by Naomi Hughes
Elodie stared. She should run while Tal was distracted. But instead she found herself stepping forward, closer, trying to see through the shadows and the sparks to where Nyx lay as still as death. The look on Tal’s face was, for once, utterly unknowable even to her, terrible and flat.
If Nyx was dead, he would never forgive her. He would almost certainly never forgive her anyway, but, she realized with an odd, distant sort of surprise, she wanted him to.
“Is she alive?” she asked, edging closer, trying to make out whether Nyx’s chest was moving with her breaths.
Slowly, Tal lifted his head. When his gaze fell on her, she stopped moving, caught like a mouse before a wolf. “What,” he said slowly, rising like a thunderhead to his feet, “did you do?”
“Laudanum,” she said, trying to explain quickly, before he made a decision that she could only hope he would later regret. “I threw the laudanum bottle into the soup.”
“A laudanum overdose can kill,” he said, advancing toward her. She swallowed and held her ground. If he decided to slay her, he would, and no stolen sword or nonexistent mercurial magic would save her. All she could do was die on her feet, looking him in the eye when he did it.
“And have I killed them?” she dared to ask.
He stopped. His jaw worked. He was still holding the razor, and in one quick movement, he flung it toward her. She steeled herself and didn’t dodge, but it only drove with a thud into the dirt at her feet. “You could have killed them all,” he said, his voice getting louder with each word until he was shouting. “Just because you were lucky enough not to does not make it justifiable. You could have killed Nyx. You could have killed Helenia. She thought you were innocent, redeemable.”
“I cannot be held responsible for what other people think,” Elodie answered angrily, wrapping her arms around her chest like a child in the cold.
He advanced on her. He was shaking now. His voice, when it came again, had dropped to something low and venomous. “What about your actions? Will you be held responsible for those, my lady?”
She flinched, the air going out of her all at once. “Don’t,” she said, weak suddenly with the memories of all the other times he had called her my lady, his voice by turns flat, furious, ravaged, broken. “Don’t call me that.”
He stopped right in front of her. “Destroyer.”
She set her jaw. “Don’t call me that, either.”
“It is what you are.”
She couldn’t deny that, so she only turned her head away. Tal was silent for the space of a few breaths, then he asked, “Do you truly remember, then?”
She remembered too much. She could not recover from it. His words were a weapon, and she hated being helpless before them. “I remember you swearing to me on the palace docks. I remember you saying your god wanted you to defend me,” she said, because she knew it was her own sort of weapon. “I remember your hand on mine when you saved Nyx from my fire. I remember where you got every one of your scars.”
He was close to her now, too close. He leaned in. Her breath hitched in fear and something flickered in his eyes in response: pleasure. He was glad for her to be afraid of him. “Do you think I need that razor to kill you?” he asked softly.
“The only thing you need,” she said, leaning in a little herself, hating the fear that flashed briefly in his own eyes but glad, so glad, for the scrap of power it returned to her, “is the will to do it. But you don’t have that. Do you?”
“I could bind you,” he said. “I could wait for Nyx to wake, and give her razor back. She would do it.”
“Would you let her?” Elodie didn’t mean for her voice to waver. She cursed the fact that she seemed to have less control of herself now. She was less certain, less powerful in every way. Had it only ever been the mercury in her veins that had made her everything she was? What was she now, without it?
Tal held her gaze for a long, dangerous moment. She sensed the way the air prickled around him, the way the night seemed to fade as his attention on her grew sharper. Then, all at once, he stepped back. “You are impossible,” he said, and all of the hate and anger had drained out of him, leaving him ragged. He tipped his head back and closed his eyes. “This is impossible.”
In such a position, with his eyes closed and his head stretched back, his neck was exposed. He held no weapon. He was allowing himself to be vulnerable before her, the person who had been his greatest enemy. How could he bear it? She couldn’t fathom it, nor could she understand her own envy of such a thing.
The danger had gone out of the night, and with it had gone the energy of the panic that had been keeping her going. She sat down heavily on a nearby fallen log. Her hands felt empty and useless. She busied them with wiping the specks of blood from her face, a job at which she was as unskilled as anything else, and only succeeded in smearing half-dried blood over herself. “I couldn’t agree more,” she said, her voice shaking with the aftereffects of it all.
He opened his eyes and looked at her. “How long have you been able to remember? Did you know who you were this whole time? Were you only pretending to be Elodie?”
She held up her hand, which was still oozing red blood. “Why would I pretend to be this?”
He hesitated. “You helped me,” he said at last, the words sounding as if they were being dragged from him. “After the explosion. You got me to the cave before the blizzard struck. And then with the mooncat, you…”
“Died saving you?” she snapped, unwilling to linger on that awful memory: the cold, the dark, the blur of him through the ice. “Yes. You’re welcome, I suppose.”
His eyes narrowed and his voice went taut. “Do you think I owe you something now? Do you know how many lives I have taken for your sake? Giving your own life is nowhere near enough to tip the balance. Nothing could be.”
“I am aware,” she said, angry again—mostly at herself this time—but refusing to be baited into another standoff. She gave up on her attempts to wipe the blood away. “The question we should be discussing is: what do we do now?”
“There is no we.”
She stilled. Of course. She kept forgetting he was no longer bound to her. The thought was a thing with spikes and barbs that burrowed into her every time she recalled it, but she refused to allow her dismay and grief to show. She had bigger things to consider. She needed to think of some way to persuade him to help her evade the people who were currently set on killing her, and to help her get somewhere safe. If there was any such place for her now.
“What—what do you want?” she asked clumsily. If she could ferret out some need of his, perhaps she could find a way to use it to bargain with him.
He laughed, a sharp, humorless bark. “If I had any idea what I wanted, Elodie, I wouldn’t be standing here.”
Elodie. He’d called her Elodie. He’d said it like it was some sort of curse, but it was still many measures better than my lady. “Do you want money?” she went on, fumbling to think of what he might desire now that he had his freedom. “Clemency for your sister? A…a job?”
He stared at her, incredulous. “A job? What would you do, give me a reference? Would I note my experience with murdering in the application?”
“You weren’t murdering, you were protecting,” she protested, hating that he would see himself in such a negative light. She was only now beginning to realize that he had come to hate himself nearly as much as he hated her. He shouldn’t do that. He was the only good person she had ever known.
He shook his head. “Stop it. Just…stop. I don’t want you to defend me.”
“Then what do you want? Tell me what it is, anything, and I’ll give it to you in exchange for…” She groped for what exactly it was she wanted to bargain with him for. Her safety, yes, but in what way? What was it that she imagined for herself? Not returning to the palace. Not now that she knew what had been done to her there. She wanted to deny it again as she had when she’d first heard it, wanted to believe that Sarai would never command Albinus to do such a
thing to her own sister, but it sounded too much like Sarai’s unique brand of love. In the empress’s mind, she had given Elodie a way to protect herself, given her a tonic to make her forget the worst night of her life, and created a new weapon to safeguard her own rule all in one neat stroke. Elodie felt sick just thinking of it. No, she could not go back to her sister, no matter how tenuous the safety she might find elsewhere. “In exchange for my safety,” she finished, deciding she could clarify her side of the bargain later, after she’d had time to think on it properly.
“I’ve spent the last two years ensuring your safety, and I believe I have had quite enough of it,” Tal said, and turned to stride back to where the Saints were lying on the ground.
The panic from a few moments ago began to flutter beneath her breastbone again. “You said you wouldn’t let Nyx kill me,” she said, standing up to hurry after him.
“It was you who said that.” He slid his arms gently under his sister’s back and legs and carried her closer to the fire, where she would be warm. When he set her down, her limp hand brushed over his leg—the spot where he’d been injured in the explosion—and he hissed a breath through his teeth as if he were in pain.
Elodie’s eyes narrowed and she paused. The Saints had healed Tal, or at least, she had assumed they had when she’d seen him walking around rather than bleeding to death from the many injuries he’d sustained in the past few days. But perhaps she had been wrong. “Are you still hurt?” she demanded.
“It is none of your concern.” He didn’t look at her, busy scooping up Helenia to move her to the other side of the log near Nyx. When he stepped past the fire’s light, this time she paid closer attention, and saw the faint trace of a glassy sheen in his eyes and the way he was sweating a little even though the night was cool.
“You’re still feverish,” she realized. “Did you get wound fever?”
But wound fever should have been cured by a basic healing potion, if they’d given him a large enough dose—and if the Saints had been able to cure the rest of his significant injuries, the dose surely would have been substantial enough to flush out a wound fever as well. But if it wasn’t a wound fever, then what else…
Her breath caught as a possibility she wouldn’t have considered before arose in her mind, throwing its long and terrible shadow over all the facts she had previously failed to connect. Tal’s blood was silver. He had visions. He was a Smith. He’d been injured badly in the explosion, and he’d been sweating in the middle of a snowstorm afterwards, and he was still lightly feverish now even after a heavy dose of healing tincture.
“You have rust phage,” she whispered.
His jaw tightened but he didn’t respond, only continued carrying the Saints closer to the fire and making certain they were laid in comfortable positions.
“How long?” she demanded, her mind working busily to try to determine how he could be cured, how much more tincture they needed. Her fingers twitched, and it was only through great effort that she kept herself from marching across the small clearing and yanking up his trouser leg so she could see the phage spot for herself. “How long was I unconscious? How long have you been sick?”
“A few days,” he said tightly.
She did the math. They had spent the night after the explosion in the cave. The day after that had been the mooncat attack. Then the Saints had found them and drugged her. It was evening now, which meant it had been three days total at the very least, and likely a day or two longer than that. That was right on the border of how long a person could go without the right treatment before they passed the point of no return. “There must be more healing tincture,” she said, though she knew if there was, Nyx would have already used it on him. She thought quickly; she had no idea where they were but surely there was a town nearby, somewhere with a priest, a physician. “We can get some—”
“Regular potions, or at least the kind non-Smith townships can get, are not enough,” he cut in. He picked up the bowls of soup and began rinsing them out over the fire, probably so that the food remnants wouldn’t attract predators while the Saints were helpless.
She wanted to shake him. Why was he just ignoring the fact of his own looming demise, as if it meant nothing? “The Saints headquarters. They have to have a stronger potion.” Her voice was getting louder now but she couldn’t seem to control it.
“They don’t. Even if the base wasn’t about to be attacked, there are no copper Smiths powerful enough to make concentrated tinctures outside of the palace.”
A realization struck her like lightning then, scorching and illuminating all at once. “Then we must go to the palace,” she said, hearing the tremor in her voice but unable to do anything about it.
Finally, finally, Tal stopped what he was doing and looked at her. “There is nothing,” he said, enunciating each word clearly, “nothing, that would make me take you back there.”
She matched him glare for glare. “I know a few things that could make you.”
He dropped the bowl he’d been cleaning to free up his hands and turn fully to face her. “Are you threatening me?”
She lifted her chin. “If it will save your life, yes, I am absolutely threatening you.”
“You have no fire. You can barely grasp a sword.”
“But I know you, I know who you love and what you care about and how stupidly noble you always are, and that’s more than enough to know how I can make you go back to the palace with me.” She was bluffing—she had absolutely no power over him now, and she doubted she could bring herself to hurt Nyx again even if Tal wouldn’t knock her flat on her back before she could so much as touch the other girl—but with any luck, he would take her seriously.
His gaze raked her up and down, taking her measure, and then he picked the bowl back up and turned away again: a clear dismissal. “If you think I’m going to let you use me to get you home, just so you can have me executed for being a Smith the second I walk through the gates of—”
“I won’t let anyone touch you,” she snarled, and for a moment, she felt truly like her old self: invincible in the clear, cold certainty of her mission.
“No,” he said, not even bothering to look at her this time.
Her certainty faded to desperation. “But you’ll die if you don’t go back!”
“I’ll die if I do!” he shouted back, hands clenching on the bowl. He took a deep breath and spoke again, in a lower tone this time. “How exactly do you expect me to be cured without anyone realizing why I have rust phage? Sarai made my blood illegal, remember? Her execution order is what killed my parents after they were caught during the Silver Coup. Do you think I would forget such a detail? Why else would I have taken such pains to hide what I am for the last two years?” He exhaled. “I will not go back to my old life at the palace, not in any measure or for any reason. I will die out here, free, in the company of what family I have left.”
Elodie shook her head, frustrated, but couldn’t think of the right argument to gainsay him. In a way he had a point; she suspected this wouldn’t be a simple matter of slipping into the physicians’ offices and finding the right medicine for him to swallow. By the time they could get to the palace, Tal would likely need an intensive treatment that only Albinus could provide if he was going to have a chance at survival. And Albinus, as Tal’s vision had shown, would not risk disloyalty to Sarai. There was no way for Tal to be treated without the empress finding out what he was.
Maybe she could talk Sarai into letting him live. After all, Elodie had basically been doing that for the last two years. Her sister never had been fond of Tal. Elodie flinched away from the very thought of speaking to her sister again, knowing what she now knew, but if it was necessary to save Tal she’d have to consider it. In any case, what happened after they saved his life was a matter to worry about later. Right now she needed only to convince him not to die nobly out in the wilderness like an idiot.
All at once, it hit her. “The Saints base,” she said.
Tal set th
e last of the now-clean bowls in a stack next to the fire. “What?”
“In your vision. You said Sarai was going to attack the Saints base to rescue me, because she thinks that’s where I am. They’ll have no warning, and even if they did they wouldn’t have enough time to evacuate. Sarai will utterly crush the rebellion for my sake. There will be no one left, except those few stationed at outposts.”
“I am aware of that,” Tal bit out.
“The rebellion will be ended forever as of tomorrow night. Unless,” Elodie said, dreading the words even as she spoke them, “you return me to her first.”
Tal turned. He watched her through the veil of smoke and sparks drifting up from the campfire between them. “You’re saying if I take you back to the palace,” he said slowly, “you’ll prevent the attack on the base?”
“I doubt I’ll be able to prevent it entirely,” Elodie warned. “If she’s gotten the intelligence on its location, there’s no way she will let it go for long before she strikes. But my return could buy them an extra day or two to evacuate while Sarai debriefs me.” She nodded at the limp form of Nyx. “Once they wake up, they could send a warning to the base and get everyone, or at least almost everyone, out before Sarai attacks. And,” she added, the idea coming to her as she spoke, “maybe this way Sarai would let you live, too—we could tell her that you fought off my kidnappers, brought me through the wilderness on your own, were brave and heroic and so on, and that you deserve healing and a pardon in recognition for delivering me. She’ll think you’re still under your oath, so perhaps she wouldn’t consider you a threat to me even if you do have silver blood.”
Tal shifted his weight to his uninjured leg, an unconscious movement as he considered her proposal. “And after that?” he asked at last. “Once the rebellion is saved and I’m healed? Do you expect me to go back to being your bodyguard?”
She didn’t know what she expected, but she wasn’t naïve enough to hope for that. She swallowed. “No. You can—you can leave then. If you want. I will not stop you.”