Page 12 of Witchlight
“RUN!” she heard Vaness shriek, and abruptly, iron sheered upward. It cut the ice. It released Vivia’s limbs and Vivia’s brain. “RUN!” Vaness shrieked again, and now she was shoving at Vivia from behind.
They both toppled onto the other side of the column.
Already, the iron was buckling. Already the ice was clambering around its edges and reaching for Vivia and Vaness. It ignored Cam entirely. Not that Vivia noticed that in the moment. All she had mental space for as she staggered after her young first mate was the ice. The stone. The quaking that built beneath her feet.Come, my daughter, come. Come, come, and find release.
They reached a door. It was not a magic door, but rather an archway into darkness.The big shadow,she thought distantly as Cam towed her through,that goes to the Convent.
But Vivia didn’t want to go to the Convent. She wanted the magic doorway to the under-city. She tried to swivel back. To see if the ice still hunted or if maybe she could carve a way through the ice and to the under-city door.
But she ran into Vaness, who gripped her tight and shoved her back into shadows. Ice lurched behind the Empress, a glowing blue tidal wave that sang of sleep and hunger. That filled the doorway Vivia had wanted to rush back through.
It crunched, it built, and finally it sealed them in completely.
“Your iron,” Vivia gasped. “Can you use it?”
The Empress shook her head, lifting her wrists to reveal no iron shackles. No iron flail or shield. “Gone,” she answered. “We are trapped here in this darkness.”
SIX
The boy followed Merik, skittering and scurrying from shadow to shadow. Merik was careful to never move so fast the boy couldn’t keep up. It was hard to stay slow, though. The wind had burrowed deep into his bones. Hunger was so pressing, he felt his stomach eating into his esophagus.
What Merik did not feel were signs of the Puppeteer. She was as inescapable as the tides. Her power seeped into every stone, every branch, every inch of plague-ridden soil. But there was nothing here now beyond wind and cold and these bodies that should be dead.
Bodies like his own. And like the boy still following him.
It was that thought more than any that propelled Merik onward until, at last, he and Aurora reached an intersection he knew too well. This was the way to the Puppeteer’s tower, and if he lifted a numb hand to block the wind, he could see it right there: part crumbling relic, part testament to a history long forgotten.
Ancient things made new again.He’d thought that of the tower, where Esme had trapped him, tortured him, terrified him.
But she also had had a stove in there. Blankets too. And maybe, by some miracle, there would be food.
Years later, Merik would look back at this moment as one when the fissures in the ice had finally led him exactly where he needed to be—for there really were no coincidences. But in that moment, all he’d really known was that an unexpected peace settled over him. And it radiated stronger, stronger as he stumbled ever closer to the tower.
When he finally reached the gaping, open door, he paused long enough to look back. The boy was still there, although he’d stopped now. Which was fine; Merik knew eventually the boy would follow. Aurora certainly did, shoving past Merik to be the first into the tower.
She nosed at an old pile of kindling beside stone steps, startling several mice. She snapped them into her jaws; Merik winced at the sound. But then decided he’d rather she eat mice than people.
With a fresh surge of strength, Merik hurried upstairs to the top floor.Thefloor where Esme had made her home.
There was no one there now. There was only her desk, her books, her many slouching candles that hadn’t seen flames since her passing. And of course, there was the corner where Merik had existed, bound by the Puppeteer’s collar and her capricious, yet calculating whim.
The rags that had been his only warmth were still there. The collar that had blocked his magic was not. For several moments, a tightness gripped Merik’s chest. As if his ribs had become a fist, as if they squeezed inward, trying to stop his lungs and heart from working.
Aurora whined. The moment passed. And Merik inhaled, laying a hand on the storm hound’s warm head. “We should start a fire,” he murmured, though he suspected she might understand his desires even without words. “And then we should look for food, and try to make a bed for that boy outside.”
Aurora snuffed. Merik scratched. Ancient things made new again.
Hours later, Merik had found wood and coaxed a fire to life in the stove. He’d found salted meat that had frozen inside a barrel and a loaf of icy bread that the mice had never reached. So, after melting snow, he made a sad attempt at stew.
Then Merik hugged a rough blanket around his shoulders and with Aurora behind him, he climbed the final steps to the top of the tower. The boy had not yet braved the doorway, but he was still out there. Merik heard him shuffling every hour or so.
He would come eventually.
Or at least, Merik hoped he would. Night had fallen; the cold would soon be deadly.
The wind beat stronger atop the tower, and the winter sky was crystalline in a way it never looked on the Jadansi, as if the cold sharpened each star and darkened all the spaces between. There was a full moon tonight, which meant months might have passed since Merik had fled a dying Puppeteer and been swallowed by the ice… or it might have only been two weeks. Two weeks seemed unlikely though, given the dramatic change in temperature and snow.
And given the dramatic change in what waited beyond the walls of Poznin.
