Windwitch (The Witchlands 2)

But of course, he had no coat. No spyglass. No weapon.

No matter. He didn’t need that—not when his blood hungered for that shadow wind.

A quick scan of the wharf showed ethnicities as varied as ages, as voices, as degrees of desperation. These were not only Nubrevnans but people from outside the borders as well. People from the Contested Lands or the unstable Sirmayans.

Merik’s eyes snagged on a bald man hovering where the docks jutted into the man-made harbor. He was as badly scarred as Merik, at least on his scalp—as well as on the hand he now lifted overhead.

A hand with no pinkie.

Chills lifted across Merik’s neck and arms as he wondered if it could be another man like the one from the storerooms. Then the man turned, and it was Garren. The assassin from the Jana.

For several booming heartbeats, the wharf seemed to fall away. All Merik saw was the assassin, and all he heard was his blood thumping in his ears. No wind reached his cheeks, no voices hit his ears.

The entire world was a dead man walking.

That night, in the darkness of his cabin, Merik had thrust a cutlass through Garren’s gut. Blood had sprayed; innards had fallen. Yet here the man now stood.

Merik squinted. Sunspots speckled his vision, but he could still make out the jagged black lines throbbing down the man’s neck.

Marks like Merik’s.

Marks that called to him.

He hadn’t known what those lines meant earlier. He didn’t know what they meant now. He simply knew that Cam was right: they were bad.

And Merik knew that if following Garren might lead him to Cam, then he couldn’t stop now.

Garren shuffled away from Merik, pushing steadily through the chaos. He aimed for a bar called the Cleaved Man that hugged the canal. A large stone building filled with sailors and soldiers and those who needed a cheap drink.

In moments, Merik was off the roof and approaching the ramshackle tavern. The crowds settled into cursory background noise, vague colors of no import.

Then he was there, at the Cleaved Man and staring at the sign creaking on the breeze. The blackened eyeball painted on the wood felt a little too familiar. A little too … real.

The door swung wide. Merik ducked his head as two sailors staggered into the day, drunk even at this hour. Behind them, though—that was what interested Merik. For somewhere within, darkness slithered and dead men walked.

Merik found the entryway just as he remembered from past visits, half the lamps unlit, the blue rugs muddied to brown, and everything coated in the sheen of ox tea. The Cleaved Man brewed many varieties of alcohol in the basement, but their most famous was ox tea, which was neither tea nor related to an ox.

But it got a man drunk. Fast. And in a world torn apart by enemies and empty stomachs, patrons wanted to get drunk. Fast.

Merik reached the bar’s main space. It spread before him, candles flickering from fat chandeliers. Wax dripped onto people at the dozens of rickety tables. Merik was halfway to a door in the back corner, when he realized a hush had wrapped around the room. The revelers had stopped reveling, and at the nearest table, a sailor sat immobile with a flagon of ox tea halfway to his lips.

A nudge from his neighbor. A cough from nearby. Then all at once, wood groaned, vibrating through the floor as every person who sat abruptly decided to stand.

“I told you he would come.” A man’s voice, greasy and familiar, snaked through the silence.

Merik whirled toward the bar, to where a sweaty Serrit Linday held his arm outstretched.

For the briefest fraction of a moment, the world slowed. Stopped entirely. I saw you die, Merik thought. Yet here Linday stood, a second dead man walking—and now speaking too, with almost giddy delight, “Arrest him, soldiers. Arrest the Fury.”

* * *

Safi, Vaness, and the Hell-Bards burst out of the inn mere minutes before it crashed to the ground in a cacophony of black seafire. They bolted through the bathhouse, using plumes of smoke to hide themselves, before tumbling into a scalding midday that had no business being so sunny, so blue.

Zander led the way, though as far as Safi could tell, every street looked the same. More buildings cradled in ruins from a forgotten past. The blood from Vaness’s nose gushed at a rate that no body could sustain, much less while sprinting at top speed through a hostile city. With Lev on one side and Safi on the other, the empress managed to maintain at least a stumbling jog onward.

Caden kept the rear, an iron longsword—created by Vaness from the two rapiers—in hand.

As Zander led them into a five-way intersection, elm guttered and Baedyed bannered like every other in the district, Vaness planted her heels. “Must … stop,” she panted, doubling over.

Safi circled back with Lev, and horror pummeled through her. Blood from Vaness’s nose streaked behind them, a trail that any idiot could follow. Think like Iseult, think like Iseult. First things first: the blood. They had to stop it from falling.

But Lev was already tearing fabric from her sleeve. “Here.” Crouching, Lev pressed it to the empress’s nose. “We have to keep moving.”

“I know.” Her voice was thick beneath the dark cotton. “I’ll manage. Just let me breathe … for … a moment—”

“We don’t have a moment!” Caden rushed in. He pushed Lev aside and hooked his much larger, much stronger arm behind the empress. “The Baedyeds are right on our tail. We need to move.” As Safi released Vaness, he lugged the empress back into a jog.

Just in time, for a man wearing Baedyed gold was most assuredly sprinting their way. Fast.