Mercurial

by Naomi Hughes

  “No,” she snapped. “Leave it dark. Begone, all of you.” She stalked into her rooms with Tal at her back. The door closed gently behind them. It was well-made and the carpet beneath it plush and thick, and no light at all seeped through any cracks. She knew well the geography of this room—an antechamber that held her carved writing desk and small library, along with a seldom-used reclining couch—but in such darkness, the space suddenly felt far smaller and more intimate than she remembered.

  The Destroyer stood very still. She ached to demand an explanation, to fling either herself or her magic at Tal, and most of all to see his face so she could reassure herself that he truly was there, in the space just behind her and a bit to the side, where he had always been.

  “Elodie,” Tal said quietly.

  She shuddered at the name. It wasn’t hers. Not anymore. But it still seemed to hold some sort of sway over her—or maybe it was just him who had that, no matter what it was he was saying.

  “Talk to me,” he said.

  “I do not take orders from you,” she replied, keeping her back to him. She tried to make the words cool and detached but they came out flat instead. She took a breath, tried to focus. “Albinus will have his spies watching the exits, but you may be able to hide until it’s safe to go.”

  “I don’t want to hide,” he said. A whisper of fabric rustled against her ears as he moved, those familiar footsteps slow but certain as he stepped toward her, circling around until he stood in front of her. “I don’t want to go.”

  “You do. You did.”

  “I came back.”

  “Whatever could possess you to do such a thing?”

  He was not far, perhaps an arm’s length away. She could feel the outline of him in the darkness. She wanted so badly to close the distance to him, to be able to see the way he was looking at her now, but she remembered why she had kept the room dark—because she couldn’t bear to see him flinch again when he met her eyes. And even in that darkness, if she reached out to him she would only feel him recoil, because that was the instinctive reaction when one was faced with a predator.

  It wasn’t until Tal’s fingers settled against her cheek that she realized she was crying.

  The touch was so unexpected, and suddenly so completely and exactly what she needed, that she gasped aloud. She didn’t dare to move, though, only stood quaking as his other hand lifted, slowly, carefully, to graze her other cheek.

  “I came back,” Tal said, his voice so low she could barely hear it even though it seemed to reverberate through every part of her, “because I could no longer pretend, even to myself, that I don’t love you.”

  She raised her hands then, gripped his wrists, not because she needed to hold him in place but because he was her anchor and she was in the midst of a storm and she knew that if he backed away now, if he flinched, she would be torn apart by it.

  He didn’t flinch.

  “Elodie is gone,” she said. Her voice was not thick with her tears. She’d had too much practice acting as if she weren’t crying. “It isn’t me who you love.”

  “It is,” he said steadily. “I love you, the girl I so foolishly swore a metal oath to two years ago, with the tired smile and the twisted crown. I love you, the girl I hated when I had to kill assassins and Saints for your sake. I love you, who has been used as a weapon by your own sister. And most of all I love you, the girl who saved me from a blizzard and a mooncat and from myself. You were right when I said I loved Elodie. But you were wrong when you said you weren’t her. You have always been Elodie, and as hard as you might try to kill her, I am afraid she is quite a bit tougher than that.”

  She closed her eyes. Earlier, he had stripped away her defenses. Now, his words had replaced them with something new and far stronger, something insurmountable, impossible. Something unutterably beautiful.

  She took one hand off his wrist and reached tentatively for him. She brushed his face. He turned into her touch as he had earlier, but this time the movement wasn’t small. It was a leaning of his whole self into her; an acceptance, an offering. She stepped closer to him. His breath ghosted over her hair. She paused barely a few inches away, realizing what she had been about to do, the boundary she had been about to cross—and then Tal crossed it for her, leaning in and finding her lips with his own.

  The kiss was whisper-soft. It was a knowing that passed between them, spinning out like a blown glass ornament, fragile and precious as it grew. She trembled beneath his touch and he trembled beneath hers. She was helpless, out of control, and drunken with the headiness of it. It reminded her of a sled ride down a steep hill, snow in her hair and a blizzard on the horizon, the world laid out before her as she whooped with joy.

  He loved her. He trusted her enough to give himself to her in this way, even though she had quicksilver eyes and mercurial blood and enough fire to level a city, even though she had hurt him, and even though she knew there would always be a part of him that hurt to be with her.

  As if his touch were a conduit that connected her to herself—to Elodie, to her own formerly distant emotions—the weight of what she had experienced in the last few hours crashed down on her all at once, and a sob rose up within her. She broke the kiss, wrapped her arms around Tal, and buried her head in his chest. The tears that had refused to fall when she’d found her sister’s body flowed at last. She shook with the grief of it, with the anguish of losing the only family member who’d loved her, and with the agony of the knowledge that she would soon lose Tal too—either to the trial, or to the phage.

  She could not endure it. She could not bear to lose him, too.

  “Yes, you can,” Tal said to her, which made her realize she had spoken her thoughts aloud.

  She stepped back, suddenly furious. She knew that the flash of her changing emotions was mostly due to the mercury and tried to contain it, but only partly succeeded. “I love you too, you idiot,” she hissed, “and no, I cannot bear to lose you.”

  She felt his chest shake beneath her hands and realized he was laughing. “If I were not already convinced you were still Elodie, that needlessly aggressive declaration of love would do the trick.”

  She let out a frustrated breath and barely kept herself from shoving him away. “How can you expect me to withstand your death?”

  He sighed and leaned his forehead against hers, resting there as if she was an entirely safe spot for him to abide. “Because you are human,” he said softly. “We were made to withstand such things.” He hesitated a moment then, and said, “I am sorry for the pain you must feel at the loss of your sister. I truly did think you could save her.”

  It was both honest and kind, but not the whole truth. He was sorry only for her pain and not the actual loss, which he did not mourn at all, because he hated her sister and felt no trace of the love for her that softened his hatred of the Destroyer.

  “I do not feel it as Elodie would,” the Destroyer admitted. “Even now. And I am glad.”

  Tal was quiet, but she felt him tense against her. “You must promise me something,” he said at last.

  “I must do no such thing,” she answered, wary with the knowledge that he could only be asking her to do something she very much did not want to do.

  He plowed onward without regard to her reply. “Whatever happens at the trial, you must find a way to give up your mercury.”

  She pulled away from him at that. “I will not give up my power.” Her heart turned over at the thought—the wretched emotions that she would once again wholly feel, the defenselessness against her enemies.

  “It is not power,” Tal argued. “It is poison. Perhaps you can withstand the mercury now, but the more time that goes by the more it will overtake you, until there is nothing at all left of the girl I loved.”

  She noted his use of past tense. Her hands curled into claws in his shirt. “Tal, you will not die. I will not allow it.”

  He said nothing. The quality of his silence changed in a way that felt somehow rueful and familiar, and s
he realized then what had to have happened to bring him back to this place. Her mouth filled with a sour taste. “You’ve had another vision, haven’t you?”

  “I have.”

  Her whole being filled with an incandescent rage, underlaid by a terrible sorrow that felt inevitable. She warred with it. “So you have come back not for me at last, but for him.”

  “I came back for you because he finally made me understand that I love you.”

  She gritted her teeth. The anger was so intense; she had forgotten how it blew through her like a windstorm, uprooting sense and logic, leaving only destruction in its wake. It turned out there were some emotions she could still feel strongly after all—but at least these emotions made her feel more powerful, not less. “If he allows you to die, I will raze all of his people to dust.”

  “Please don’t say that.”

  “Why? Because it’s blasphemy? He betrayed you! Remember—he led you to me, to two years of pain, to the embittering of your very soul because of it, and I will never forgive him that.”

  “But I think I might,” Tal said softly, “someday.”

  “You cannot forgive him.” The words were final, an order from an empress.

  His fingers found her jawline. His thumb smoothed away a tear there. “I will forgive who I wish,” he said, a trace of heavy humor in his tone now. “And you cannot command me otherwise.”

  He gently kissed the spot where his thumb had rested, and some of the raging fury within her subsided. Like a retreating tide it left behind the wreckage of its passing. “You cannot forgive me either,” she said quietly.

  His fingers paused on her face and then dropped away. She could almost hear him wrestling with his thoughts. “I love you,” he said at last, “and I will forgive you someday, too.”

  “But not yet?”

  He let out a breath. “Finding the end of a journey satisfactory does not erase the pain of the path that brought you there. It wouldn’t be honest to love you, or to love my god, and not admit to myself that both of you have hurt me too. Someday the pain may be distant enough for me to forget it, to remember only the rightness of the ending. That’s not today. But I have faith,” he said, and she could feel that rueful smile of his in the darkness, “that it may be so eventually. Until then, I will just have to live with it all together: love, and hate, and grief and betrayal and joy.”

  At least he was speaking as if he would live past tomorrow now. “How will you bear it?” she asked. “How could anyone bear to have so much inside them?”

  “We were made to withstand these things, too.”

  “Tal. Tell me your vision.”

  The suddenness of her request did not catch him off-guard as she had hoped. He only said steadily, “If I tell it to you, it may not happen.”

  “And you want it to happen?” Maybe it was something good that he’d seen, some way out of the corner that she and Albinus and Tal himself had backed her into.

  “I’ve said yes to my god, and I will not go back on my word,” he replied, which wasn’t an answer at all. She made a sound of frustration and disgust, and felt his chest shake with laughter again, just a little.

  That was when she finally got the courage to say what she had wanted to say ever since she saw him kneeling in front of a contingent of soldiers outside the physicians’ wing. “I want you to forgive me,” she whispered as if it were a sinful thing to confess, which it certainly was. People like her shouldn’t be forgiven.

  He said nothing, only wrapped her in his arms and held her together. They stood like that for a long time as the moon lifted higher on the other side of her curtains, until eventually exhaustion overtook them both and they went to her bedroom to sleep. Tal tried to stop at his cot in the corner but she pulled him away from it so hard he nearly tripped. “Stay with me,” she said, and although it was meant to be an order it came out shaky and unfamiliar—a request. One she knew he had every right to deny.

  Without a word, he went to her bed and drew the covers back. Neither of them bothered to change, but only slipped beneath the blankets in their peasant’s clothing, dirty from travel and in Tal’s case stained with blood. He pulled her against him and she rested there, knowing she had no claim at all to such a thing, and together, they waited for the morning.

  BY THE TIME THE MIDNIGHT MOON REACHED THE ZENITH OF ITS RISE, Nyx had finished her third barfight and had just about decided on the location for her fourth.

  Bars were, as any good reprobate knew, excellent places to search out news in the form of gossip. For instance, there was the rumor about the young bodyguard who had slain three dozen palace soldiers that evening only to hang himself before he could be caught. That had been the basis of her initial barfight. When the rude, drunken, middle-aged rumormonger had insisted that the bodyguard had indeed died to avoid the shame of facing his misdeeds, she had ended the argument by introducing the back of his head to a very heavy beer mug. Afterwards, the barkeep had unceremoniously introduced her face to the outside sidewalk, which she took as an invitation to try her luck at the tavern across the street. There, she started her second barfight after another rumormonger—a woman only a few years older than her this time, but equally as drunk as her predecessor—insisted that she had seen the bodyguard go up in a column of magical flames before he even set foot inside the palace. That barfight had been more invigorating, as the woman had fast reflexes and seemed as eager for a brawl as Nyx, and it had come to an end only when Nyx locked her arm around the woman’s neck and choked her until the woman at last gave in and admitted that she had made up the rumor in hopes of earning a free beer in exchange for the news.

  The third barfight had not been a result of any rumors at all, but rather because Nyx’s desperation and anger had brought her to her breaking point, and she needed to hit something before she did something even stupider—like march up to the palace and demand to be taken to the Destroyer so that she might kill the bitch properly this time.

  Nyx had reached the city not long after sunset, only a few hours behind Tal and the Destroyer. She knew it hadn’t been longer than that because she had found their abandoned sled, and the mud caked to its retrofitted wheels was not yet quite dry. She had left her own sled beside it, letting her dogs loose along with Tal’s so that they could drink from the river and rest, and then she’d marched into the city intent on finding and saving her younger brother even if she had to drag him out by the scruff of his neck. Even then, a frantic fear had swirled beneath her determination, because she knew how far the rust phage must have gone by now. She knew that he would only have allowed himself to be coerced into returning here—where he would almost certainly be executed as a silver Smith once captured—if he thought there was no other option. He had told her to warn the mountain base of the coming attack but if he understood her at all, he knew she would do no such thing until she had first ensured his safety.

  The only problem with that was she had to find him first.

  Hence her strategy of tracking down drunken gossip. She had learned some information that was likely accurate so far—all of the rumors confirmed that the Destroyer had returned, and several people had stated that her bodyguard had slain varying numbers of dungeon guards—but it was only enough to stoke Nyx’s despair further. She still had no idea where her brother was or even if he was alive. She’d need much more detailed information if she was going to stage a rescue attempt that had any chance at all of success.

  The next tavern—site of her impending fourth barfight—was a seedy place with cracks running through its bricks and mushroom-colored mortar breaking off in flakes. The door hung off a single rusty hinge, which wasn’t even Smithed to detect when someone entered with a weapon as the door hinges of the other bars had been. She wished now that she hadn’t left her dagger with the sled.

  She grabbed a stool—an act she regretted immediately, as its surface was wet with some sticky brown substance—and slid a coin across the counter to the woman on the other side. “A glass of you
r most disgusting ale, and any information you might have on the return of the Destroyer and her guard,” she said.

  The woman paused in her ineffectual scrubbing at the bar’s counter and peered at Nyx. “Ah,” she said, slipping the coin off the counter and into her pocket, “I think the woman you want to talk to is in the back room.” She made no move to fetch the requested ale, but Nyx didn’t care, because this was the first time anyone had reacted so knowingly to Nyx’s demands for information. That could only mean one of two things: either she actually had access to someone with relevant and accurate information, or else this was a trap.

  Nyx turned toward the back room, which she assumed was through the dilapidated door beyond the end of the counter. She grabbed a beer mug—they made a decent weapon in a pinch, as she’d discovered earlier in the night—from an empty table and wove her way through the handful of patrons who were still drinking or gambling at this late hour. She nudged the door open with her foot, muscles tense and ready for anything…

  Except, perhaps, for what she found.

  Sitting at a table in the shadows, drinking herbed tea from a remarkably clean mug, was her mother.

  Nyx stared as Saasha. She had bathed recently and even washed and oiled her hair, her short black pouf shining with it. Her skin was scrubbed clean of the dirt from her travels. Nyx could smell the faint hint of marigold and lavender that she used in her favorite perfumes. Even her clothes looked comfortable and clean, if not new, and she sat straight and stately in the rickety wooden chair as if it were a throne.

  Nyx knew that she should be happy to see her mother alive and well and not a prisoner. But what she felt in that first instinctive moment, that split second of surprise when she had not yet had time to lie to herself, was anger.

  During the mission that the two of them had concocted together, Nyx had poisoned herself, had prodded the Destroyer into torturing her nearly to death, had been dumped in a snowbank in the middle of nowhere, and had been dosed with laudanum while her brother was taken hostage yet again—and Saasha had come back from their mission literally smelling of flowers.