But before Merrick could reach her, Nynnia’s father, who had stayed beyond the battle, moved to her. With a little grunt, Kyrix pulled the knife loose. After exchanging a glance with his daughter, he threw the dagger away without even looking at it. It clanged into the corner.
“Nynnia?” Merrick took her arm as if he expected her to fall over. She didn’t stop him as his fingers gingerly explored the gash in her robe. Beneath, there was nothing but smooth flesh. “Nynnia . . . you should . . . What—” He paused to catch his breath.
“We have no time for explanations.” She pressed the tips of her long fingers against the line of his jaw. “I am more than you think, that is true, but I also have the same aims as you—to stop the Murashev and save Vermillion.” She looked around at the others. “Do you trust me?”
They looked at her hard, then around at one another. Sorcha didn’t want to influence them, so she stayed silent. She’d made up her own mind. Whatever Nynnia was, she was powerful, and they needed all the friends they could get at this point. Still, if Raed and his crew rejected her, Sorcha would stand with them.
“She could have let the Captain get a knife in the ribs,” Frith said in a low voice, and the others nodded in agreement.
Aachon’s dark eyes didn’t look as convinced, but he glanced at Raed. “It is up to you, my prince.”
The Pretender shrugged, and pronounced his verdict with a broad grin. “Beautiful, powerful women don’t fall into your lap every day—just what this venture needs, I say.”
Sorcha heard Nynnia murmur a question to Merrick, but couldn’t quite make it out. If they were going to face the Murashev, she found herself wanting him to have a little happiness.
“She saved your life once,” Sorcha said reluctantly to Merrick. “Now she’s saved Raed—what more does a girl have to do to get your attention?”
The young Deacon pulled Nynnia in and kissed her hard. Sorcha looked away; there was a limit. For once, the woman—if that was what she was—looked flustered, her cheeks rosy with a becoming blush. “We must move quickly. These thugs will be just the beginning.”
Raed quickly strode toward the back door, but as the rest followed, Sorcha turned in the other direction. She grabbed hold of the publican who was carefully avoiding looking straight at them. He looked too guilty for her liking. With the careful application of force as taught to all novices, Sorcha had him facedown on his own bar in seconds. He winced slightly as his earthenware cups went tumbling to the floor; two smashed loudly. Sorcha knew in his tiny brain he was trying to work out how a woman two heads shorter than him had him pinned down. Before he could decide to put up a fight, she hissed into his ear. “What is happening at Brickmaker’s Lane today?”
Obviously the question was as simple as he was, because a grin spread over his face and he gabbled an answer. “The Emperor and the Grand Duchess are opening the public fountain destroyed by geist attack last month.” She patted the publican on the cheek, released him and followed the others out the back.
Brickmaker’s was only three streets over. Catching up with them, she reported her findings. “Zofiya will indeed be nearby and probably in the next hour or so. She’ll be officiating the reopening instead of her brother, since the little goddess Myr has jurisdiction over water.”
“The fountain.” Merrick was a smart lad; even with stars in his eyes for Nynnia, he recalled the case.
“What is the significance of the fountain?” Raed was checking the exit from the alleyway, but his mind was more than capable of juggling several tasks.
“It was destroyed by a swarm of rei.” Sorcha was pressing her memory hard; it had seemed such a trivial event, the last dying breath of a cluster of crisis near the fringe of the city. Rei were generally thought to be the souls of the drowned, drawn to the energy of water and delighting in making mischief by disrupting it. Vermillion—like every port city—drew them, with its combination of water and people. Still, as annoying as they were, they could also cause real damage—destroying pipes was their particular specialty. No one liked their sewage being interfered with, but it was even worse when public fountains bore the brunt of their mischief. Everyone was affected then, as no one could drink safely from the lagoon.
“The rei swarm didn’t just destroy the pipes.” Merrick snapped his fingers finally, recalling the rest of the memory. “They wrecked the fountain and the pipe feeding it, right to the mains. They had to spend weeks digging back to fix it—back to the old ossuary, I think.”
Sorcha’s chest contracted as if she’d been punched, so much so that she had to lean back against the wall of the building for a second. The Bond vibrated so loudly with her new fears that Merrick—and even Raed—gasped.
Her partner suddenly realized what he had said. “The ossuary! By the Bones!”
“Literally,” Sorcha snapped, feeling the circle joining itself back up.
“Again”—Raed crossed his arms—“with the lack of information.”
Sorcha stamped her foot to illustrate her point. “Beneath us right now is the First Ossuary. Vermillion is a very, very old city, and two hundred years ago there were simply too many bodies filling up all the graves—nowhere to put new ones. So they had to fill the caves on the fringe with the bones.”
Nynnia made a face. “Digging up the dead, in a city infected with geists?”
“No, it wasn’t pretty.” Merrick squeezed her hand. “But from the records of the native Order, they were eventually able to get the city under control. Burning the bones would have been even worse.”
“That has got to be where the Murashev is being created.” Sorcha blinked, thinking of the last time she had been down there; the endless rows of skulls and bones stacked upon one another. The recollection made her shiver. Even though she’d been a member of a Deacon Conclave, the looming menace had still been palpable. The White Palace, the locals called it, as if it was a mirror image of the Imperial Palace above.
“If the Grand Duchess were to be taken there and sacrificed . . .” Even Nynnia couldn’t finish that sentence. It didn’t take too much imagination to consider the consequences.
Apparently, however, Frith had no imagination. “What’s so cursed different about her blood compared to ours? She bleeds red just like every other person!”
“Certainly she does,” Merrick replied, “but her line is rife with old blood. Ancient blood.”
“They need it,” Nynnia said, with a sidelong glance at her father.
Sorcha was beginning to suspect there was something more to that relationship. Feathers of eldritch blue light twined between the two. The flow of power from man to woman was like blood flowing through shared veins. Life force. He might call himself her father, and that could still be true, but he was also her foci, just like Raed and the Beast, or the children of Ulrich and the poltern. Whatever kind of creature she was, she needed her foci just like the rest. It was both a strength and a weakness; a foci meant she couldn’t be easily dismissed back to the Otherside, but also bound them together so that her strength depended on his fate. No wonder she had wanted to reach Ulrich so desperately when they had first met.
Nynnia’s eyes locked with Sorcha’s, acknowledging the Deacon’s observation and recognition. Sorcha’s gaze did not flinch. “Don’t you think it is a good idea for your father to be safely away from this?” she asked pointedly, while the men around them murmured among themselves blindly.
The slim woman nodded slowly. “Yes, you are right.”
“Better make it quick,” Raed commented. “There is a crowd gathering.”
Sorcha stood at his shoulder and glanced out into the street. He was right: people were streaming in the direction of Brickmaker’s Lane; they were suddenly surrounded by eager apprentices, mothers with wailing babies, gritty laborers and dyers with their hands stained the colors of the rainbow. The Emperor and his sister were coming out from the palace—not an everyday event.