The world had become such a hardscrabble place that any little hope—even from a geistlord—was eagerly grasped. Merrick turned his head away from the oncoming airships and spared a glance behind him.
The Order may have grown in the weeks since Sorcha’s abduction, bulging to almost three times the size it had been in the citadel, but he wondered if it was going to be enough.
It was not the Order that Merrick’s previous Arch Abbots would have recognized—there were not enough cloaks to go around, so many had provided their own. Consequently, the group waiting below him was a variegated patterned quilt of a gathering. Their lack of proper training was the thing that still haunted him though.
Merrick’s bleak thoughts were interrupted by a sharp nip on the ends of his fingers. Merrick jerked back from the Fensena, who had drawn blood with his sharp fangs. The coyote’s gold-coin eyes were narrowed and fixed on him.
“You must not think of things you cannot have,” the beast growled. “You cannot give proper training without time—and you do not have time. What you have is what you have.”
Merrick pulled his cloak tighter with a frown. He didn’t think the coyote was inside his head, but he very much disliked the impression the beast gave that he was. “It does not seem much to take on Derodak and his Circle of Stars—let alone the Maker of Ways . . .”
The Fensena did not deign to reply, but raised his muzzle as the three airships approached. “You have transport to get where you need to, that should be enough.”
It was the Summer Hawk. The First Presbyter smiled; even in these dark times something as familiar as that airship lit a small fire of hope in his chest. This had been the very airship he and Sorcha had first commissioned to take them back to Vermillion. Afterward they had defeated the Murashev. He could only hope it was an omen of things to come.
Captain Revele—if it was she, still in command—maneuvered the airship down to a hundred feet off the mountaintop and secured her position with landing ropes. Finally, a sturdy, yet swinging ladder was dropped. Still, apparently someone couldn’t wait.
A person, dressed in white, slid down one of the ropes to land only a body’s length away from him. For a moment Merrick was caught completely off-guard. Zofiya had come to meet him, but he knew immediately something had changed.
She was dressed in a white jacket and Imperial scarlet trousers, with her dark hair braided up at the nape of her neck. On her left ring finger she wore a thick strap of silver, surmounted with a massive sapphire. It was the Imperial Ring he had last seen on her brother’s hand. Encompassing her forehead was a band of gold decorated with a strand of silver leaves. Each of those leaves represented a principality of Arkaym. It was not the Imperial Crown, but it might as well have been. Merrick knew the only thing this all meant.
The Grand Duchess was no more. The person standing beside him was the Empress Zofiya of Arkaym.
Merrick’s throat was suddenly dry, and his hands dropped to his side instead of wrapping around her. Automatically, he stooped into the deepest bow a Deacon could give.
“Rise, First Presbyter Chambers,” she said softly. Their eyes met and he saw with some relief that she was still herself—though there was a deep, abiding hurt hidden in there. She had said nothing of her change in status in the brief weirstone missives she had sent.
A frown darted across her Imperial brow. “I wanted to tell you myself,” she whispered, for a moment looking very vulnerable.
He swallowed before answering. “That is entirely your right, Imperial Majesty. May I ask . . .”
Zofiya looked about, and seeing that they were alone except for the silent coyote, threw herself into his arms. Suddenly she was just his love: warm, soft and hurt. She whispered the horror of it into his neck. “I had to take the throne, Merrick. Kal . . . Kal killed himself in the end. I couldn’t stop him . . .”
The feeling that she had been holding all this in for weeks was immediate.
Merrick let her hold him for a little while, but there was no time for much more. Eventually, he pulled back and wiped her tears with the sleeve of his shirt. By the time he was done, no one would have been able to tell that the new Empress had a heart.
“You did what you had to,” Merrick said, holding her quite still in his grasp. It was entirely inappropriate for a man—even if he was Presbyter—to hold the Empress in any way at all. “When Derodak worked on your brother for months, he got his claws deeply into him. You cannot blame yourself for that.”
Her jaw tightened slightly as she straightened. “I spent all my life looking out for Kal, Merrick. I thought I was doing a good job, but I didn’t move quickly enough when I suspected something was wrong with that man. I’m not ever going to forgive myself for that. Never.”
Zofiya would hold on to that until her grave; it was what she was like. “Then you must learn to live with it,” he replied softly, “because it is not just your brother who has endangered the world.”
“We have no time for this,” the Fensena, who had been mercifully silent until this moment, said, getting to his feet. His ears pricked forward. “You need to tell the Empress about all this, but we must be off immediately.”
Zofiya’s saber was out of its sheath and in her hand in a flash. “What is that? Another talking beast?” Her gaze fixed on Merrick accusingly. “Another geistlord?”
The coyote did not help his cause by folding one front leg and performing a bow like some well-trained dog. “Indeed. The Fensena.”
Her brother would most likely not have recognized the name, but Zofiya had spent hours learning about the dangers of Arkaym. “The Broken Mirror? The Widow Maker?” She turned slightly on Merrick, but kept her eyes and weapon pointed at the coyote. “Are you the new Derodak then, Merrick? Would you make pacts with geistlords as he did?”
A headache began to form itself at the base of the First Presbyter’s head. He’d known that this meeting would not be easy, but he did not want to argue with the new Empress. “The Fensena is not to be trusted—”
“I am right here you know,” the coyote broke in dryly.
Merrick shot him a dark look and continued, “But he is as invested in this world as we are. On the Otherside he was one of the weaker geistlords.” The coyote growled but held his peace. “He knows more of this than even a Deacon can, and he says that Derodak is planning to contact the Maker of Ways.”
The Empress blanched and reluctantly sheathed her saber. “Why would he do that? If the Otherside came through, there would be nothing but chaos and death.”
The Fensena answered before the Deacon could. “Derodak has lived in this realm for hundreds on hundreds of years. He was both the first Deacon and the first Emperor. He thinks his knowledge and power is limitless, so when the Otherside spills into this world he imagines that he will control the geists as he has the ones here.”
“He is a fool!” Zofiya spat, kicking a rock out from under her boot.
“Indeed,” the coyote said, shaking himself as if he’d received a sudden dunking, “but he thinks he knows best. All will look to him, and he will be their father. However, when the Maker of Ways comes, Derodak may have cause to remember the true horrors of the Otherside.”
Merrick watched his lover out of the corner of his eye, because he did not want to interrupt her thinking. When she spoke, there was more than a touch of weariness in her voice. “I have spent the last weeks fighting and negotiating my way around Arkaym. Even the false Rossin woman has been dealt with. I think I have mended much of what my brother did, but now you tell me it is all in vain—that the geists are coming and there is nothing I can do about it?”