What Merik wanted to see was Cam, the friend who had stood by him through floods and hell-waters. Over Shite Street and back.
Before he’d pushed her away.
All Merik could figure was that Cam had gone out to search for answers on the dead man in the storerooms … And then she had stumbled upon something she couldn’t fight. Like the shadow man.
Merik heaved his hood lower, streaking faster down Hawk’s Way. Stop seeing what you want to see! The attack pounded in his chest, in his eardrums. Inescapable and all too true.
Merik had seen potential trade for Nubrevna where there was none. He’d seen a navy that had “needed his leadership” when it hadn’t. He’d seen a selfish domna in Safiya fon Hasstrel, a frustrating Threadwitch in Iseult det Midenzi, and then an inconsequential ship’s boy in Cam—yet none of those presumptions had proved true.
Worst of all, in all of his holiest of holy conceit, Merik had seen a throne he thought he should sit upon—that Kullen had implied he should one day claim, even though that “greatness” was his sister’s right by birth.
Merik jostled forward, slow. Too slow. Carts and refugees and thrice-damned mules everywhere he tried to step.
A man stumbled against Merik’s back, and when Merik didn’t budge, the man shoved. “Stand aside—”
Merik had the man’s wrist in an instant, twisting until he felt the ligaments and bone strain. Another inch, and they would snap. “I will kill you,” was all Merik said.
“Please,” the man stammered.
Merik released him. Flung him away. He wanted to roar. I am dangerous!
But the words never came, for at that moment, a cool wind spiraled against Merik’s flesh. A breeze that sang to his witchery.
Death. Shadows. It called him … south. Farther down Hawk’s Way. The same icy darkness that had spoken to him in the storerooms—the same frozen curse that he feared might have claimed Cam.
Merik abandoned the quay, hurtling into a dark alley. There, he sprang up, foot by foot. Leaping one wall to the other, a wind to punt him higher. Side to side, until finally he hit a shingled roof.
Sunlight burned down. He dropped to a crouch and flexed his fingers, watching as dust coiled outward, carried by his winds. He reached for anything his charged air connected with.
There. Straight ahead.
Merik set off, cloak flying around him. His hood fell back. His boots slammed onto shingles, knocking them. Cracking them. Shattering more than a few.
He reached the end of the building. Gathering his breath and his power, Merik bounded over a strip of black alley. Rooftop after rooftop, the gap between Merik and this darkness—a shadow that sang to his blood—shrank with each gusting bound.
Until the rooftops ended, forcing him to stop. The Southern Wharf spanned before him, and beyond it, the water-bridge thrust across the clouded valley toward the Sentries.
So crowded. Boats crammed bow to stern, leaving no water visible. No gap in the people arriving.
Merik sank flat against the sloped shale and snaked to the edge. Instinct sent him grabbing for a spyglass in his admiral’s coat …
But of course, he had no coat. No spyglass. No weapon.
No matter. He didn’t need that—not when his blood hungered for that shadow wind.
A quick scan of the wharf showed ethnicities as varied as ages, as voices, as degrees of desperation. These were not only Nubrevnans but people from outside the borders as well. People from the Contested Lands or the unstable Sirmayans.
Merik’s eyes snagged on a bald man hovering where the docks jutted into the man-made harbor. He was as badly scarred as Merik, at least on his scalp—as well as on the hand he now lifted overhead.
A hand with no pinkie.
Chills lifted across Merik’s neck and arms as he wondered if it could be another man like the one from the storerooms. Then the man turned, and it was Garren. The assassin from the Jana.
For several booming heartbeats, the wharf seemed to fall away. All Merik saw was the assassin, and all he heard was his blood thumping in his ears. No wind reached his cheeks, no voices hit his ears.
The entire world was a dead man walking.
That night, in the darkness of his cabin, Merik had thrust a cutlass through Garren’s gut. Blood had sprayed; innards had fallen. Yet here the man now stood.
Merik squinted. Sunspots speckled his vision, but he could still make out the jagged black lines throbbing down the man’s neck.
Marks like Merik’s.
Marks that called to him.
He hadn’t known what those lines meant earlier. He didn’t know what they meant now. He simply knew that Cam was right: they were bad.
And Merik knew that if following Garren might lead him to Cam, then he couldn’t stop now.
Garren shuffled away from Merik, pushing steadily through the chaos. He aimed for a bar called the Cleaved Man that hugged the canal. A large stone building filled with sailors and soldiers and those who needed a cheap drink.