Windwitch (The Witchlands 2)

Yet for all the lushness here, there was also no missing the damage. Entire hedges were smashed, and flowerbeds trampled to mush. Nothing at all like the last time Vivia had visited. Ages ago, it seemed, though it had really been only five years.

Serrit had confessed feelings Vivia knew he didn’t have. She had seen in her own father just how men wielded lies and marriage to win power. Her friendship with Serrit had dissolved from there.

Vivia forced away that memory, squaring her shoulders and smoothing her captain’s coat. Two paces ahead, Linday’s feet limped unevenly over the gravel pathway that led to the greenhouse’s center.

He glanced over his shoulder, fretting with the high neck of his robe as he did so. “I deeply appreciate you looking into this, Your Highness.” Nothing in his tone sounded grateful, and he was being unusually whiny. “The princess herself coming here. What an honor.”

Princess. Vivia felt the barbs on that word. A reminder that she was still not queen, for of course Linday and the rest of the Council wouldn’t permit her to claim her rightful title.

She let frustration flash across her face. “Of course, my lord. I would do no less for any of my vizers.”

“Oh?” Linday’s eyebrows lifted. Warped, though, as if the muscles of his face wouldn’t follow orders. A trick of the light, no doubt. “I thought perhaps you came because of your men’s…” He lowered his voice. “Your men’s ineptitude. For is it not their failures that have left this man called the Fury still out there?”

Ah, he was baiting her—and the soldiers behind too, for they certainly heard him. So Vivia ignored him.

Moments later, after rounding a bellflower, its violet flowers in full bloom, the greenhouse’s central courtyard opened up before them. The fountain spat halfheartedly, its spout bent in half.

At its base was a dead man.

“There. Look at that.” Linday pointed emphatically, as if Vivia couldn’t see the mutilated body. His voice was abnormally high-pitched as he went on: “Look at what the Fury did to me!”

“You mean,” Vivia countered, “what he did to your guard.” She flipped up her hand, and the soldiers settled into a perfect waiting row. Then Vivia approached the corpse.

He was scarcely human now, with shadows crawling across his skin. “Vizer,” Vivia began, smothering the bile in her throat, “why don’t you tell me happened here.” She knelt.

Lines of darkness spread over the man’s body, thin as a spider’s web in some places and clotted together in others. His extremities had turned into shiny, charred chunks. Blackened fingers—only nine of them, Vivia noted absently—a blackened face, and a blackened, hairless scalp.

Behind her, his hands wringing with enthusiasm, Linday relayed how a scarred man had attacked while he tended the garden. “A habit for those nights when I cannot sleep, as I’m sure you can understand.”

“Hmmm,” Vivia replied, listening about as closely as she listened to her father. She couldn’t help it. There was something alive about the marks. When her gaze unfocused, they seemed to move. To pulse in a way that was sickly fascinating and viscerally familiar.

“Cleaved,” Vivia murmured at last—although that wasn’t quite it.

“Pardon?” Linday scurried in closer, his limp more pronounced, fidgeting with his robe’s collar as if it wouldn’t go high enough.

Vivia pushed upright. “Did the attacker—”

“The Fury,” Linday cut in.

“—hurt you?” She waved to Linday’s left leg, which he was favoring, and pretended not to have heard his use of the label the Fury. Naming the criminal after a saint, particularly in front of her troops, would only give the man power.

“The Fury did hurt me.” Linday rolled back his sleeve to show blackened slashes down his inner forearm. “There’s another like it on my leg.”

Vivia’s eyes widened. “What caused that? Magic?”

“Oh, certainly he was a witch. A corrupted Windwitch. Powerful.”

Vivia’s brow knit. A Windwitch did narrow down the pool of potential murderers—particularly since it would allow her to look at a registry. “Did he have a Witchmark?”

“I didn’t notice. It was lost in all the scarring. Scars,” Linday emphasized, “like those.” He looked meaningfully at the dead body.

“So … you think the attacker was cleaved.”

“It is a possibility.”

Except that it isn’t, Vivia thought. While cleaving would indeed explain why this corpse looked the way it did, it would not explain how the man posing as the Fury could hold conversations. Nor how he could live this long. Once the corruption began, it combusted a person’s witchery in mere minutes.

“Did the attacker tell you why he came?” Vivia scooted a bit closer to Linday. Though holy hell-waters, was he always this sweaty? “Or did he make any demands?”

“He did make a demand,” Linday oozed. “But forgive me, Your Highness, for you won’t like what I have to say.”

This was going to be good.

“The Fury said I must find the missing Origin Well.”

Vivia stiffened. “Missing … Origin Well? I didn’t realize one had been lost.”

For several breaths, Linday held Vivia’s gaze as if he didn’t believe her. Then at last, he smiled lopsidedly. “And here I had so hoped you might know what the Fury was referring to, for he said if I did not find this Well, then he would kill me.”