by Naomi Hughes
The words took a moment to penetrate the fuzz that filled her mind, and then she remembered…silver Smith. Tal was a silver Smith. She must not tell anyone. No—she shook her head, trying to jar herself into clear thinking. If they were saying Tal had a vision then they must already know what he was. It was no use worrying about him.
And then she heard what his vision was, and heard the stony anger in Nyx’s voice when she said we kill her now, and she abruptly realized Tal was not at all the one she should be worrying about.
Her breathing quickened as she lay there. She felt the warmth of fire on her face but none at all sparking in her veins. She could not stand. Could not even make a pitiful physical attempt to save her own life—not that her strength would have been a match for any of theirs, even if she hadn’t been drugged. She wondered how much it would hurt when Nyx killed her. She supposed that would depend on how much Nyx wanted it to hurt, and the answer to that was, of course, probably a lot.
Tal. Tal would save her. Tal was the only person she could ever trust to be on her side, if only because he had no choice. They would almost certainly think to restrain him, but he had fought off Elodie’s attackers in worse conditions before—her breath caught as she remembered the incidents, one bloody, fiery scene after another, too much to hold in her mind at once—and surely he could do it again.
And then he said, “You do not need to hold me back,” and Elodie’s entire world inverted.
Numbly, distantly, still unable to do as much as open her eyes, she listened to him explain. She was dead, he said, and she recalled the burning cold of the water, the blur of his shadow through the ice, how much heavier liquid felt in her lungs than air. His voice shook with shame when he spoke of saving her. When he said I breathed for her, she felt the ghost of his lips on hers.
She had died.
Which meant his oath was gone.
But—but he’d saved her. She scrambled for the logic of it, for the good news, for anything other than the panic that was now scrabbling madly through her mind. He had saved her of his own free will, because…because he wanted to? Because he cared for her?
He could not care for her. She was not a person people cared for. She was an unlovable creature; she had made herself such.
She remembered the warp and weft of his scars under her fingers. The way he’d snapped at her before that: You are not a kind person. Stop touching me. All my nightmares are of her.
And she knew then he was sorry he had saved her, and that now he would kill her.
Her panic intensified. She forced her eyes open and began to consider how she might save herself. The uncomfortable heat of the fire on her face resolved into snapping flames a few feet away: a bland yellow-and-orange color, nowhere near as vibrant and alive as her own magic. But it still burned. It was here, and her magic was not. Maybe she could use it.
She didn’t want to use it. She didn’t want to wield fire, not against Tal. Never against Tal. And it wasn’t as if she could just stick her bare arms into the flames and toss the burning wood at the Saints without injuring herself, too.
There was a pot suspended over the fire. It had to be full of some kind of hot liquid. She could…what? Pick it up and toss the scalding coffee or soup or bone stock over the Saints with all the strength she didn’t have, and then flee into the forest to find her way home using all of the survival skills she also didn’t have?
And even if she did make it home, the Alloyed Palace would be less of a refuge for her now than it had ever been. So many had tried to assassinate her when she was whole, when she was protected by both mercury and Tal. How long before someone succeeded now that she had neither? Returning there would be like walking into an adders’ nest. Despair filtered through her panic, making it all the more potent as she imagined striding through those cold metal-plated corridors with an empty space at her side. It wasn’t only that she would be unprotected. She would be alone. There was Sarai, of course, but she was as much the Iron Empress as she was Elodie’s sister, and no matter how much love was between them, her loyalties could never belong wholly to Elodie. Not the way Tal’s had.
Albinus could fix her. Then she could protect herself again. But…fixing her would mean giving her back her fire. Her silver eyes, her mercurial blood. It would mean becoming the Destroyer again. And she realized, with a sudden and violent certainty, that she did not want that. And even if she did, even if she became who she had once been—she would still be alone. She would still be afraid.
She knew she was feeling an emotion, one that ran much deeper than her current skittering panic and fear. It was something powerful and unwieldy, something that would fill her and bury her all at once like a valley beneath a landslide, but it was far off yet, still fuzzy and amorphous beneath the influence of whatever they had drugged her with. She had to make it out of here before it overcame her or she would be utterly useless.
She managed to turn her head, just a twitch, but it was enough to make out the brown bottle that was leaning against a log at her side. It was unstoppered and smelled faintly of bitter black poppy. Ah; so laudanum was what they had dosed her with. And, apparently, had been about to dose her with once again before something distracted them, allowing her to finally surface from her drug-thickened nightmares.
She could use this against them. Laudanum was a weapon she would be happy to wield, one that required no strength beyond the ability to lift her hand. Admittedly, even that was a strength she did not yet quite possess, but if the Saints could just stay distracted for a few minutes more she was certain she could make it work. All she had to do was dump the laudanum in the soup.
And hope they ate it before they killed her.
Fixing the laudanum bottle with her coldest glare, she ordered her fingers to twitch. They did. She ordered them to reach for the bottle. They merely twitched with slightly more vigor. Damn. The Saints were still distracted, at least, huddled up around Tal as he explained—
Her fingers stopped twitching. Her glare faded. A tremor went through her whole body as she registered what, exactly, Tal was explaining. As far away as she was from their huddle, she could only catch a few of his words as they floated over the campfire:
Sarai. Albinus. Emperor.
Misfire.
Misfire. The word echoed strangely in her mind, a key in search of its lock. Something dark and dangerous and long-forgotten blinked its eyes open behind the surface of her thoughts, and suddenly her old nightmare yawned like a crevasse below her. Frightened, she tried to pull herself back from it. She was not a scared little girl with a mouth full of blood. She was here, she was now, she was awake. But Tal was still speaking:
Moss
Arrow
Red
And the words were all keys and her mind the lock rusted shut, finally creaking open.
Her nightmare pulled her in.
She was a little girl in bed, the emperor’s shadow suffocating her. It is a father’s duty, he said, more resigned than regretful, and then he asked his nephew to join him for a drink before he killed his youngest daughter.
No. No. That wasn’t right. That wasn’t her nightmare. Her father had been a hard man, impatient for Elodie’s blood to quicken, but he had never planned to murder her. She would have remembered such a thing.
Her mind and Tal’s words pulled her inexorably onward. Sarai launched herself out the window, Elodie crept after. And then it was her old nightmare, but in new and vivid detail: scorch moss dripping crimson around them, a man’s shadow—her father’s shadow—pinning her down as her mouth filled with blood. For the first time, when she spat it onto the dead leaves, she could make out its color.
Red. Red.
Her sister saved her. Her father died. His blood flowed thick, molten iron gilding the moss and leaves just as it should, not lying in a puddle red and thin and weak like hers.
Six-year-old Elodie passed out. Her nightmare ended. But Tal wasn’t done talking.
He spoke of Sarai carrying her to Albinu
s’s chambers, of her demanding his fealty. He gave in to Sarai, because of course, no one could ever do otherwise with her sister. Albinus had healed Elodie. But then…
“Sarai told him to infuse her with mercury,” Tal was saying, his voice rusty and dry now. “To give her magic even if it poisoned her in the process.”
The Saints went still with shock and then, like a covey of startled hens, exploded into a flutter of denial and questions all at once.
Elodie’s breath quickened, went jagged and rasping. This was not true. She would make Tal take it back. He was lying and she didn’t know why, except that he must want to hurt her. But he doesn’t know you’re awake, whispered a small voice in her mind, and she crushed it without mercy.
Laudanum. She needed to put the laudanum in the soup. She ordered her hand to move and this time it did. She closed her numb fingers clumsily around the bottle and then considered the pot of soup. To reach it, she would have to stand. She wasn’t sure her legs would hold her yet, and anyway, standing would certainly draw the attention of the Saints. Tossing the whole bottle in was the only option. She winced at the thought; she didn’t have the best aim even when she wasn’t drugged, and she could already hear how the glass would shatter on the edge of the pot, alerting the rebels and ruining her entire plan. But what choice did she have?
She had to make Tal stop talking. She had to get away from here, even if she didn’t know yet where she would go.
She pulled her arm back and gently, carefully, tossed the open bottle toward the soup. It bounced off the inside lip of the pot. The thick glass didn’t break, but it did make a sharp clanking noise. At that very moment, though, the fire leapt a little higher as a burnt log collapsed, sending sparks wheeling into the stars and making the other logs crackle and shift. The sound covered the clanking of the bottle, and it sank slowly into the soup, bleeding a trail of brown medicine that quickly diluted and became invisible in the broth.
Elodie closed her eyes in relief. Fire had, once again, protected her.
Someone was shuffling toward the campfire. Elodie quickly went limp, closing her eyes to slits, peering out through her lashes as a figure—the girl called Helenia, who had fed her the drugged bread—bent to pick up a ladle from the ground. She washed it off with a dribble of water from a canteen and then set about filling the bowl in her other hand with soup from the pot. Tal continued talking, his voice cracking from overuse and emotion, as the moon crept higher in the sky and Helenia handed out bowls of soup. Tal took his but set it down on a rock next to him so he could keep talking. Everyone else shoveled spoonfuls in their mouths, obviously hungry from their long journey even as their attention remained fixed on Tal.
They finished eating. A few of the Saints yawned. Elodie wondered how long it would be before the drug took effect. She had no idea how much laudanum it even took to put people to sleep; perhaps it had been too diluted, and would only make them a little sleepy. Or maybe, she thought wildly, it had been too much, and they would not fall asleep but perish. Would she be sorry? The Destroyer wouldn’t be.
But even the Destroyer would mourn if Tal died.
Her eyes flicked open at the thought. Her gaze leapt between the empty bowls lying on the ground and the Saints they belonged to, until she found the still-full bowl that had been Tal’s. He had not eaten. She released a slow breath that shuddered with a relief she refused to examine.
A motion caught her eye. Tal was standing before Nyx, holding out his hand. His fingers closed around the straight razor that his sister laid in his palm. “I will kill her myself,” he said, and began to turn toward the campfire.
Elodie’s breathing stalled. She closed her eyes before he had turned all the way around. Her head was lying on the ground and she could hear the familiar rhythm of his footsteps as he approached her. They should be set to music, she had once thought, and now the trill of her own heartbeat in her ears provided it.
She inhaled. It smelled like dead leaves: rot and mulch and earth, pulling her into itself. She felt the cool of his shadow fall over her as he stepped between her and the flames. He knelt. Something thin and cold set itself against the side of her throat, resting on the soft skin just under her ear, where her pulse beat a frantic rhythm. Tal laid a hand on her forehead to hold her still. His fingers slipped through the strands of her hair as he settled his grip.
Even as the razor began to bite toward her vein, a part of her refused to believe it was happening. I swear to protect you, whispered his voice in her memory.
The blade slipped through the top layer of her skin. Her breath caught; she couldn’t stop herself. She wanted to open her eyes. She wanted to plead with him. She wanted to know why he had saved her before, if he was only going to kill her now. She wanted to deny the pain of the razor, the thin trickle of blood already curving down her neck, the way it confirmed the inescapable truth that he was no longer bound to his oath.
And to not allow harm to come to you, whispered the voice of memory. She remembered the mist of that day, the way it drifted softly through the starlight, the way it caught in his hair like beads of glass. She remembered the cold and desperate trail of her own thoughts. The glorious hope when his oath had forced him to defend her for the first time. She had an ally, she had thought then. A refuge. Someone that none of her enemies could use to hurt her.
And to never harm you myself.
Anger rose then. It was hot and desperate and pure. Would she lie here and allow herself to be killed by a boy as she whimpered beneath his blade, unable to accept the truth of his betrayal? The fact was, they had both betrayed each other, and his god had betrayed him, and he had betrayed his sister. They were all wrapped up in it like flies in a spider’s web, unable to find a way free of their pasts and their failures and the things they owed to each other. She knew, all at once, that Tal didn’t want to kill her. If he had he would have thrust the blade into her throat in one swift, inevitable movement. Instead he was hesitating, his hand almost gentle on her forehead, holding the blade still at the mere nick he had made in her skin. He didn’t want to kill her, but he would eventually do it anyway, because he thought he should want to. And suddenly, Elodie was sick beyond belief of people doing what they thought they should be doing.
She opened her eyes, grabbed the razor, and thrust it away from her, at the same time pushing her other hand against the ground to shove herself to standing. In her mind, the movements were quick and graceful, as all her movements usually were, but in real life she was still drug-addled and unused to relying on her hands rather than her fire for defense. As she thrust the razor away, it sliced deep across her palm, right along the scabbed-over spot where her hand had already been injured. She hissed and yelped as she scrambled to her feet, instinctively shaking her hand as if she had dunked it in hot water. The movement flung drops of blood all over her clothing and face—and all over Tal, who had stood up much more gracefully and was even now moving toward her with deadly intent. His hands were still bound with manacles, but as she had thought earlier, she had seen him do deadly damage under far worse conditions.
Frantic and still furious, she stumbled backwards and scanned the clearing. One of the sleds was nearby, the dogs unharnessed and dozing near it. A bundle was packed onto the sled and half-covered with a canvas. At the edge of the bundle, the hilt of one of Tal’s swords peeked out. A weapon! She had never trained with swords, but it was better than nothing, so she launched herself at the pack, scrabbled to grasp the hilt with her blood-slick hands, and drew out the short sword. She swung it around and pointed it at Tal, who had stopped moving toward her but was still watching her with those steady, impassive eyes that he probably thought showed no emotion. But oh, she could see the tumult behind them, the guilt, the pain, the anger—and relief was there, too, when his eyes flicked to the thin line of blood trickling down her neck. He quickly shuttered that emotion away, though, and began to stalk toward her with the razor held ready. He had decided on his course and he meant to see it through.<
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She shook the sword at him in what she hoped was a threatening manner. “Stop!” she ordered. She tried to make her voice cold and commanding as it used to be but failed miserably. “I’ll—I’ll stab you, I swear I will.”
Tal, predictably, did not obey her. “How will you do that?” he asked, voice flat. “You’re holding that like it’s a steak knife.”
She swallowed, taking a step back as he approached. “Steak knives can stab.”
His eyes narrowed. He shifted his weight. She saw the way the muscles in his shoulders bunched, saw how the razor moved and caught the light. He was about to end this. Instinctively, she dropped the sword and threw her hands up—a motion that would have been swiftly followed by a protective cascade of fire, if she still had magic.
Tal, too, had an instinctive reaction. He flinched away from her and flung up an arm even as he turned, shouting a warning. No, not a warning—a word.
“Nyx!”
All the breath went out of Elodie. She dropped her hands, fearing for a terrible moment that she somehow had sparked her powers after all, had used her fire against Tal, had burned him or, worse and more unforgiveable in his eyes, hurt his sister. She scrambled backwards, not picking a direction beyond away. She tripped over something warm and furry. Maluk. The gray dog blinked his eyes open in annoyance, grunted at her, gave her a half-hearted lick on the shin and then curled back up and went to sleep, utterly unconcerned by what was happening around him. Maybe he was still recovering from his own dose of laudanum.
Oh—oh, no. The laudanum.
Elodie’s head snapped up. She spotted Tal, who was already on the far side of the campfire again and leaping over a downed log, rushing toward a group of figures that were splayed across the ground. That was why he had shouted Nyx’s name. When he had turned his head away, he had seen her and the others collapsed. He skidded to a stop at Nyx’s side now, dropping to his knees, horribly silent.