Reaching along the Bond, he alerted her to his presence. Her reaction was an almost overwhelming surge of relief and delight. They had come a long way from that first awkward pairing that the Arch Abbot Hastler had thrust them into.
We are a good team. Her voice in his head was clear as a matins bell. Many partners in the Order would have been jealous of Merrick and Sorcha’s powerful Bond—if they had dared reveal it.
Raed! Sorcha directed Merrick’s attention to the other part of the Bond: the Young Pretender. Immediately he flinched back as pain burst through the connection.
Merrick groaned and doubled up, his hand going against the smooth mud wall to stop himself from falling. What exactly had happened while he’d been gone?
Find me. Sorcha’s call was her usually abrupt tone but mitigated by her genuine fear. Things are happening.
Like a needle seeking magnetic north, Merrick turned and strode toward her. After a moment he broke into a jog. He was not the only one running. It didn’t take a Sensitive to notice that everything was wrong in the city. Where before there had been organized chaos, with the streets full of merchants and citizens, now there was no one in the streets except for the occasional person darting for their house. Until Merrick turned onto one of the main streets—and then he discovered just where nearly everyone was.
The main street of Orinthal was choked with its citizens, and every single one of them was wearing the mustard yellow of Hatipai, either cloaks or merely torn strips of cloth bound around their arms. Merrick stepped back and hugged the wall. Maybe it was some local festival.
He opened his Center wider, tasting the air like a dog sniffing the breeze. A crowd, any crowd, could be a frightening thing; but this one full of religious fervor frightened him down to his bones.
And there was more. A sensation akin to turning his back on a lurking danger. Every hair on his neck was standing up, and every muscle was twitching. As he spun ad, he wouldn’t have been surprised to find someone coming at him with an upraised knife.
Taking a chance, Merrick peered out onto the street again. The people were moving silently and smiling, but he spotted disturbances at the edge. Some of the citizens of Orinthal were not entirely happy with this display of religious zealotry. Unbelievers were being beaten and kicked in the side streets. The crowd ignored all that, moving like a sluggish beast but not toward the palace.
Wait, he projected to Sorcha. He couldn’t walk away from this situation—he had to see more. With dread knotting his heart, he found a building with soft stone steps leading up to a flat roof. Until he reached the top of them, Merrick kept his eyes cast on the ground. Before he raised them, he opened his Center wide, flinging open everything that he had as a Sensitive. The sun was beginning to fall toward the horizon, sending beams of scarlet and umber light darting over the buildings and making them glow. It would have been a beautiful sight, but for Merrick it was a bloody vision, punctuated with shadows and dire portents.
The spectyrs were no longer content with occupying the distant mountains; like the humans, they were heading east into the desert. The sky was thick and dark in his vision—though none of the citizens seemed aware of it as they trooped off under its shadow.
Merrick’s fear rattled through the Bond, and he could feel Sorcha’s response, like an echo on a taut string. With a wrench Merrick closed his Center and staggered back into the real world.
I’m coming, he called along the Bond to Sorcha. As he leapt down the steps back to the road, he saw her in a nearby alley. She was wearing the cloak of the Order but turned wrong way around, the blue of the Active hidden by the black. It reminded him starkly of Hastler’s funeral and the long ranks of the Deacons mourning that liar. Sorcha’s face then had been calmer than the one he saw under the hood now. He had never seen her paler or with wider eyes, and she smelled of blood. She was running too—like they were two parts of something broken that needed mending.
Merrick darted forward, and they threw themselves into each other’s arms. It was not the embrace of lovers, but it still contained love. The Bond wrapped around them until for a brief heartbeat there was nothing but the two of them. It was an echo of the time under Vermillion—the time when they had in fact been one.
Finally Sorcha tugged him off the street into a darker part of the humid alleyway. “By the Bones,” she whispered, not letting go of his forearm, “it is good to see you, Merrick.”
His partner had a lovely way of repeating emotions that their Bond already told him, but this was not the time to chide her. This close, his Deacon senses told him that she was indeed soaked in blood and sweat under the cloak.
“What happened?” he asked, his eyes already darting into the shadows, though he could not sense Raed anywhere. In fact...
“He’s gone,” Sorcha snapped. “I couldn’t stop the Rossin without you, and he transformed right in the palace. People died, and they’re hunting me, thinking I did it.”
She delivered a hint of an accusation to go with his sliver of sudden guilt. Yet that was foolish—Nynnia had shown him things, taken him places he needed to be. Instead, Merrick clasped her arm right back, completing the link. “Then that is what we need to do—find Raed and sort this out.”
As Merrick turned to go back out onto the street, his rtner stopped him. “Where were you, Merrick?” The crack in her voice was something that he had not expected.
He wasn’t ready yet. The tumble of time and death was something that he needed to sort into words. But he knew Sorcha would not let him get away without some form of explanation. “Nynnia saved me,” he said simply, surprised at the steadiness in his own voice.
Those blue eyes widened, and then a frown creased her forehead. “Nynnia is dead, Merrick.” She was afraid for his sanity.
“I am not crazy—you would feel it if I was.” He smiled. “And yes, Nynnia is dead . . . but also alive.”
Sorcha sighed, her lips twisted into a knot of frustration. “You Sensitives are hard to understand at the best of times. What do you mean?”
“I will tell you all soon.” Merrick found he was rather enjoying flummoxing his partner. He clamped his hand around her arm, giving it a firm squeeze when she looked ready to demand more. “They have taken Raed, and we need to get him back quickly.”
Sorcha’s gaze unfocused slightly, her head lifting and turning east where the spectyrs had disappeared. “Yes.” Her voice was soft, concerned, not the usual from his sometimes prickly partner. It remained unspoken how many cruel and evil things the blood of his ancient line could be used for.
“What do we do?” Merrick couldn’t be sure, but that could have been the first time Sorcha had turned to him for advice so completely. She was older, more experienced and far more confident than he was. Usually.
He thought back on what had happened during his trip into the past: the determined, dark face of the Ehtia and the great crushing despair in the divine face of Onika. They were in a strange city, unable to trust their own Brothers and Sisters of the Order, and far from the protection of the Arch Abbey. Only one person remained who knew the way of things here.
Merrick straightened. “We go to the Prince and lay the case before him.”
His partner jerked upright. “Remember when I said people died? One of them was his daughter. I think going back there would be a quick trip to the gallows or maybe a rapid introduction to a bullet.”
“I think, with me standing at your side, we should be all right.”
“I don’t care what the Bond says—I think you have gone raving mad!” Sorcha snapped, her voice reclaiming some of her usual bravado.