I seized Merulo’s remaining hand, trying to rub some warmth into it. “How are you doing?” I asked Hydna, who slouched off to the side.
“Tired,” she said, her ashy face speaking the truth of this. “Very tired.”
“You are both fucking idiots,” I said, and was met with a shrug.
CHAPTER 45
In Which We Are Living with the Consequences of Our Actions, both of the Sorcerer’s Poisonous Ambitions and of My Own Inability to Remotely Temper Them, but In Which We Are Still Here and Still Alive and Still Waking Every Morning with a Renewed Thankfulness for All That Has Yet to Be Taken Away.
It had taken practice, and he had, impossibly, lost even more weight, but Merulo now walked with his familiar imperiousness. Only a faint limp and the clink of the prosthetics betrayed any difference. The artificial limbs worked as intended, magicked sections sliding over one another in an imitation of tendon and muscle. Merulo even claimed to have some sense of touch through them, in the same way he retained shadowed sight through his stone eye.
He didn’t want any acknowledgement of the days I spent half carrying him about as he adjusted, pained and miserable, so of course I was tactful.
“The power balance has definitely shifted.” I sat perched on a stool overlooking his paper-strewn desk. “I reckon that I, the strong and handsome knight, am in complete controlnow. I should be the one issuing orders. I’ll start thinking of an appropriate title, too. Perhaps ‘Your Grace,’ as a start?”
“Is that all?” said the sorcerer. Over the weeks, he had transformed our underwater bedroom, pinning notes and sketched sigils across the walls, and in a couple of areas, scrawling directly onto the wallpaper in a fit of passion.
“I think so,” I said. “For now.”
“Alright.” With quick quill strokes, Merulo copied a series of glyphs from the spread tome before him. “Fantastic. As an aside, each and every day I regret wasting my powers on your resurrection.”
“That’s genuinely very harsh.” I wobbled back and forth on my stool, lost in boredom. With the dragons scheming at an increasingly frenzied pace, barely even stopping to sleep, I’d been left feeling isolated and without purpose. I’d even slipped back into cleaning and meal preparation, just for something to do, which at least stopped the dragons’ work areas from growing too disgusting.
“Now that I have this”—Merulo retrieved his wand from its resting place atop a stack of pages and angled it in my direction—“you could be a vulture again, with extreme ease. So perhaps stop testing the limits of my patience.”
“Aw, you like me too much to do that.” The stool nearly tipped with my rocking, but I caught myself on the desk’s edge, preventing a fall. Unfortunately, this jarred it sharply. I watched in mute horror as towers of stacked paper toppled, fluttering in a cloud to spread across the room.
The sorcerer turned slowly, with murder in his face. “Do I?”
“Could you two not flirt with me in the room?” Hydna batted at one of the drifting pages. She sat on the bed withher own set of papers fanned about her, the mattress sinking beneath her weight. “I swear, Mer, whatever work you think you’re doing is nothing compared to the math going through my head right now.”
I peered at her. “And, Hydna, what you’re doing will . . . ?”
Merulo spoke before she could. “Cleanse the stain of God, undo its transformations, destroy its magic. And free our world from its isolation. Anyway, Hydna, I thought you had completed your end.” The sorcerer stood with the click of sliding metal, and a pronounced sigh, and began the task of gathering his scattered pages. I hopped off the stool to help, feeling more than a little guilty.
“I did,” Hydna growled. “And now I’m checking for errors.” She tapped the papers peevishly, but she couldn’t keep the excitement from her voice. “Haven’t been any so far. This is going to work, Mer. It’s really going to work!”
“Not that there’s any rush.” I held out my handful of collected pages, which Merulo snatched without thanks.
“No, Cameron. It’s not as if the combined forces of humanity are currently hunting us down or anything.” He stumbled slightly as he reseated himself at the desk. The prosthetics, though brilliant, were not a true replacement for flesh.
“Sarcasm shouldn’t be your go-to. It’s indistinguishable from the way you normally speak. Maybe if you tried something more obvious—like insulting limericks.” I moved to retake my stool, ready to resume my rocking, but halted at Merulo’s glare.
“Hydna. Dear sister. Could you allow us a moment of privacy?” There was a singsong quality to his words that had me reconsidering all my actions of that morning.
Had he been serious about his threat? Returning tovulturehood held little appeal, especially not in this enclosed environment, with no fresh carcasses to dine on. With his new limp, I stood a good chance of outrunning the sorcerer if I could just make it to the hallway. After that, I’d tuck myself away until evening, by which time Merulo wouldalmostcertainly have redirected his passions into some new improvement to his spell.
I stuck close to Hydna as she exited with her papers, making an exaggerated display of goodbyes and pats on her broad back and, crucially, placing myself by the open door.
“Close it,” said Merulo.
I hesitated, my hand on the handle. “Uh, with me on the inside or the out?”
“The inside.”
In what felt like the closing stroke to my execution, I clicked the door shut. Across the room, the sorcerer had ceased his scribbling and sat watching me, still as a cobra. I tried to put a great deal of respect into my ramrod posture.
“Cameron,” said Merulo. “I would like to hurt you.”
