Page 9 of Witchlight
Merik is seven, Vivia is ten. He has just walked into Vivia’s “fox’s den,” as she calls it—the secret room where they keep their toys. He likes to pretend Vivia’s dolls are the Paladins from the old stories everyone says aren’t true. But where Merik expects to find the den empty, he instead finds Vivia curled up beside the dollhouse.
She cries, with her hands over the top of her head and her face buried in her knees. The dollhouse is sodden, and a pitcher of water now stands empty on a table by the door.
“Vee?” Merik asks. He is afraid because Vivianevercries. And he is afraid because if she is crying, then he is not sure how he is ever supposed to keep himself from doing the same. Their father has already made it clear that Merik cries too much; he needs to be more like Vivia. “Vee?” Merik tries again, and he drops to the floor beside her.
She shrinks more tightly into a ball. Her tears fall harder. They are not the shattered sobs of a girl who has lost her mother, nor the carefully controlled tears she let fall while they threw autumn leaves off the water-bridges at Mother’s funeral. They are a whimpering hiccup with an occasional sniff every few seconds.
Merik lays a hand on her arm. She stiffens. Then relaxes and raises her head slightly. Her dark eyes are almost swollen shut. She must have been crying for some time before Merik found her. “Don’t tell Father.” Her voice is hoarse and tired. “Don’t tell him, Merry.”
“Tell him what?” Merik asks, and it’s an honest question. Is he supposed to keep it quiet that she is crying? Or that she has clearly, once again, lost control of her magic? Or is the secret that she was in here at all and playing with the dolls their father told her to leave behind a year ago?
“Don’t tell him what you saw.”
Merik recoils slightly, and a hot sensation wrings through him—a feeling he doesn’t recognize and one he doesn’t like. “What… did I see?”
She blinks at him. Then she swipes tears from her eyes. “Exactly.” She pushes to her feet, nodding as if she is pleased by Merik’s answer. Pleased by his understanding of something he most certainly doesn’t understand at all.
But he likes it when she does what she does next: when she pats his head and even smiles a crooked smile that looks so much like Mother’s. It’s a smile that says,You’re all right, Merry, and I’m glad you’re here beside me.So Merik bites back his questions.
“I’m sorry about the dolls.” She motions to the house, still dripping with water. “It was an accident, and I’ll go fetch a towel to wipe it up.”
“I’ll come with you,” Merik says, and to his deep delight, Vivia’s smile widens and she offers him a hand. He takes it. Her palm is hot and clammy.
They leave their playroom like that. And Merik leaves his questions behind too, until the memory of that afternoon fades. Until he forgets he ever saw something he wasn’t meant to see.
It was like a beam of sunshine punching through a storm. And as soon as the memory hit Merik, it was gone again—but the full weight and warmth of the moment remained. He remembered that day in Vivia’s den. He did not remember what it was he’d supposedly seen and was meant to keep secret from his father.
It didn’t matter now. What mattered was this sound of crying that was so like Vivia that it pulled at Merik’s heart, as if a Thread already bound him to the unseen person.
Merik spun toward the whimpers. It was coming from within the rows of Cleaved—and by Noden, whoever they were, they must be terrified out of their skull.Too fast, Prince,he thought as he crept toward them,and your prey will sense you long before you reach ’em.
Hye, Master Yoris, you’re right.
Merik slung his gaze left and right, searching for any movement in the Puppeteer’s unmoving army. Dead grass and lifeless vines rattled and scraped beneath his bare soles. Aurora carefully kept pace beside him.
Until Merik spotted a noticeable gap in one of the rows—a hole where snow did not reach, as if someone had just left it there. As if one of the Cleaved had, as could happen, suddenly become fully human again.
The crying broke off, and Merik ground to a halt. “Hello?” He spoke Arithuanian. “Hello? I won’t hurt you. I’m like you—I am a former Cleaved and lost.”
Aurora stopped beside Merik, and it occurred to Merik that perhaps having a storm hound was not the best way to prove his trustworthiness.
“She won’t hurt you. She’s just a puppy who’s lost too. Hello?”
He glanced around, searching shadows for where the child might be. But he couldn’t see anything other than the usual bodies, the usual broken streets and drooping buildings of a city that used to be as prosperous and fine as the greatest capitals in the Witchlands.
Aurora snorted, sinking into a pointer pose, exactly like the houndsused to do with Master Yoris. Her whole body became a perfect line from snout to tail with a front paw crooked upward. Even her wings pressed back along her body to make her a white-furred arrow.
An arrow that pointed straight ahead toward a barren hedge tangling upward along a limestone building. Merik squinted toward it, and hye. There was a slightly darker shape tucked inside.
He lifted both hands toward it and started walking. “I won’t hurt you,” he tried in Cartorran this time. “I’m like you. I was a Cleaved. I promise I won’t hurt you.” When the hedge didn’t move and the darkness tucked within didn’t either, Merik continued his careful inching forward. And he kept on repeating the same phrases, over and over again, each time in a new language.
After Cartorran, he tried Dalmotti. Then Marstoki. Then broken Svodish and even more-broken Lusquan before he circled back to Arithuanian. When he was ten paces away, he could finally see the distinct shape of a child, dressed in velvet with gold rings upon his fingers. His brown skin blended more easily into the shadows, but the day’s tepid sunlight occasionally winked on those rings.
The boy’s knobby knees were pulled up just like Vivia’s had been in her fox’s den, and he must be about the same age she had been on that day Merik had almost forgotten.
With his hands still raised, Merik dropped slowly to one knee. His muscles shook; he lacked any of his former grace. “Can I sit?” he asked, shifting now to Marstoki. The boy’s style of dress suggested he might be from the east. “I will tell you a story, if you like. It’s about two fish who swam into Queen Crab’s lair. Maybe you have a story like it wherever you’re from.”
Aurora, having eased out of her pointer pose, now circled twice. Then huffed down to the ground next to Merik—a welcome body heat.Tell the story,she seemed to say.
