Then a new thought hit. The missing Origin Well. It couldn’t be the lake … could it? Origin Wells were said to be the sources of magic—and Nubrevna already had one in the south. A dead Well, but there all the same.
Had Vivia’s soldiers not been waiting nearby—if Linday hadn’t been likely to return at any moment—Vivia would have scrambled down the hole immediately. She needed to know where it led. She needed to know how much Linday knew about the underground, and why he even cared in the first place.
Yet Vivia’s men were here, and Linday too. Not to mention, the fifth-hour chimes were riding in on a honeysuckle breeze. This was the hour at which she normally awoke.
So with the sickening realization that this would have to wait, Vivia shouted for her men to begin clearing out the dead guard. Then she followed, once more, the ants and the spiders and the centipedes. Away from the trapdoor. Away from whatever frightened them underground.
*
Merik did not drown.
He should have, but somehow, the water—stark and cold—carried him ashore. He awoke with his back on a low lip of the Hawk’s Way canal. He awoke to Cam’s voice.
“Oh, come on, sir.” She was shaking him. He wished she’d stop. “Please, wake up, sir.”
“I’m … up,” he gritted out. His eyelids shivered wide. Cam’s dappled face swam into view, a gray dawn sky behind.
“Thank you, Noden,” she breathed. And finally, finally she stopped shaking him. “You really should be dead, sir, but you’ve the blessing of Lady Baile on your side.”
“That,” Merik croaked, his throat more wasted and sore than it had been in days, “or the Hagfishes think I taste bad.”
She laughed, but it was a taut sound. False. Then her words blurted out, too fast to stop. “I was so worried, sir! It’s been hours since we went to Pin’s Keep. I thought you were dead!”
Shame spun in Merik’s chest, while she helped him to rise. “It’s all right, boy. I’m all right.”
“But I saw you go upstairs, sir, and I waited … and waited—just like you told me to do. But then that white-haired first mate went up, and I thought for sure you were in trouble. Except nothing happened. The woman came back down, and … you didn’t.” Cam thumped her stomach. “My gut was sayin’ you were in trouble, but by the time I got up there, you were gone—are you sure you’re not hurt?”
“I’m fine,” Merik repeated, pulling his hood into place. “Just soaked through.” It was true; he was drenched all the way to his small clothes. And cold—he was cold too.
“Why did I just fish you from the Timetz, then? Where’d you go, sir?” She fixed him with an expression that was a cross between a glare and plea. As if she desperately wanted to be annoyed with her admiral but just couldn’t quite bring herself to it.
“I’ll explain once we’re back at the tenement.”
“Hye, Admiral,” she murmured.
Merik’s shoulders tensed for his ears. It felt like a lifetime since anyone had called him that. He didn’t miss it.
Motioning for Cam to release him—he could walk on his own—Merik set off for the stone steps leading out of the canal. He owed the girl an apology. But not, he thought, an explanation. Stacia Sotar and the Fury, a shadow man with frozen winds, a dead vizer in the greenhouse—it wasn’t a story easily relayed like one of Cam’s melodic tales.
Besides, the less she knew, the safer she’d be.
As he walked, Cam scurrying behind, he re-created the greenhouse in his mind. He re-created the shadow man.
That creature had killed Vizer Linday as easily as Merik might crush a spider. If Merik hadn’t fled when he did, he would have been next.
He hated that fact more than anything else, but there it was: he could not face that monster alone. He could not fight that dark magic, could not stop that wrongness alone. Yet his city, his people … They needed Merik to do something.
So what was left, then, beyond staying the current course? Only with an entire contingent of trained witches and soldiers could Merik possibly hope to face that shadow man. To gain an army such as that, he would need to gain the throne—or at least to keep Vivia off of it.
It was sunrise by the time Merik and Cam made it into Old Town. The first beams of pink morning light glittered on puddles left from the night’s storm. Water splashed up from Cam’s steps, and Merik realized, his earlier shame doubling, that Cam was barefoot. She had been for weeks, and not once had she complained.
He’d noticed, of course, but there’d been so many other things to worry over. Not an excuse. Frowning, he fidgeted with his hood before ducking into the tenement. The halls were more crowded now, people off the streets seeking shelter for the night, and as he knew she would, always, always, Cam scampered just behind.
Upon reaching Kullen’s low door, Merik kicked all thoughts aside and focused on tapping out the lock-spell. His knuckles hurt more than he cared to consider, and his fingers were pruned from all that time in the canal.