by Naomi Hughes
Show me, he prayed.
The dreaming place pulled him in.
He spent only a moment in the dark space surrounded by a weighty presence before the vision opened around him. It was Elodie—no, it was the Destroyer, silver eyes bright with brittle cruelty. She sat on the empress’s throne. It was a cold and unyielding thing, much more suited to her sister than to her, as was the Iron Crown on her brow. She opened her mouth. “I pronounce the sentence of—” she began, and then something slender and wooden flew toward her. Some sort of small crossbow bolt.
Tal saw himself in the vision then. He was on his knees before her, hands in manacles, his back to her as he looked out over a crowd. The crossbow bolt arced toward the Destroyer.
And then he stood up. He whirled around, face-to-face with those bright, and now surprised, silver eyes. The crossbow bolt burrowed into his own back. He watched his eyes close, his face twist. He dropped back to his knees, then, lifelessly, fell forward on his stomach.
The vision faded. His god remained. Tal was back in the cell and no longer in the dreaming place, but the weight and presence of the Unforged God still enfolded him. It was asking him a question. And, he realized suddenly, the visions had always been a question.
His god had never coerced him. He had never forced Tal to swear himself to the Destroyer. He had shown him a vision and asked him to have faith in its message, and Tal had always, unfailingly, answered with a yes. Most of his visions had led only to trouble and pain…but then, the Unforged God had never promised safety, had he? Nor a long life, nor even a happy ending. What he had promised—not in words, but in a deeply-planted and unshakeable knowledge buried somewhere inside Tal—was that if he said yes, he would save the Destroyer, and save the empire through her.
Tal had felt bitter for so long that the sudden absence of the feeling made him dizzy with its loss. He accepted at last that he had not been betrayed, or at least, he had not been betrayed by his god. He had perhaps been betrayed by his own certainty that being a believer meant a life without anguish. He thought now, though, that sometimes being a believer—that saying yes—meant inviting pain. The Unforged God himself had sacrificed when he built the world from the broken pieces of himself. How could Tal rightfully expect his own life to entail less sacrifice than his god’s?
The promises he’d made Tal had not yet been fulfilled. Tal sensed a finality to this vision, though, a true ending. If he did this, if he trusted in it and followed it, he would at last save the Destroyer and the empire. He would also die. But hadn’t he already accepted his own death? And wasn’t it better to die honestly, in a final acceptance of what he had once believed, and turned away from, and finally—if reluctantly, and somewhat more cynically—might believe once again?
He had come to this place because he had wanted to spend the coin of his death on something that mattered. He did not think now that there was anything that could matter more than this: the salvation of the girl he loved, and the redemption of his own soul.
Tal bowed his head and, one last time, said yes to his god.
Then he stood up and called for the guards.
THE DESTROYER WOKE NEXT TO A CORPSE.
She regarded it with faint curiosity. Her vision was blurred and her recent memory even more so, and she was content to lie there on the comfortable cot for a while as both reasserted themselves. By the time her sight was clear enough to make out the scarred, still features of her sister, she was also recovered enough to recall that this corpse was one she herself was ultimately responsible for, and to distantly register the landslide of horror and grief spurred by that realization. The emotions would have been enough to suffocate Elodie. A good thing, then, that Elodie was no longer present.
Tears gathered in the corners of the Destroyer’s eyes. She bent her head and lay a hand on her sister’s brow. For a long time, she stayed that way, waiting for the grief to gather enough weight to make the tears fall. They never did. Her emotions felt as if they were at arm’s length—easily observed, easily calculated, but not entirely experienced.
That, she supposed, would be the mercury’s doing.
She called on her power. The hand that was on her sister’s brow sparked with scarlet flames like phoenix feathers. Everything within her relaxed at the sight, and she let out a long exhalation to see herself finally made right. The Destroyer bent down and gently kissed Sarai’s cold cheek, and then she channeled more fire through her hand and into her sister’s body. There, on a cot in the middle of an insignificant side room in the physicians’ wing of the Alloyed Palace, the Destroyer crafted a royal pyre. It wreathed the bed in beautiful dancing flames, and when it was done, nothing at all was left of the late Iron Empress.
The Destroyer pulled back her hand. The Iron Crown had fallen to the floor. She bent down and grazed its cold metal surface with a finger, both hating it and desperate for its weight to settle on her own head. At last, she removed her own twisted-briar crown and picked up the iron one.
There was a mirror across the room. Her gaze caught on it just as she lowered the empress’s crown onto her brow. It looked impossibly heavy on her head, dull and cold above her shining quicksilver eyes. This, she thought, must have been the vision that Tal had seen.
The thought of him pierced the veil of her emotions like a dart, a quick but undeniable pinch of pain. It made her catch her breath. It made her feel, for just a moment, like the fragile girl she had been a few hours ago. But after a second the pain faded back into the distance with all her other emotions, and she took a grateful breath as she straightened and made her way to the door.
The bright, plant-filled space beyond was still empty of people, but she could hear the hum of voices past the closed copper doors. She strode toward them and touched the green metal. They didn’t move, didn’t recognize the magic in her veins or open at her touch. She narrowed her eyes, recalling then that Albinus had, in his pride, had the doors enchanted to respond only to the touch of a copper Smith. It was meant to be a petty show of power here in his own hall; everyone but himself and his minions would have to either expend quite a bit of physical energy—and portray a good deal of impropriety in the process—to heave them open, or else lower themselves to calling on guards or copper Smiths to open them.
The Destroyer did neither. She lifted a hand and set it against the copper, then pushed her power into it. Snakes of silver flame wound their way around the doorframe, thirstily drinking up the oxygen that flowed through the cracks and fueling themselves until they melted through the door itself. Rivulets of molten metal dripped and smoked but the silver snakes lapped that up too, writhing through the doors until there was nothing left of them at all.
She let the flames dissipate and stepped through the empty, charred doorway, a pleasant burn of satisfaction kindling in her chest at the destruction.
Albinus was in the hallway. So were perhaps two dozen soldiers. Their eyes were already so wide she could see white all the way around their irises as their gazes darted from her face to the crown to the remnants of the scorched doorframe. Their terror was a balm. A small smile curved across her face. She felt powerful again, at last. She felt unstoppable. It seemed at once both deeply right and also, somehow, not quite right at all. She did not feel like herself, but the emotion was a squiggly and unquantifiable thing, small enough to shut away until it stopped bothering her.
She raked her smile across the soldiers, who all quailed further at her attention, until she spotted the highest-ranking guard. “My sister is dead. Announce my ascendance,” she ordered.
The guard bowed at once and left, his steps hastier than the situation merited. She reveled in the power she held over him. She turned then to the next highest-ranking guard and asked, “For what reason are you all gathered out here?”
Albinus cleared his throat and answered for the man. “There is a prisoner that requires the attention of the empress,” he said, then cleared his throat again. “That is, I suppose, your attention.” Something like gle
e loosened his features, dimming the pleasant fear. He had some sort of trick planned.
Her eyes narrowed. “You suppose correctly, cousin. I will let your improper address slide this one time but in the future, you will call me Highness, as you did my sister.”
Albinus clenched his jaw and his glee diminished. She could see his mind working quickly, trying to calculate how he might come out ahead in this situation—how he might use his knowledge of her secrets to blackmail her or gain the leverage to dethrone her, probably. She stepped forward until she was right in front of him and then leaned forward even further. “You have not outed me in all these years because you were frightened of my sister,” she murmured. When her breath brushed over his ear, he shuddered. “You should now be frightened of me.”
She stepped back. Albinus swallowed, gritted his teeth, and then lowered himself to the floor. He performed a full obeisance to her as he once had to a young Sarai. The Destroyer let him stay there for a long count of five, and then said, “Good. You may rise, and tell me about this prisoner that requires my attention.”
Albinus dipped his head—likely to try to hide the impotent rage that gripped his every feature now—and gestured at the hall behind the Destroyer. “He is there. Your Highness. Normally such prisoners would be executed on sight, but he has demanded his right to a trial. With your leave, I will assemble the representatives of the high courts to witness the event tomorrow morning.” Then he raised his head to meet the Destroyer’s eyes, and she saw that it was not rage, but a bright and devilish malice that shone from his expression. She had embarrassed him in front of her guards, and he did not care—because whatever was happening now, it could only be to his great favor.
A premonition feathered across her spine. Slowly, she turned.
The prisoner knelt on the opposite side of the hall. Dried blood of many colors spattered his clothing, his dark hair, his skin. Fresher blood stained the carpet beneath him silver and orange, leaking from a long, shallow cut that followed the line of his cheekbone. When he met her eyes—her newly mercurial eyes—he flinched.
His presence pulled her forward like a magnet tugging at the mercury in her blood. She knelt before him so that their gazes were level. The soldiers behind her were too well-trained to gasp or mutter amongst themselves, but she could hear the whisper of their feet against the carpet as they shifted their weight, uncertain of what was happening.
Tal didn’t look away from her, but she could see the desire to do so playing across his features. She lifted a hand—slowly, so that he had time to brace himself and not flinch again—and brushed a knuckle over the cut in his cheek. He closed his eyes then, and though his mouth was still tight with fear, he leaned into her touch so slightly that she would not have felt it if she was not so keenly attuned to him.
“Who,” she said, her voice as cold as the Skyteeth blizzard that they had survived together, “has cut him?”
One of the guards standing at his side cleared his throat. “I did, Your Highness. It is protocol to check the blood of an accused—”
She was on her feet. She was lifting a hand. She was calling up every scrap of power within her, more than she had used to burn her sister’s pyre, more than she had brought to bear on the copper door, more than she had used to incinerate the entire mining town last week. He had hurt Tal. He had made him bleed, revealed his greatest weakness for the world to see. She would make him pay dearly for it.
Tal stood then. His hands were manacled behind his back and he was favoring one leg—the one weak from rust phage—but he still managed to put himself between her and the guard. “My lady,” he said. “Please don’t.”
She stopped. The words arrested her, the sound of her old title falling from his lips like poison. Don’t call me that, she recalled saying. The memory tore briefly through the veil of her emotions once again, and she gasped at the sudden loss of equilibrium.
Behind her, Albinus’s voice rang out. “He begs for his own life!” he said, trying to sound scandalized but barely hiding his elation. “Will you allow such impertinence from a boy who has lied to Your Imperial Highness for years, flouted your wise sister’s laws in the halls of your own home?”
Tal held the Destroyer’s gaze. To everyone else assembled, it looked as if he were indeed pleading for her to spare him. The two of them were the only ones who knew the truth: that she was seconds away from killing every single one of these guards and Albinus too, that she was so close to violence she could already hear the way they would scream and writhe beneath her fire. That the only reason she stayed her hand was because Tal had asked her to. He was still holding her with his gaze now, refusing to release her, or perhaps it was her who was allowing him to steady her.
“I will allow whatever I see fit,” she told Albinus at last. Some of what she was thinking must have bled through to her voice, because when he answered again, his voice was slightly more subdued.
“His crimes are not limited to bearing silver blood, Your Highness. He was found in the dungeons. He freed over a dozen zealot prisoners and killed half that many dungeon guards.”
Her eyes widened. He had come back? He had come back…to the dungeons, to free the prisoners who had tried to assassinate her, when he’d said there was nothing that could sway him to return to the palace?
Apparently, he had only meant that she wasn’t enough to sway him.
She had thought that she would never feel broken again as the Destroyer, and now she had already been proven wrong barely a few minutes into her new life. He had stripped away her defenses. She loved him—or at least, Elodie had loved him, even if the Destroyer was incapable of such a thing. How could he have lied to her in such a way? Would he have sacrificed his own life to spite her, if he hadn’t been caught by the guards? Some of what she felt must have shone through on her face, because Tal’s mouth tightened as if he wanted to say something, but then his eyes went to the guards behind her and he stayed silent.
“Your Highness?” came Albinus’s voice, even more nervous now as her silence stretched out. “Shall I order the court representatives to gather? If I may dare say, the public will be quite interested in such a trial too. It would be a great opportunity to quickly establish the strength of your rule.”
Her jaw clenched. Albinus had boxed her in neatly. If she ordered Tal released—and presumably healed—then she would effectively confirm him as her weakness, and he would very quickly be used against her. It would deteriorate her sway over her subjects from the very start. He would make her vulnerable. But if she held a trial for him and found him guilty, he would surely be executed, and Albinus would have neatly removed her sole remaining ally.
Tal shifted, recapturing her attention, then bowed his head, finally breaking eye contact with her. “My lady, I request my right to a trial.”
She stared at him. He wanted a trial? She had assumed he’d demanded a trial when he was caught simply to avoid being executed on sight.
Whatever the answer, she wasn’t going to discover it out here, surrounded by her enemies. Ordering a trial would buy her time to decide what to do, at the very least. “Very well,” she said, lifting her chin. “Have the seneschal assemble the required witnesses. We will hold the trial in the morning.” She hesitated. “In the meantime, he will stay in my chambers and I will question him privately.”
His shoulders moved slightly, hunching inward as if he were bracing himself for a blow that was soon to land. She ached at the sight. I will never hurt you, she wanted to tell him, but what right did she have to say such a thing when she had hurt him so much already? When tomorrow she might deliver a guilty verdict that would end his life? Her eyes burned and her throat thickened. She had to retreat, right now.
She turned her back to Tal and strode down the hall, her sharp steps muffled by the thick carpet. “And remove those manacles,” she snapped over her shoulder. At least she could do that much. She didn’t watch as her orders were followed, though, because she didn’t think she could bear for
Tal to meet her gaze again—to look into her eyes and see only the Destroyer where Elodie used to be.
Her chambers were on the other side of the palace, down the length of two long private hallways and up three sets of stairs. Before they had made it even halfway there, she could hear Tal’s breath becoming labored, could feel the drumbeat of his footsteps lagging. She eagerly grasped at the excuse to ease his suffering at least a little.
“Albinus,” she said sharply, because of course her cousin was escorting them all the way to her rooms and would likely stand guard outside afterwards to make sure there were no unfortunate escapes. “I will not have my guard too injured to make it to his own trial. Heal him. And heal the rust phage, too,” she added like it was an afterthought. Her heart beat a little quicker in the rhythm of desperate hope.
Albinus sighed through his nose. “As Your Highness requests, I will heal what injuries I can, but from the looks of how far his phage has progressed I doubt there is any treatment that might save him from it at this point.”
Some feeling churned just behind her breastbone. She considered it for a moment, trying to dissect it so that she might identify it, but it didn’t last long enough. She should probably be glad she couldn’t feel anything more strongly in this state. “Do as much as you can,” she ordered her cousin. “And know that I will find out if you hold back.”
There was quiet behind her for a moment as Albinus presumably channeled his magic through Tal; in addition to making tinctures and infusing medical treatments with magic, copper Smiths could also use their magic directly on a patient, though it was much more draining. “There,” Albinus said after a moment, and to his credit he did sound a bit weaker than he had been a moment ago. “I have healed what I can, Highness, and alleviated some of the symptoms of the phage.”
They had reached her chambers. A guard stepped forward to open the carved scorch-wood door for her. “Shall I light the—” the man started, but she cut him off.