Windwitch (The Witchlands 2)

“To Vizer Linday’s greenhouse.”

Noden hang her. Vivia lurched back into an ascent. “Why didn’t you stop the man? Why didn’t you arrest him? He’s killed two men, Stix!”

Stix flung up her hands. “I didn’t know he would kill! I thought maybe he was working with Vizer Linday, so I waited outside, hoping he would reappear. When the man didn’t, I returned to Pin’s Keep—where a second person was in your office.”

They passed the fourth-level landing, both girls taking two steps now.

“A boy,” Stix went on. “He was skinny with two-toned skin, and he was clearly looking for someone. So I let him search … Then I followed him. First to a Noden’s Temple on Hawk’s Way, and finally to a tenement house in Old Town.”

The third landing smeared past. “Did you follow him inside? Did you see which room he went into?”

“No. I couldn’t get close—he’s got incredible reflexes. The kind you only see in kids from the Cisterns.”

Second landing, and Vivia was practically running now. Keep moving, keep moving.

“I could send soldiers to search the tenement, sir.”

“No,” Vivia panted. “I don’t want to risk spooking this man. If he’s got the power to kill like … like that”—she motioned down—“then we can’t put all those civilians at risk. But I do want eyes on the house. If the boy shows up, I want him followed. If we can arrest him, then maybe we can lure out this beast calling himself the Fury.”

“Hye, sir!” Stix popped a rough salute as they jogged onto the highest landing. Yet Vivia made it only ten steps before her feet slowed. Before she had to stop and bend and catch her heaving breath.

For a sickening thought had just set the hairs on her arms to rising. “Stix,” she huffed. “If that corpse … down there … wasn’t a guard”—she paused, gulping in breaths—“and he was in fact one of the Nines, then what was he doing here? And what was the Fury doing here?”

Stix tossed up her hands, a helpless gesture. “I … I don’t know, sir. Did you check the stores?”

“No … Curse me, no.”

As one, both women dove back for the stairs. Down they sprinted, twice as fast as they’d come up. Then Vivia was at the fifth level and shoving past guards, Stix right on her heels as they aimed for the closest bags of foreign grain.

Vivia knew what she’d find, though. She felt it roiling in her abdomen. A certainty that sickened, a certainty that hurt.

She tore open a sack of Dalmotti barley.

Black, all of it—coated in the same shadowy, charred oil that coated the corpses. Completely inedible. As was the next sack and the next sack after that.

Everything Vivia had worked for was gone. Months of secret piracy without sufficient weapons to protect her men … Months of furtive loading and unloading into the storerooms … And months of hiding and lying and praying it would all pay off. But for what? So all of it could be ruined by the foul taint of corrupted magic.

She should never have listened to her father. She should have trusted her own instincts and used this food at Pin’s Keep.

And she should have never, never gotten those thrice-damned weapons from the thrice-damned Marstoks and left Merik behind.

Vivia couldn’t help it. Even though Stix stood right there and another hundred soldiers too, even though she knew this tale would get back to the High Council, Vivia clutched at her head and screamed.

* * *

In the furnace-like heat of midafternoon, Cam ferried Merik through back alleys and side streets to a public bathhouse in Old Town. It was as run-down as everything else in the area, but at least the waters inside were clean.

Better yet, no one visited it at this time of day, and the attendant within scarcely roused from her nap to take Merik’s coins. If she noticed their stink or their grime, she gave no hint of it.

“We need new clothes,” Cam blurted, mere seconds after entering the dark wooden hut. “Leave it to me, hye? I’ll bathe when I get back!” She didn’t wait for a response before hastening back into the sunlight.

Merik let her go. He understood her need to protect the Camilla secret, and in the end, she was right. They did need new clothes.

Merik bathed alone, reveling in the pain of the soap against raw skin. In the hot, magicked waters sweeping past his waist. How much scrubbing would it take, he wondered, to clean away the rage?

Or to clean away the shadows.

He had hoped that he’d imagined the lines at dawn, when he’d applied the healer salve—that the streaks on his chest had been illusions of the light. But now … there was no ignoring the black lines that radiated from his heart like shattered glass.

Were this a month ago, Merik would have asked his aunt what the hell was happening to him. As it was, though, Merik had no one to turn to. Only Cam, who knew less about magic than a frog in the well knows the sea.

As if summoned by his thoughts, the room’s wood-slatted door rasped open. Cam’s dark head popped through. “Clothes, sir.” She dropped them to the floor, along with a pair of rough leather boots. Then she backed out, the door squeaking shut.

“Boy!”

The door paused.

“Are the wind-drums still pounding?”

“Hye, sir,” came the taut reply. “But no soldiers in Old Town.” Yet, Merik thought before the door closed entirely. He rushed through the rest of his bath. Shadows and dead men—he’d deal with it all later.