Then everyone waited, bodies shaking in time to the fading quake. Stix gaped at Vivia, and Vivia gaped at the dam. At the crack that had been growing for decades up its middle.
But the stones held, and eventually Stix spoke: “Earthquake.” The word hummed through Vivia’s body. An impossible word. One that hadn’t plagued Lovats in generations.
One that could, if it happened again, succeed in killing off the city before starvation or overcrowding even got the chance.
“Hye,” Vivia agreed roughly. Her thoughts had scattered once she’d seen the dam was intact, and for a long stretch of time, the world was silent.
She let her eyes drift to Stix. Close enough now that the first mate didn’t have to squint. It was too close—the sort of close that Vivia avoided, for though Stix would never ponder this moment again, Vivia would endlessly ruminate, evaluate, and yearn unrequited.
Then as suddenly as the tremor had hit, as suddenly as Vivia and Stix had pulled each other close, noise and movement resumed. Shouts from the soldiers. Shouts from the streets. Vivia hastily released Stix, lurching back a step. Both girls smoothed their shirts, fixed their collars.
“Check the city,” Vivia ordered, “and I’ll check the dam. I want a damage report in two hours. I’ll find you at Pin’s Keep.”
Stix saluted, shaky yet strong. “Hye, sir!” She marched off, the soldiers dutifully following.
For several moments, Vivia eyed the water-bridges. Unlike the dam, they were bewitched by the same powerful witches who had built the under-city all those ages ago. Only magic could keep those massive structures aloft over a valley thousands of feet below.
Vivia couldn’t help worrying, though, as she turned for the door, that if the magic of the underground was dying, then what of the magic above? For after all, whatever happened over …
Happened under too.
* * *
Merik felt like he was falling. As if he’d jumped off a water-bridge in the dead of night, just as his mother had, and now the shadowy valley zoomed in fast. Black skies and cold clouds.
And the Hagfishes waiting, mouths wide to catch him.
Safiya fon Hasstrel is dead.
Cam was still talking. A distant buzz of words, of which only snippets actually slid into Merik’s ears. “Do you think your sister could have destroyed that ship too?” or “Why would she want to?” or “It makes no sense, sir.” Yet Merik scarcely heard.
Safiya fon Hasstrel is dead. The words sifted through him. Numbing and cold. Shrinking the world down to a single, booming chorus in his ears. Safiya fon Hasstrel is dead.
It made no sense. Safi wasn’t the sort of person who died. She was the sort who bent the world to her will. Who kissed the way she lived, with passion, impulse, life. Who smiled in the face of death, a challenge in her eyes, and then laughingly sidestepped it before the Hagfishes could yank her down.
This wasn’t possible. Not again. Not someone else. Noden had already claimed too much.
Merik stumbled for the door. Cam’s cold hands grabbed him. “Sir, sir, sir.” But Merik shook her off and staggered on.
Magic skated over him from the lock-spells, briefly shattering the ringing in his ears. Then he was out of Kullen’s home and hurrying downstairs. A blur of people and hunger and noise, before he finally joined the packed streets outside. Rain misted down—would it ever stop?—and each of Merik’s steps fell harder than the last.
This is your fault, he told himself. After all, Merik had been the one to insist Safi reach Lejna, where the Marstoks had been waiting to claim her. If only he’d abandoned his contract with Dom Eron fon Hasstrel … If only he’d stayed by Safi’s side atop that cliff instead of flying off to meet Kullen.
He’d lost Kullen in the end anyway. But I could have saved Safi. I should have saved Safi.
And Noden curse Merik, but how prophetic her last words to him had been: “I have a feeling I’ll never see you again.”
She’d been right, and it was Merik’s fault.
He shambled onto a side street, no idea which one. As soon as the rain droplets hit they steamed off the street, curling into a fog. Transforming the world into one indistinguishable uniformity. Every figure looked the same, every building blended into the next.
Another leftward veer, and this time Merik reached a familiar set of columns. Up Merik tramped, into the temple’s darkness. The air turned instantly cooler; shadows sucked him in.
Twenty more paces, his feet dragging over the flagstones, and he was once more before the frescoes of Noden’s saints.
It was then that the earth shook, dropping him to his knees. One heartbeat, two—the stones rattled. The city rumbled. Then as quickly as it had struck, the quake was past, leaving Merik with a booming heart and muscles braced for more.
But when more never came, Merik gulped in a calming breath and lifted his head to the fresco of the god’s Left Hand.
To the beast that he had become.
“What should I do, Kull?” Merik gazed at the fresco’s gruesome face, half expecting it to answer. But nothing came. It never would. Kullen—and these stones—would remain silent forever.
Except that in the silence came a thought. Something Aunt Evrane had always said whenever she scolded Merik: The Fury never forgets, Merik. Whatever you have done will come back to you tenfold, and it will haunt you until you make amends.
Merik slowly swiveled his wrists, reveling in how the new skin protested. How the blistered, dirt-lined strips tore apart. He was haunted by his mistakes, but maybe … If he tilted his head at just the right angle, he could view this not as a curse but as a gift.