fastened onto hers. “Safi, listen to me: hide. Itosha is on her way, and I will do everything I can to get her away from here, away from Poznin.”
Itosha, Safi thought. So that was the Exalted One’s name.
Before she could answer—argue that Merik could still hide with her; explain she knew what this monster was; or at least insist that Merik keep his coat, foolish man—a burst of air shoved Safi backward.
So sudden, it almost knocked her legs out from under her.
Merik had taken flight, and in seconds, he was gone, with only a flare of smoke through the trees to reveal he’d ever been there.
Safi stared after him, too stunned to move or hide as he’d commanded.
At least until Itosha’s winds crackled into her, sparking with electricity.
That spurred her back into action, and Safi flung herself behind a burning beech moments before the Exalted One arrived.
Cackling, howling, the creature streaked past. Her body was nothing more than a stripe of furious white, but with Threads—so many Threads—shoveling into her and propelling her ever faster.
Merik could never defeat something like that. Safi wasn’t sure he could escape it.
This time, the winds that knocked into Safi did claim her legs.
She hit moldering earth. Her eyes screwed shut from impact, from heat.
Embers scorched her skull. And in the endless slog of time it took to reclaim her senses—and reclaim muscles that still hadn’t accepted she wasn’t falling—a roar of glee filled the forest.
And Safi saw that same glee brim across Itosha’s Threads. No, Safi thought. Not Merik. But there was nothing she could do except sink into the moment. Let the scalded palms of her hands and scorched soles of her feet push her back to standing.
She launched into a run.