Windwitch (The Witchlands 2)

The flowers still held their own in a series of clay pots beyond the cattails. These were the only black irises Vivia had ever seen. Most irises were blue or red or purple, but not these. Not the ones her mother had loved so much.

Jana would talk while she gazed upon them. Over and over, she’d recite one verse from “Eridysi’s Lament,” that song drunken sailors or the broken-hearted liked to sing. Yet only in death, could they understand life. And only in life, will they change the world. Then Jana would recite it again. And again, until anyone who was near her was driven just as mad as she.

For three breaths Vivia eyed those flowers, though her mind was lost in the past. In the way her mother would stare and croon. Infrequently at first, then once a week. Then once a day …

Then she was gone forever.

Vivia might be like her mother in some ways, but she was not that. She was stronger than Jana. She could fight this darkness inside her.

At that thought, Viva sprang off the bench and charged for the archway. There was nothing of value in this garden other than the trapdoor. Only madness and shadows lived here. Only memories and lament.

TWELVE

The Skulks.

It was the filthiest, most crowded part of the capital. Of all Nubrevna, even.

“Home,” Cam said, as she led Merik through. It was the first thing she’d said since leaving Kullen’s tenement, and she uttered it with such weight—as if it took all her strength to simply peel that word from her tongue—that Merik couldn’t summon a decent response. Even in the dying Nihar lands to the south, there’d been space. There’d been food.

It didn’t help that thunder rolled overhead or raindrops slung down every few minutes, weak but threatening all the same. Worse, the quake had left its mark. Collapsed gutters, crumpled tents, and white-rimmed terror in people’s eyes. It could have been worse, though—Merik had heard stories of tremors that toppled entire buildings.

Cam moved smoothly through it all, her long legs adept at hopping puddles and looping around the inebriated, while Merik followed as best he could. Two lines from the old nursery rhyme kept trilling in the back of his mind as they walked. Fool brother Filip led blind brother Daret, deep into the black cave.

What Merik couldn’t figure out, though, was if he was fool brother Filip or blind brother Daret.

Then he forgot all about it, for Cam was abruptly sidling left. In seconds, she’d disappeared down a shadowy alley, leaving Merik to scramble after. The stormy evening light vanished; his vision daubed with shadows.

“Here,” Cam hissed, and she yanked him into a narrow strip of space between two buildings. There they stood, Merik gaping at Cam, and Cam with her scarred left hand clamped to her mouth, as if to muffle her breaths.

When, after a few moments, no one new appeared in the alley, her posture sagged. Her hand fell. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “Thought someone saw us.” Then she peeked her head around the edge of their hideout. Her posture drooped all the more.

It was, Merik thought, nothing like her easy twisting and hiding from earlier that day. And when he asked, “Who followed?” and she answered, “Soldiers,” he wasn’t entirely sure he believed her.

He didn’t press the point. “Can we continue? The city needs us.” To stop Vivia, he wanted to say. To win more food, to win more trade. He held his silence, though, for Cam didn’t need to be scolded. Her face was already flushed with shame.

“Course, sir. Sorry, sir.” She resumed her trek to Pin’s Keep, though there was no missing how often she tugged at her hood or flinched whenever someone cut through their path.

Soon enough, though, Merik and Cam rounded a cluster of wooden lean-tos and the famous Pin’s Keep loomed before them. An ancient tower, it was older than Old Town. Older than the city’s walls, and perhaps even older than the Water-Bridges of Stefin-Eckart. Merik knew by the stone from which it was hewn. A granite turned orange beneath the hearth-fire glow of sunset.

When Nubrevna had first been settled by men from the north, they’d carried black granite from their homeland, ready to beat this new land to their will. But over time, Nubrevna had become its own nation. Its own people, and they had in turn used the endless limestone that the local land had to offer.

Wooden planks and tumbled tents slouched against the tower’s base, and the hacking sounds of sickness, the screech of crying babes carried over the clamor of the evening. Everything in the Skulks was louder than Merik remembered. Smellier too, and much more crowded. A line of people, some limping and limbless, some coughing and feeble, some barely out of swaddling, were strung out from the low archway that led into the tower.

Merik cursed. “Can we push in front of everyone, boy?”

Cam tossed him a knowing side-eye from the depths of her hood. “Find the entrance down below, sir. This way!” Just like that, the girl marched past the entire queue, then back behind the tower, and finally through a rusty gate. Here, the fat tower slanted against the matching granite of the city wall.

Two steps through the gate, and the jagged cobbles of the alley dropped sharply, as if there had once been stairs.

“Wait over there.” Cam pointed to a stretch of shadow, where the descending sun no longer reached. “I’ll get the door open, and then you can slip inside when no one’s lookin’.”

Merik hesitated. He didn’t want Cam inside—he’d only wanted her help getting this far, and then he’d intended to take the lead—yet the girl was already traipsing toward the door and lifting her hand to knock.