by Naomi Hughes
The future yawned open before her, a crevasse as unyielding as her nightmare.
Tal sighed, sounding defeated. “I told you, I don’t know what I want. But very well. I don’t suppose there are any better options, and if I have to return you to your sister to save the rebellion, then it’s the least I owe them.” He gave her a hard look. “But know that—”
She cut him off, hope and impatience leaping within her. “Yes, yes, if this ends up being a trick I’m sure you’ll kill me with your very impressive sword work, or perhaps you will just stand and glare at me stoically until I wither up and die. Now can we get moving? We are in a bit of a rush, as I’m sure you must understand.”
He made a soft sound that she realized after a moment was a laugh. He sighed afterwards and tried to run a hand through his hair, but stopped short when his manacles clanked, reminding him of their presence. He ducked down to rummage through his sister’s pocket and extracted a key. “I wish you weren’t so different now,” he muttered as he unlocked the manacles from his wrists.
She raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Why is that?”
“Because it shouldn’t be this hard to hate you,” he said, and without another word, he pushed past her to begin harnessing the dogs.
NYX JERKED AWAKE ALL AT ONCE, and had counted six nearby blunt objects with which to bludgeon her brother—or whoever was currently threatening her brother—before she registered where she was.
Cool grass and leaves beneath her. Her torso and head propped up on a log, its stiff bark digging into her bare scalp. Tall mote trees edging her view of the silver-blue sky, their falling seeds more leaden now, coated with a lacy dew that labored their usual drifting movements.
Feeling drunken and half-paralyzed still, Nyx turned her head and squinted. The sun was rising, hovering just over the roof of the temple. It was then that she remembered why she wanted to bludgeon her brother, and why she feared he was being threatened.
She filled her lungs as deeply as she could and then bellowed a string of inventively foul curses into the sky. She could also have yelled something like help, what happened, or somebody had better produce my little brother unharmed immediately before I enact violence that everyone involved—except probably me—will regret, but curses worked just as well, and if Helenia were nearby she’d be able to translate what Nyx really meant in any case.
Nobody answered. Nyx’s heart rate kicked up a notch, and she gathered her strength to roll onto her side and lift her head.
She was surrounded by bodies.
Before she had even finished processing the fact, she was stumbling to her feet, gaze scanning the bodies wildly for the lean shape of Tal, the familiar curves of Helenia. Her heart pounded a frantic drumbeat: no, no, no.
It wasn’t until she tripped and fell onto the body of one of the mushers, wringing a sleepy groan from him, that she realized the bodies weren’t dead at all but only sleeping.
She felt dizzy with relief. Her body was shaking. Without bothering to check if her fall had done any damage to the musher, she pushed off him—eliciting another groan—and continued her search for her brother and girlfriend, only slightly calmer now that she had more reason to believe they were still alive. She made an entire circuit of the campfire area, accidentally stepping on two dozing dogs in the process, before she finally found Helenia sleeping peacefully on the other side of the log where Nyx had woken up. Nyx sagged down to sit next to her, not bothering to check that she was still breathing; she could hear Hel’s snores from here. A bit of drool spotted her cheek and Nyx reached out to wipe it off with her sleeve, laughing shakily when she thought of how horrified Helenia would be to see the state she was in.
She had found her girlfriend. She could breathe now, and her heart was a bit calmer. But where, where, was her brother?
She was angry at him—no, she was downright furious—but she couldn’t quite remember all the details of why. She dug through her hazy memories until she managed to recall him explaining his visions and then saying, you do not need to hold me back.
Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch. He was free of his oath, had been for days now, and he hadn’t so much as hinted at it to her. Worse than that, he’d brought his own enemy back to life. When she thought of him saying I breathed for her, thought of the Destroyer’s lips touching his in a mockery of intimacy, she wanted to be sick and she wanted to pummel them both until her fists bled. Why would he do such a thing? What could possibly compel him? Had his time with the Destroyer truly been enough to change him so? She’d heard of captives falling in love with their captors, and love or some twisted version of it seemed like the only thing that could even begin to explain his actions. She remembered seeing his new scars and thinking that his soul had always been so much more fragile than his body. Could the Destroyer have broken it entirely, warped it into something that could feel sympathy for a murderess?
Nyx hadn’t found the Destroyer’s body when she had done her circuit of camp. There were also, she saw now, a sled and five dogs—including Maluk—missing. She pressed a kiss to Helenia’s forehead and then stood up to investigate further.
There were footprints all over camp, and it was impossible to tell which had belonged to whom, but there were also droplets of dried red-brown blood splattered near where the missing sled had been. Nyx’s razor was nearby too, driven blade first into the earth. She yanked it out to examine it; its edge was crusted with red blood. So at least her brother had tried to carry through on his promise to kill the Destroyer himself…but then what? Something had gone wrong, obviously, something that had managed to put everyone except Tal and the Destroyer to sleep. Gold magic could do that. Had a gold Smith come upon them and used their powers to rescue the Destroyer? But if that was the case, why not slit the throats of all the Saints while they were sleeping, or take them prisoner?
And then she realized there was something else that could put a group of people to sleep, and took two steps sideways to peer into the soup pot. There was a stack of cleaned bowls next to it but the pot itself was crusted with the burnt remnants of stew. She rooted around until she found a stick and then used it to poke at the bottom of the pot—and immediately the stick clanked against something laying below the surface of the stew. With a snarl, she drew back the stick and drove it down hard, and the sound of shattering glass echoed through the clearing.
The bottle of laudanum. While they’d all been yelling at each other and listening to Tal explain his visions, the Destroyer had been awake, and had managed to dose their soup with the drug they’d been using to keep her unconscious. The Destroyer hadn’t had any to eat, of course, which was why she wasn’t among the sleeping bodies now…and Tal hadn’t eaten any, either. At the time she had thought he was too upset to eat—she had been, too, but her mother-hen girlfriend had forced her to eat anyway—but now, there was a small, dark part of her that couldn’t help but wonder if he and the Destroyer had planned this somehow.
She broke her stick over her knee and hurled the pieces in opposite directions as hard as she could. Then she turned and started toward a sled, meaning to harness the dogs while she waited for the others to wake—but then she spotted a page of paper pinned beneath the stack of washed bowls. Her name was printed at the top in familiar neat lettering. She snatched it up, tearing a corner off in the process, and read.
Nyx,
Go warn the base. I’ll try to buy you a day or two.
Forgive me.
She read her brother’s note three times before she could process what it meant. The only way he could hope to “buy her a day or two” to warn the Saints was by somehow keeping Sarai from attacking the base for that long. And the only way the empress would wait to rescue her sister was if she no longer needed to rescue her sister. Tal was helping the Destroyer get back to the palace.
Nyx dropped the note. It fluttered to the ground, where the dew-laden grass slowly soaked it, wet spots bleeding over the page like inkblots.
Tal had left her behind, again. Tal ha
d chosen the Destroyer over her again.
She scrubbed a hand over her eyes, furious to find wet tracks on her cheeks. She was not going to cry. She was not going to stand here and whimper that her brother’s spirit had been broken by a monster. She was going to track him down, and she was going to stop him, and then she was going to end the Destroyer if it was the last thing she ever did.
She went back to Helenia, her steps steadier now that she’d had a few minutes to begin recovering from her drugged sleep. She knelt down and reached out a hand, but then stopped, her fingers hovering over Helenia’s shoulder. Her mind played out the scene that was about to happen: Hel would wake, Nyx would tell her what happened and what she was going to do, and then…Helenia would stop her.
Her girlfriend had always been soft-hearted. It was one of the reasons Nyx had fallen so hard for her; sometimes, many times, Hel was the only softness present in any part of Nyx’s life. She smoothed Nyx’s hard edges, provided calm in Nyx’s many storms, and had guided her through some of the worst weeks of her life after Tal had first left. But Helenia’s kindness, her tendency to think the best of others, sometimes extended to people it shouldn’t—as last night’s conversation had shown.
Helenia had recognized Tal’s and Nyx’s right to decide the Destroyer’s fate then, but she had argued stridently against execution, and if she were awake now she would do it again. She would tell her to trust her brother. To trust the god who had given him his visions. To have hope that this twist of fate might mean “Elodie” was indeed meant to be redeemed. And even if Nyx managed to talk her around, the time it would take would allow Tal and the Destroyer to get so far ahead that Nyx would never catch them.
Slowly, Nyx withdrew her hand.
The other sleds were all where they had been last night, and the dogs Tal hadn’t taken lifted their heads and watched as Nyx chose one and began hooking up the harnesses.
The rest of the Saints, including Helenia, would be fine. They would wake up soon and figure out for themselves what had happened. They would take care of warning the base.
And by the time they were done, the Destroyer would be dead.
DURING THEIR TWO-DAY JOURNEY SOUTH, Elodie did everything she could to endear herself to Tal. She was, predictably, not very good at it.
Throughout the first day, she noticed that he and Maluk seemed to have an affinity for each other. During their infrequent and brisk rest breaks, Tal checked the old dog over carefully, looking at each paw for any thorns or pebbles that might’ve gotten stuck, spending more time with him than any of the other four haulers. Maluk, for his part, leaned into Tal during these sessions and closed his eyes, the picture of canine contentment. So the first evening, when Tal went to hunt for the dogs’ dinner, Elodie dug through the packs until she found a brush and then used it to clean Maluk’s fur until he shone. The hauler leaned into her just as he did with Tal and she felt an unexpected fizz of happiness at the sign of his trust. The dog, at least, seemed to like her—which was fortunate, because the gesture won her no goodwill at all from Tal. He barely glanced at her when he returned, dragging a dead hind behind him.
Then she and Tal took turns sleeping atop the packs that night as the other stood on the rails and mushed. Elodie didn’t wake him when her shift was over, instead letting him doze on as the fat, nearly-full moon rose. The stars flushed and faded in its presence, entirely outshone. They had the grace to know when they were beaten. Or perhaps they simply lacked the will for the fight.
The sled continued its southerly course, the foothills flattening around them, the Skyteeth receding into the distance, the scorch tree woodlands growing into a blur of crimson on the horizon as the sun dawned. The sled’s retrofitted wheels meant their journey was an uncomfortable, bone-rattling one. She didn’t know how Tal could sleep through it. When he woke, his eyes glassy with fever, she got her answer. He was limping visibly as he walked around to take her spot. Something lurched painfully in her chest at the proof of his growing weakness.
“I can keep going,” she said, clinging to the handle even though she was dazed with tiredness and starch-stiff from balancing on the jouncing rails most of the night.
“No,” Tal said shortly, and it turned out her will was as weak as the stars’, because she lay down on the packs without further argument and slept through the entire day. She felt perversely safe with him watching over her, as she always had, even though he had held a razor to her throat less than twenty-four hours ago.
They were both silent the next day as they traveled through the dripping crimson moss of the scorch woodlands, though she was sure they had different reasons for their reticence. The closer they came to the palace, the more ghosts rose up to pursue her, and she had little endurance left to outmaneuver them. As for Tal, she was beginning to suspect that he was keeping something from her. She could see it in the way he avoided looking at her, in the tightness of his expression when he did and how quickly he looked away again. So when they came to the bank of the Entengre river and the plated-metal palace rose up before them at last, Elodie looked not at it, but at Tal.
He said nothing, same as the last two days, but now it wasn’t just his silence that worried her. It was the quality of that silence. Always before it had been a tensely-held thing, not a lack of speech between them but rather the presence of something weightier and more terrible, something that could allow no words through the gaps in its defense. Now, though, Tal’s silence was empty. As if everything that could be said had already been said, and there was nothing left at all to fill the blank space that stretched between them.
And now, the way he was looking at the palace: not with the resignation and hatred that he’d always had, but rather as if he’d never seen it before, as if it were a thing he’d only ever heard of in stories, and now he was trying to match those stories to the sight before him. She saw her home through his eyes: every wall a curse, every spire a blade. Every room filled with monsters.
She watched him look at the Alloyed Palace, and she knew that he would leave her.
She broke the silence at last, because she realized now that he never would. “You’re not coming back with me.”
The river’s mist rose around them, a delicate sheen under the dying evening light. His eyes, which were already bright with fever, looked luminous in the haze. “I told you,” he said quietly, “that there was nothing that could make me go back.”
Her mind seemed to hang somewhere outside her body, suspended in the fog like a beetle in amber. Though she had spent the last two days trying to find some way to convince him to stay with her, the realization that he was refusing now to go back for even as long as it took to save his own life left her utterly without reply.
She could beg his forgiveness for her sins. She could promise his safety. But she could not lower herself to grovel for something he could never give and she couldn’t rightfully promise him her protection either. If she had no magic, she could do nothing to stop any distant cousin or half-royal acquaintance from hurting him to get to her. And if she did have magic, then she would be the one to hurt him, one way or another.
“Tal,” she said at last. “Don’t do this.”
“It is not something I’m doing, but something I am refusing to do,” he said, so calmly that she thought she might throttle him. How could he so easily accept his own demise when the thought of it made her half-mad with desperation?
“Let me save you. Let me make reparations to you,” she tried next. “I don’t expect you to stay with me. But at least don’t let yourself die just to spite me.”
He exhaled, something that was almost a laugh, and turned at last to face her. “If I wanted to spite you, we wouldn’t be standing here.” He nodded at the palace. “It’s nearly evening. Your sister will be preparing the zeppelin any moment now. You must go to her before she takes off.”
Elodie glanced at the bridge that stretched across the river. Few people were on it at this time of day. She would be able to get across it and
to the palace in the space of perhaps ten minutes. Judging by the timing of the base attack—or at least, what Tal’s vision had revealed about the base attack—she still had a bit of leeway before the balloon would take off.
She turned back to Tal, squaring her body to his as if they were fighters in a ring, and lifted her chin. “No.”
“What?”
“You heard me. No. I won’t go back without you. I won’t save the Saints from my sister unless you let me save you, too.” It was a gamble, but one she was more than willing to follow through on, if that was what it took. She had never met anyone from his mountain base and the few Saints she had met had unanimously wanted her dead. She owed them nothing. She didn’t particularly care if her sister killed them or not. But Tal cared. She would use whatever leverage she could to keep him alive, and she refused to feel even the slightest bit guilty about it. He had a claim on her soul and she was done denying it; he would live, even if it damned her. Not, she supposed, that she could be any more damned than she already was.
He closed his eyes. He didn’t look angered by her blackmail like she would have expected, though. When he spoke again, she realized why. “Your sister will die in the attack on the base.”
She stared at him. Slowly, the words sank through her until she could pick them apart and decipher the truth beneath them. “Your vision,” she guessed finally. “You didn’t tell the Saints all of it.” Her hands began to shake and she curled them into fists, digging her nails into her palms to punish her traitorous body.
“Yes. I saw your coronation. That could only happen if Sarai dies.” His answer was without a trace of guilt, so unlike him that for one wild moment she wanted to laugh. He sounded like her.
She exhaled. The mist swirled around her, and when she inhaled again, the taste of copper slipped under her tongue and coated her teeth. It was because of the mines upriver, she thought, but couldn’t rid herself of the idea that it was blood and not metal at all that she was tasting. “You are saying that Sarai will die if I don’t stop her from leaving now.”