Windwitch (The Witchlands 2)

Then he exhaled, sending a hot tendril curling up the stairs, into whatever room waited overhead.

His winds met no one. The room was empty.

So after a final glance to check on Cam, Merik hugged his cloak close and ascended.

* * *

An office and a bedroom. That was what Merik found above the dining hall of Pin’s Keep. The attic between room and roof had been repurposed into a cramped living space.

When, though, was the question. After Jana’s death, the running of Pin’s Keep had fallen to Serafin, who had in turn passed it off to servants. The first Merik had heard of Vivia taking over had been when he’d moved back to Lovats three years ago. Yet this space was so unmistakably hers.

A couch sagged beneath an open window. The back, despite its moth-eaten corners, was covered in a neatly folded quilt embroidered with the Nihar family’s sea fox standard. A matching curtain dangled from one corner of the window, suggesting that the poorly installed shutters did little to block the drafts.

Merik couldn’t tear his eyes away from the curtains. They conjured the memory of another window, another space, just like this one but tucked in a forgotten wing of the palace.

Vivia had found it. Decorated it. And for a time, she’d allowed Merik to enjoy it with her. My fox’s den, she’d called it, and he’d played with toy soldiers while she’d read book after book … after book.

Then their mother had died, and after setting the mourning wreaths aflame, tossing them off the water-bridges, and marching somberly back to the palace, Vivia had promptly locked herself in her fox’s den.

Merik had never been allowed in again.

A moth flapped in on the storm’s wet breeze, catching Merik’s eye. Hooking him back into the present. It fluttered to the brightest corner in the room, where planks served double duty as wall support and shelving.

Merik crept over. He was careful to keep his pace slow, his gaze steady as he examined each spine. Move with the wind, Master Huntsman Yoris had taught Merik. Move with the stream. Too fast, Prince, and your prey will sense you long before you reach ’em.

Yoris had managed the Nihar men at arms, and Merik—and Kullen too—had spent countless hours tracking the lean soldier. Mimicking everything he did.

Merik mimicked him now, moving slowly. Carefully. Resisting an urge for speed. Until finally, he found a useful title on the highest shelf. Judgment Square Sales, Year 19, it read, and a smile built at the edge of Merik’s lips. His smile grew when he found Garren’s name inside.

Acquired Y19D173 from Judgment Square. Traded to Serrit Linday for farm labor, in exchange for food.

“Traded,” Merik mouthed. “To Serrit Linday.” He blinked. Read the name a second time. But no—it definitely still said Serrit Linday.

Which was not what Merik had expected to find. While he certainly hadn’t anticipated finding a note that declared, Sent to Nihar Cove to kill brother, he had expected something to connect Garren to the attack on the Jana.

Instead, he’d found a completely new link in the chain. Hissing an oath, Merik snapped the book shut. Cam’s words rang his ears. What if it wasn’t your sister who tried to kill you?

But it was her. It had to be, for she was the only culprit that made any sense. Not to mention, the youngest Linday—a noble prick if ever there was one—had been Vivia’s friend in childhood. This might be another link, but the chain still led back to Vivia.

By the time Merik had returned the book to its shelf, the moth had trapped itself in a Firewitched lantern. It was dead in seconds, and the stench of smoke briefly drowned out the sharp lemon.

For half a breath, Merik stared at the flame, burning brighter. At the smoke coiling off it from the moth. Then he forced his gaze to Vivia’s desk. It was a table, really. No drawers to hide important messages in, no lockboxes beneath. All the same, Merik shuffled quickly through the stacks of papers. Checked between, behind, below.

Six stacks he flicked through, but there was nothing of interest. Just endless inventories and accounts in a tiny, slanted scrawl that was so neat it almost looked printed.

His eyes caught on a different stack, on the scribbled calculations and tallies and notes. Legible but so sharply slanted the numbers were almost horizontal.

And all of them crossed through. Scratched through with an angry pencil. The number of incoming people (by day) versus the amount of incoming food (by day, and with the palace’s contribution subtracted), all underscored by the amount of coins being spent to pay for everything.

The numbers didn’t add up. Not even close. The hungry and the homeless far outweighed the food and the funds coming in. Noden’s breath, what a huge number it was. Sixteen new people came each day hoping for beds, and forty-four more people came looking for food.

If that was how many people made it to Pin’s Keep for shelter, for meals, for healing, then how many didn’t? Merik knew his homeland was in tatters—it had been for twenty years, and things had only sunk deeper into the hell-waters recently. But these numbers …

They suggested a Nubrevna far worse than Merik had realized.

With a steeling sigh, he moved onward to the final stack on the desk. A large paper with creases down the center rested on top of it.

A map of the Cisterns, the vast network of tunnels below the city that carried water and sewage throughout. Merik leaned in, excited, for there was a spot on the map with a fat X atop it—as well as six times of day scribbled in the corner, one of which was circled. A meeting location and time, perhaps?