Instinct told Merik to run. Told his muscles to flee. Yet something else warred inside him—something hot and not to be trifled with.

Merik let his fury come. It roared to a fiery life right as the darkness scuttled across him.

The shadow man had arrived.

There was no other way to describe what prowled into the clearing—Linday had gotten the title right. Not because the man was made of shadows, so much as he was cloaked by them. Eaten alive by darkness.

The man, the monster towered before Merik, his features impossible to distinguish. What little of his skin was exposed—hands, neck, face—moved like a thousand eels skippering upstream.

Against all Merik knew to be wise or safe, his eyes closed and his arms shot up to block his face. He rocked back two steps, almost tripping over Linday.

The shadow man laughed at that. A sound so deep that Merik could scarcely hear it. He felt the thunder rumble in his lungs, though. Felt the man say, “I respect your attempt at stopping me, Vizer, but alarms and guards are useless now. Give me what I’ve come for, or everyone here dies. Your guards. This friend of yours. And you.”

A whimper split the darkness, forcing Merik to lower his arms. To open his eyes and look at the shadow man, snaking closer. A creature with all the power in the room.

All the power in the world.

Merik made himself watch. Made his mind think, his muscles move, and his own power awaken. It was strangely weak. Strangely cold—a tendril of frost laced with darkness, as if the shadow man had stolen all heat in the room.

“Where is it, Vizer?” The monster’s voice rippled and scraped. Scales rubbing against the sand. “We had a deal.”

“I c-couldn’t find it.” Linday’s teeth chattered, louder than his words. “I-I looked.”

The shadow man laughed again before kneeling beside the vizer—and leaving Merik all but forgotten. Clearly he saw Merik as no threat.

Well, then, that was his mistake.

Immediately, Merik drew more magic to him, backing away as he did so. The wind was still frozen and off, yet it rose all the same. A subtle breeze to curl around him. To build. To expand while the shadow man reached for Linday’s throat. It was an almost loving gesture, were it not for the death hissing between his fingers.

“This was your last chance, Vizer. Now we will be forced to enact the final plan. Your doing, Vizer. Your doing.”

A root punched up from the earth and drove straight into the shadow man’s chest. Linday’s magic.

A scream—human and beastly, living and dead—tore through the greenhouse. Unlike the spoken words, this sound was real. A physical thing, like icy winds, that smashed apart Merik’s skull and flayed the flesh from his cheeks.

Merik had just enough time to lock eyes with Linday before the shadow man’s fist squeezed.

He crushed the vizer’s neck as easily as a grape. Darkness splattered from Linday’s throat. Blood and shadows sprayed from his mouth. Burst from his eyes, and Merik knew, in that primal part of his spine he should have listened to before, that he stood no chance here.

With the little power he’d managed to grasp, Merik sprang backward. Ice carried him. Cold guided him. Winter rushed through him, both soothing and terrifying.

Branches cracked; leaves slapped; bell after bell rang out. The shadow man pursued, but he was hurt from Linday’s root. Merik had a head start.

Merik reached a door. Not the one he’d come in, but an exit all the same that spit him into another part of the outer garden. Night air coursed over him, freeing. Empowering. And finally his witchery, hot and familiar, could truly unfurl.

He flew. Fast and high, winds bellowing beneath him. Yet just as Merik reached the peak of his flight, just as he relaxed his guard and risked looking back, the wall of shadows reached him.

Black erupted over him, frozen. Blinding. Like the explosion on the Jana but cold and darkness that erupted from the inside out. Too much power, too much anger, too much ice.

Then Merik’s magic winked out. He fell. Spinning and choked by death. Until at last he hit something with such force it seemed to snap his bones. To snap his mind.

Yet even then, Merik didn’t stop falling. He simply moved more slowly, sinking.

Water, he thought as his lungs bubbled full of it. Then he was too deep to know anything else beyond drowning and darkness and Noden’s watery court.

FIFTEEN

You’ve been avoiding me, said a voice made of glass shards and nightmares.

Iseult was in the Dreaming again. That cusp between sleep and waking. A claustrophobic place where her mind detached from her body. Where she could do nothing but listen to the Puppeteer.

Esme was her name. Iseult had learned that in the last—and only—dream invasion since the night before the attacks in Lejna. Esme had plucked Iseult’s location right from Iseult’s mind, and then used that information to cleave, to kill.

Iseult had been completely helpless to stop it.

Admit it, Esme said, you’ve been staying away from me on purpose. Iseult didn’t try to argue. She had been avoiding Esme. With every piece of her mind and her body, Iseult had been avoiding the other witch.

Which meant Iseult had scarcely slept in the last two weeks. It was the only way she could guarantee escape from the Dreaming. The only way she could guarantee the Puppeteer’s nightly assaults did not occur.

Dreamless bursts of fitful sleep, plus a mind and body too exerted to properly close down—those were the factors needed to evade Esme. But well fed and unafraid, it would seem, were not.