Chapter 4, Witchlight
Plus, an Indigo pre-order sale!
Before I dive into the next chapter of Witchlight, I have some exciting announcements!
I’ll be attending YALLWest in Santa Monica this May! So come see me! I haven’t been in a few years, so I am super pumped to go.
The Executioners Three is one of Indigo’s Most Anticipated Kids’ and Teens’ Books! That means it’s currently 20% off to pre-order! You can find the book here!
I’m updating TE3 on Wattpad with the finished/edited version of the book, and I’ll be adding another chapter this week! So get reading! (Or you know, just give me a vote so the algorithm likes me.)
Now on to the main event. 😉
Chapter 4
Poznin had changed.
This was the first thing Merik thought when the magic of the mountain released him. Gone was the pond filled with dead bodies—although not the bodies. They were still here, but now frozen and slumped across the pond’s empty basin.
It was winter now too, the world gray and white.
Aurora whimpered and Merik dragged himself toward her. Her golden fur was stained with red from where the ice had pierced her. Merik was bleeding too. A gash on his chest; a puncture on the back of his calf. They were lucky the ice had not killed them.
“Aurora,” he murmured in a voice that felt too loud here, where cleaved bodies had frozen into bloated flanks of meat. “You’re safe now.” He laid a hand onto Aurora’s back. Her spine protruded; her ribs too. “We’re out of the ice now. You’re safe.”
Merik didn’t actually know if this was true. So far, no Cleaved were approaching—and no Puppeteer laughed or cackled in his brain. She’d been mortally wounded when Merik had last seen her, but she might have survived. He had no way of knowing.
Carefully, he continued to stroke down the storm hound’s back, feeling each knob in her spine, each ripple of young, malnourished muscle. Then Merik drew in cold air. It sparkled in his lungs, alive with his Windwitchery.Maybe I can fly us out of here, he thought. Maybe I can summon enough winds to carry myself and Aurora far from here, across the Witchlands, all the way to Nubrevna, where I can . . .
He didn’t know. He’d spent so long trying to escape Esme, then trying to save Kullen . . . and then asleep in the ice. How long had he been frozen? How much had changed in the Witchlands since he’d left it behind?
Slowly, slowly, as Merik continued to stroke Aurora’s back, she unfurled. Her body relaxed. Her whimpers ceased. She lifted her canine head and found Merik’s eyes with her own of silvery blue. There was trust in those eyes, and strangely, inexplicably, Merik felt his heart break.
He’d only ever hurt those who’d trusted him. He’d only ever abandoned and betrayed them. His crew on the Jana. Kullen. Cam. Ryber. Safiya. And even Vivia. He’d tried to help, tried to be what he’d thought people needed from him . . . but he’d only ever been a disappointment. Just as his father had always said.
Aurora snuffed, her silver eyes blinking.
And Merik shook his head. “Dark thoughts,” he told her, scrubbing a hand over her downy snout. “But as my father always used to say: Sitting still is a quick path to madness. Come on, little one. Let’s move.”
Aurora obeyed, stiffly rising. The wound on her wing was ugly, but it wasn’t life-threatening. And Merik thought again of what the strange girls with their archaic speech had commanded him to do. There’s one thing you have to do once you’re free: you have to find our father. He calls himself the Raider King.
That, Merik had already decided, was most certainly not what he was going to do. “This way,” he said with more confidence than he felt. “I’ll try to lead you around the bodies.”
Aurora snuffed again. Her feet were clumsy, her body clumsy like the puppies Master Huntsman Yoris used to raise in Nihar. But unlike those pups, Aurora had no interest in these corpses. There was no desire to nose around and root through the interesting smells. She seemed to recognize these bodies were not for her; that there was something inherently wrong with them.
Then they were out of the pond, out of the collapsed building, and emerging into the full cold of the day. Merik hadn’t conceptualized how much the crumbling walls blocked out a winter wind. It crushed against him now, calling to his magic—and freezing him to his bones. Aurora seemed not to feel it. In fact, she visibly strengthened before Merik’s eyes, and visibly brightened too. As if the power of the wind fed the Airwitched heart of her.
Merik knew so little about the magic creatures of the world. They were so rare, more often relegated to legend than ever seen. But he did know that creatures like storm hounds and sea foxes and shadow wyrms were creatures of pure elemental power.
Her snout wiggled in the air. The wind rippled and towed through her fur, turning the blood streaks into fluttering lines. Her wings stretched wide, and for several seconds, she looked like a cormorant drying out in the sun. Then her injured wing began healing right before Merik’s eyes—as if she was absorbing strength directly from the wind into her blood.
In a lurch of horror, Merik realized he should stop the storm hound. What if the Puppeteer sensed Aurora’s magic? She might jump out at them at any moment and snap wooden collars around both their necks—
But then Aurora folded her wings back in. No longer injured. She blinked slowly at Merik as if to say, We can go now.
Merik swallowed. Food. Shelter. That was all he had to find—and without the Puppeteer sensing them. But which way should he lead Aurora? To the left, he could see the top of Esme’s tower. He would not go that way.
The river? he wondered. The forest to the east?
East, he decided, would be safest, and he was surprised how easily he remembered Poznin and its streets. His imprisonment here had been so brief; his mind, his body, his magic so subjugated. Plus, winter had since sapped all color from the city, leaving snow to gather in steep banks along various corridors.
But Merik knew it, all the same.
Aurora kept her wings folded against her spine, lending her a hunchbacked look as she prowled forward. Her nose shoved into occasional snowdrifts. Twice, she pulled up a human body part: a finger. A foot. Like before, she didn’t eat them. If anything, she seemed disappointed they weren’t proper food.
When they reached a wider avenue through town, the Cleaved stood sentry. These were also as Merik remembered, untouched by time. People of all ages, all sizes, all genders and colors and castes. One tall man with a long, pointed beard reminded Merik of the Northman who’d stabbed Esme.
Merik hoped that man was safe. He hoped that man was headed toward his family now . . . or perhaps already there.
Merik was about to continue onward, when a sound hit his ears. A mere whisper beneath the wind’s howl, and instinctively his gaze snapped to Aurora—as if she really were one of the hunting dogs he’d grown up with. Her ears swiveled forward; she heard the sound too.
Someone nearby was crying.
For several blinking heartbeats, Merik found himself not in Poznin but in a tiny room where he and Vivia used to play.
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 Vivia never cries. 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 the 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,” she says. 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 very 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 from his mind. 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 on that day many years ago. It pulled at Merik’s heart, as if a Thread was already bound to him from 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 hounds used 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.
So Merik did, describing Fool Brother Filip and Blind Brother Daret. Then he told a story about a hungry Hagfish. And another that Evrane had once told him about a little monster who wanted to become a man. Cold burrowed into his bones. Hunger curled through his gullet. And the boy never unfolded. Only the wind broke the stillness as it kicked at the winter-stripped hedges and towed at the coattails and dress hems of an army that never moved.
After what must have been at least an hour of such stories, when Merik’s throat was too dry to continue and his body too cold, he pushed to his feet. The world wavered. Blood boomed in his ears. Then he called out, “I am going to search for food and shelter. You can follow if you like. Your choice.”
Merik turned away. Aurora went with him.
Thank you all—as always—for reading! And stay tuned for more of The Executioners Three later this week on Wattpad…
Safe harbors!
💚 - Sooz