Page 3 of Witchlight
Aurora keened louder and withdrew.Now,she seemed to say.We need to move now.
As if in answer to her, a sound filled the cavern. A strange sound that made no sense here.Caw, caw.The cry bounced and echoed.Caw, caw.A bird flapped by, wings black and glistening.
A crow or raven,Merik thought as he watched the distant bird wheel and dip around ice webs—moving in a path that, if he was fast enough, Merik could follow.
He sucked air to him. In through his nose. Out through his mouth. And on the exhale, wind lifted him and Aurora simultaneously. Hoarfrost crackled and released them.
Aurora yelped as they flew across the cavern, chasing after the black bird. They wheeled and dipped exactly as the bird had, until eventually Merik saw where the bird was aimed: a door with a thin stream of water pouring from it.
Merik knew that door. It was not the one he wanted—even if it was where the girls in the tomb had told him to go. He wanted to go through any doorbutthat one.
But here he was: stopped, blocked, forced to change.
The bird swept through the door. Blue magicked light sprayed. And it was as if the sleeping ice suddenly seemed to realize it might lose Merik if it didn’t actnow. It lurched toward him in thick strands that wanted Merik and Aurora to sleep while the ice embraced them.
Aurora shrieked, her wings flapping ineffectively and spraying Merik in her blood. Merik slung out two winds at once. One wind he used to propel Aurora toward the door—hard and fast, and although she screamed, she also instinctively curled herself into a ball to avoid the pain of impact.
She hit the door’s opening.
She disappeared just as the black bird had.
The second wind, Merik shot at the ice. An outward blast to keep it offhim while he plummeted onto the tiny outcropping before the wet, glistening door.
Power roiled across him. This wasnotthe door he wanted. This wasnotsafety.
But Merik would follow the grain.
Panting, he threw one final look at the cavern where nothing made sense—where magic was both incalculably strong, yet also weak and starving. He could see now just how much ice was coming for him, lancing across the cavern like shots from a Firewitched pistol.
Merik dove for the door, curling as Aurora had. Then magic clamped over him. He left the mountain behind.
TWO
There were few people the Bloodwitch Aeduan hated more than Purists.
Noblemen happened to be one of them.
Particularly noblemen who believed big swords made up for an absence of spines. “I have told you three times now,” Aeduan said without inflection, “this is not a negotiation. Give up the castle and swear fealty to Her Imperial Majesty Safiya fon Cartorra.”
“Demon,” snarled one of the two men currently frozen in place before Aeduan.
“Monster,” hissed the other.
Aeduan would have rolled his eyes if he were that sort of man. Around him, the ancient stones of the empty Hasstrel estate groaned. Wind shrieked through holes in the shutters; a rat scurried down a nearby hall, her blood singing of freedom and shadows. The two fon Grieg sons had been granted this estate when Eron fon Hasstrel had been arrested. Since the dom’s release and his niece’s ascendancy to the throne, fon Hasstrel had decided he wanted his castle back.
Which was why Aeduan was here, instead of a hundred miles east with a silver taler that smelled of his own blood.
Sweet wine and lathered horses. Cut emeralds and sharpened steel.Both fon Grieg men smelled of wealth. And both bore the lingering cold iron scent of the Hell-Bard Loom, for although they were no longer bound to it, it would forever taint their blood.
Aeduan let his Bloodwitchery swirl into his eyes. Let his lips lift to reveal his canines while a fresh gust of winter wind flipped into his new Carawen salamander cloak. He might not be a dramatic man, but he also wasn’t above a bit of theater when the moment demanded. With his left arm outstretched, he furled in his fingers.
And watched as less and less blood reached the two men’s brains. “I can kill you this way,” he said. “I just keep tightening”—another inch withhis fingers—“and tightening until there is nothing left to keep your brains functioning. Or I can set you free.” He released, though only slightly.
Both men gasped. The right brother’s eyes shuttered.
“Your choice.”
“Our father,” rasped the one on the right. Redrick or Redris or something comparably bland and Cartorran. “Was given this castle—”
