by Naomi Hughes
That last vision. The empress had found the Saints base. She had found it, and she had killed everyone inside, and she had rescued her sister. And then the Destroyer had been crowned.
“Tal? Are you all right?” Helenia asked. She was kneeling next to him now, a hand on each of his shoulders, trying to pull him upright so she could see his face.
He laughed, a bit wildly, and shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, not at all.”
And those two earlier visions, the ones that had shown Elodie and Sarai as children. If they were to be believed, it meant—
He shook his head and lurched to his feet. He could not think of those now, could not take the time to understand what they implied. Could not allow the sight of Elodie as a child to change the truth of Elodie as the Destroyer—of Elodie the soon-to-be Empress, if his final vision was correct.
He spun around, found the temple’s entrance. Not much time had passed since he’d come in here. It was sunset now, the air outside the entrance stained purple and red, still peaceful. “The moon,” he said aloud, and sprinted for the clearing.
Helenia hurried after him. “Tal! What in the name of the Unforged—”
He was already outside. He spun around, scanning the sky, ignoring the floating mote seeds and the quiet, distant shushing of the streams. He found the moon. It was waxed nearly full, only a sliver of a crescent missing. “Two nights,” he said aloud. “The moon was full in the vision, bright enough to create rainbows in the mist. She will attack in two nights.”
Helenia was at his side. Her hand clamped onto his shoulder, surprisingly strong. It anchored him—he had not realized until this moment that he felt like one of those mote seeds, spun about by the wind until no one could know where he might land.
“You had a vision?” Helenia asked.
He raised a hand to rake it through his hair, then remembered that his wrists were still bound together by the manacle. “Yes. Of the empress, attacking the Saints base.”
The lines of Helenia’s body went taut all at once, and her expression turned fearsome. “Then we must tell Nyx and the others immediately.”
Yes. Of course. That was what they needed to do. His mind wouldn’t clear, wouldn’t quite process the present moment. It kept curving back to six-year-old Elodie in bed, mouse eyes and rabbit heart, a line of scabs marching up her forearm like army ants. The fear and helplessness she’d felt when she’d realized her father would kill her. The weight of his shadow on her back as her mouth filled with blood. Red blood. The blood she had been born with, the blood that hadn’t changed to mercury until her sister and cousin had injected it into her veins without her knowledge or consent.
Helenia was pulling him toward the campfire. The Saints stood around it, empty bowls in their hands, waiting impatiently as the pot of stew began to simmer above the flames. Someone had dragged Elodie off her sled and dumped her next to the fire to keep her warm, but they had placed her too close—her forehead wrinkled in her sleep and the muscles in her neck twitched as she tried to turn her face away. The brown glass bottle of laudanum sat next to her, unstoppered. They must have just dosed her, or perhaps been about to dose her when it was announced that dinner was nearly ready.
He wondered what she would say if she were awake. Did she know what had been done to her? No, he realized, Sarai had given her a memory tonic. Which meant as far as Elodie knew, her blood had at last quickened naturally on the eve of her seventh birthday, perhaps due to the adrenaline of her attempted murder.
But the girl she had been, Tal reminded himself, hurrying his steps toward the Saints, did not excuse the young woman she had become. The memory tonic had not forced her to burn villages, to incinerate the families of suspected seditionists, to torture Tal’s own sister.
But…but the mercury. Poison, Albinus had called it. It induced madness. Paranoia. Acts of violence. Only a Smith could withstand the toxic effects of metal in their blood and Elodie, as it turned out, was no Smith. She would not have become what she had become, would not have done the terrible things she had done, without the imbalance created by that toxicity.
Sarai had not simply given mercury to the Destroyer. Mercury had made the Destroyer.
Helenia had tugged him into the circle of Saints who were waiting with their bowls. The group had begun to line up now, jostling and laughing, completely unaware that they were slated to die in two days’ time when they reached the Saints base.
“Nyx, everyone. Tal has had a vision,” Helenia said loudly, cutting through the chatter. The man who’d been stirring the stew dropped the ladle in surprise and one of the nearby dogs whined, trying to sneak close enough lick the bit of spilled soup. Nyx, who had been sitting on a downed log and staring unrelentingly at the Destroyer from across the fire, jerked her head up.
“What?” said his sister, rising. “Another one?”
He swallowed, uncomfortable beneath their sudden scrutiny, uncomfortable in his own mind. Every bit of him could sense the presence of Elodie at his back, the outline of her clear as if it were carved on his own skin. She was still too close to the fire. Someone should move her before she burned. He caught that thought, held it immobile and looked at it and laughed aloud at it, the sound harsh and biting as if it had been scraped from his throat. A mere week ago, he would have wished nothing more fondly than for her to burn. Did he not still? He didn’t know what he wanted. He only knew that he had seen her young and small and vulnerable and wished he could protect her, and he had seen her grown and vulnerable then, too, and it was all too much for him to quite fathom.
“Yes,” he said, facing the Saints, forcing his attention away from Elodie. “It was of the Empress. She will attack the Saints base in two nights’ time.”
He explained his last vision in full—or at least, almost in full. He left out the part about Elodie being crowned, because he knew if he told them that there was no way they wouldn’t immediately kill her and he at least needed to explain everything else before they decided whether to do that. With each sentence, the rebels gathered closer, empty bowls hanging forgotten from their fingers, the air growing smothering with the heat and the thick, musty scent of unwashed bodies. Tal struggled to breathe through it. Claustrophobia clamped itself around him. He wondered if this was what drowning felt like, and that thought led him back to the icy lake, to Elodie’s limp and half-frozen body in his arms, to the feel of her cold lips beneath his and the terrible relief he’d felt when she had begun to breathe once again. He had realized then that he’d wanted the Unforged God’s promise to come true after all. He wanted to save Elodie, and wanted to save the empire through her.
“God’s hammer,” swore one of the rebels. “What are we to do?”
“The empress shouldn’t even have rightfully survived the explosion,” another protested. “She was right in the middle of it. What must we do to finally end her?”
He didn’t tell them that Sarai would be dead soon anyway, as must happen if Elodie was going to be crowned. He would have to tell them soon. Not yet, though.
“We can’t reach the base in time to warn them. Not with a caravan like this,” Nyx cut in, her eyes flashing.
“We could send a single sled ahead. One musher, minimal cargo. They would make it in time to give the evacuation order.”
Nyx ground her teeth. She ran her hand over her head, pressing the pads of her fingers into the short, dark stubble that had grown there. When she then grabbed her pack and rummaged through it to come up with her razor, Tal at first wondered why she would choose this moment to shave the stubble away. Then she lifted the blade and said, “We kill her now.”
Tal’s breath caught in his throat.
“We cannot risk the empress rescuing the Destroyer,” Nyx continued, “and we will run out of laudanum sooner or later—we can’t keep her a prisoner on the run indefinitely. And if the base is going to be attacked, she can’t have a proper trial there either. We kill her now, then later we can say her death was in retribution for the raid
of our headquarters. That way maybe we’ll even get the bonus of making Sarai think twice before she messes with us again. It’s the only way the rebellion has a chance at some sort of victory if the base gets wiped out.” She turned to her girlfriend. “Hel, hold Tal back.”
Tal and Helenia looked at each other. She gave him an unbearably gentle look that meant the time had come to tell Nyx the truth, and his stomach churned in a way that made him want to find the nearest bush and be sick behind it. But he owed his sister the truth, so before he could allow himself time to think of how to evade the question, he turned to face her squarely and said, “You do not need to hold me back.”
Nyx had taken a step toward the far side of the fire where Elodie lay, but stopped now and turned. “What? Have you…have you found a way to fight the oath?” Her eyes lit with hope.
Too miserable to face her, too ashamed to face his own words, he closed his eyes. “No. I am rid of it. She died at the icy lake. She drowned. My oath is gone. And so is yours, or at least the part of it that requires the Destroyer’s death.” At least there is that, he thought desperately, grasping for something good. At least there was one less vow to bind his sister.
There was silence for a long moment. “But,” Nyx said slowly, “She’s not dead, not yet. She’s right over there.”
“Because I saved her after she drowned. I breathed for her,” he admitted. “I brought her back.”
The silence turned slow and thick and deadly, a poison sap that glued them all in place until it began to turn hard and brittle. All at once, it shattered.
Nyx was shouting. He couldn’t make out words past the tremors of fury and confusion and grief that ravaged her voice, so he didn’t respond, but he did open his eyes, because he at least owed it to her to witness her anger. Hel stood behind her now, whispering quiet calming things into her ear that seemed to have almost no effect, holding her arms back as she tried to lunge across the space to Tal.
“How could you?” Nyx managed at last, eyes alight with tears, face twisted in disbelief. The words were knives, daggers, arrows. The trees caught her cry, dulled it against their leaves, absorbed the weight of it until Tal could almost bear it.
He struggled to find a way to explain his reasoning but of course couldn’t do such a thing when he didn’t understand the logic of it himself, so instead, he told her—he told them all—of the other visions. Elodie, small and afraid. Nearly killed by her own parent. Poisoned without her knowledge. The moon arced higher in the sky as he talked, explaining each detail of his dreams until his voice ran hoarse. At some point, the soup nearly boiled over and Helenia rescued it, ladling stew into each of their bowls and insisting they eat; good plans weren’t made on empty stomachs. Tal let her fill a bowl for him but couldn’t take even the thought of eating. Nyx watched lifelessly, all emotion drained from her expression. She wouldn’t look at Tal. She also wouldn’t let go of the razor.
“How could Albinus have kept the mercury in the Destroyer’s system for so long?” Helenia asked when Tal had finished explaining his visions and the remnants of the stew had gone cold. “He wouldn’t have been able to change her bone marrow—that’s what creates new blood when the body needs it. So her blood would have slowly changed back to red over time, the mercury used up bit by bit as she used her powers, diluted by the new blood as it was generated.”
“Her treatments,” Tal realized. His voice cracked from overuse and he had to clear it before he could go on. “The treatments Albinus gives her—it’s not medicine at all, but a transfusion of mercury. She was late for it on the train.”
“Which must have meant the metal in her blood was running low,” Helenia said. “That’s why Nyx’s poison did more than it was intended to; it was formulated to weaken the magic of a Smith, but the Destroyer’s magic was artificially induced, and already destabilized as her natural blood began to dilute it. The poison destabilized it even further and caused her to expel all her remaining powers at once in the explosion and then afterwards, her magic didn’t recharge, because it can’t. She has reverted back to her true, original condition. The trauma of it must have been what temporarily muddled her memories.”
“Now we know what gave her the ability to wipe out thousands of innocent people,” Nyx said dully, her eyes gleaming in the light of the waning fire. “Well and good. Let’s kill her before we go back to arguing about what to do next.”
“We can’t kill her!” Helenia protested. “She’s innocent.”
The group grew very quiet again. The betrayal and shock in Nyx’s eyes seemed to echo through Tal’s own soul.
“She is not,” he said softly, “innocent.”
Helenia bowed her head. “I am sorry,” she said, her words sounding stilted with the weight of emotion. She reached out to Nyx and touched her gently on the shoulder, the motion looking oddly formal. “I haven’t been through what you, and you too, Tal, were forced to endure. It’s not as visceral for me—I have no right to call her innocent when I haven’t had to bear witness directly to what she’s done. Nyx, I would do anything to save you from what she did to you, my love.”
Nyx closed her eyes. “I know.”
Helenia relaxed slightly at the sign of her girlfriend’s forgiveness, then hesitated. “But still…Elodie was an innocent six-year-old infused with poison after her own father tried to kill her. There is tragedy and ill-placed trust in her own life, and a great wrongdoing was enacted upon her—one which had power to shift the whole direction of her life forever afterward. Perhaps Elodie, the girl with the red blood and the brown eyes, the girl who gave her life to save Tal from a mooncat, might be different from the Destroyer. Isn’t that something she could decide for herself? Isn’t that something she ought to be able to choose?”
“No,” Nyx said ruthlessly, lifting the razor once again. “The mercury didn’t make her do anything, Hel. Maybe it did make her paranoid, maybe it did give her a tendency to violence. But it didn’t hold a knife to her throat and force her to slaughter entire towns of locked houses, with the men and women and children closed up inside. You make it sound like she deserves a choice now. The fact is, she’s always had a choice. Mercury or no mercury, evil sister or no evil sister. Everyone’s got a choice.” She looked at Tal as she said this, and he bowed his head in shame and acknowledgement. It was too much, and he was so tired; he wished he could lie down and dream normal dreams and forget all of this. The rust phage was even now burrowing deeper into his leg, making it ache, making him feel slightly feverish and even more exhausted.
Helenia gave a grim nod at the truth of Nyx’s words. “But is there no room to be allowed for redemption?” she asked. “No room for the possibility of eventual forgiveness?”
“There is none,” Nyx bit out.
“The blade of vengeance has no hilt,” Helenia said softly, quoting scripture. “It cuts all who wield it.”
“Then let it cut me, but first, let me cut her.”
Helenia was quiet for a moment, considering. Around them, the rebels shifted and murmured, and a few of them yawned and looked as tired as Tal felt, but no one else spoke up. They left the weight of the decision to Helenia.
Helenia turned then to Tal. “It is not a choice for me to make,” she said heavily. “I have no firsthand experience of the Destroyer. I haven’t the right to judge her, or to determine whether there is a real chance she could change, and I also don’t have the right to seek her potential redemption over justice for her victims. You and Nyx are the ones who have been nearest to her, who have been most strongly affected by her. The choice is for you to make. Nyx has cast her vote. What is yours?”
Tal closed his eyes. He thought again of the feel of Elodie’s still lips under his, of her silent heart beneath his palms. He thought of the Unforged God’s promise that he would save her. He thought of the little girl in the scorch tree woodlands, pursued by her own father, poisoned by her own sister. Tal thought of all the nightmares he had ever woken her from. There was a man standing over me and
my mouth was full of blood and I was screaming, she had told him in the cave. A part of her was still that frightened little girl.
And then he thought of the last two years. He thought of being forced to kill assassin after Saint after would-be revolutionary, of protecting the Destroyer from his own people while she looked on, utterly unmoved. He thought of finding her in the train’s prison car. He thought of Nyx, hair burned short, beads melted to her clothing, body spasming.
He thought of her past victims, and all of the future victims she could make if she were to be crowned as his vision showed. Did her life, the life of one girl who might have been different if she’d grown up knowing the truth, really outweigh all of those other lives? Did it outweigh the life of his sister?
It didn’t. He could not let it.
“We have to kill her,” he said. He went to Nyx, stood before her, and held out his hand. This was how he would begin to ask his sister’s forgiveness. This was how he would try to make up for his actions, for his lie. Elodie, with her red blood and brown eyes and sharp wit and innocent ferocity, might have been a person he could care for—God help him—but Nyx was the only precious thing in his life, and this was something he needed to do for her. After a moment, Nyx slowly lifted the razor and set it in his hand.
“I will kill her myself,” he told them all, and wrapped his fingers around the weapon’s handle.
ELODIE LAY VERY STILL AND LISTENED TO THE SAINTS DEBATE HER DEATH.
The sun had been setting, staining the temple with shades of rose and plum, when whatever they had dosed her with had first begun to wear off. The heat of the fire on her face had woken her. At first, the only thing she could do was try to turn her head away, unable to even summon the strength to open her eyes. And then familiar footsteps—the steady drumbeat that had underscored the terrible symphony of her last two years—moved past her, and someone said, “Tal has had a vision.”