Mercurial

by Naomi Hughes

Her finger hit the trigger. The bolt flew from the crossbow.

  And here it came: Tal’s decision.

  The weight of his god lifted, hovered. Warmth enveloped him. The choice, even now, was his to make.

  He made it.

  THE DESTROYER BURNED WITH A FERAL SATISFACTION as she began to pronounce her judgment. She was certain that she had guided the trial well, that her subjects were likely to see Tal’s potential as an ally now and not think him to be her weakness. The rust phage was still an obstacle, of course, but she was the Mercurial Empress. She would find a way to cure him. She could offer a coffer of gold to whoever could fix Tal, or maybe just hurt Albinus until he did the trick. Surely the royal physician—the man who had infused a misfire with mercury magic—had some experimental procedure, some secret cure, that could ensure Tal lived.

  But in the middle of her pronouncement, Tal stood up suddenly and spun to face her. His gaze locked with hers and then, without warning, he staggered forward a step as if someone had struck him from behind.

  She cut off her pronouncement, startled. She raised a hesitant hand. “Tal?” she asked, her voice too high, too questioning, potentially ruining all her hard work at appearing dispassionate and reasonable. But there was something sad and final in his eyes that frightened her beyond caring.

  The audience started screaming. People leapt over each other, running for the exits. Guards and soldiers were shoving through them to get either away or to the stage. Someone, another soldier perhaps, grabbed her arm and tried to pull her backwards. She put her palm out and blasted a hole through his chest. No one else laid hands on her after that.

  “Tal?” she asked again, her voice loud and panicked in her own ears. She didn’t move. She couldn’t make herself move. She had so much practice in reading Tal even when he tried to hide his emotions from her, but now they were playing across his face like shadows from the windblown trees, flitting too quickly to make out fully.

  All at once, the emotions vanished, leaving his eyes dark and lifeless.

  He exhaled. He dropped to his knees. He fell forward, revealing the arrow lodged in his back.

  And the Destroyer exploded.

  All around Nyx, the crowd was screaming, lunging, knocking over benches and each other to get away. The Destroyer’s wreath of fire had expanded explosively outward, encompassing most of the stage, burning at least three lords of the high courts to ash instantly and landing several others with fatal wounds. Nyx heard an unearthly wail, one that was underlaid with the roar of a forest fire. The Destroyer was walking to Tal, who was the only person on the stage untouched by the fire. She was kneeling at his side. She was weeping.

  Nyx dropped the crossbow. She stared at her brother’s body. She tried to understand what had happened. She tried to understand what she had done.

  She could not.

  A movement at the edge of the stage caught her attention. Albinus was backing away, face tight in a rictus of fury. He was turning to the soldiers beside him, snapping orders. One of them began to hand him a weapon.

  Albinus. He had engineered this. He was going to try to kill the Destroyer now, while she wept over Tal’s body.

  A sudden clarity descended on Nyx. She welcomed it, even though she knew it was powered by adrenaline and not necessarily by logic. She leapt onto the toppled bench in front of her. She kicked a woman out of the way. She launched herself at the stage. Heat blistered her as she sprinted past the edge of the veil of flames, catching a dozen tiny fires on her clothing, but she didn’t even feel the spots of pain. There would be a much greater pain waiting for her later.

  Albinus spotted her too late. She threw herself through the air and tackled him to the ground. She snatched his weapon—a throwing dagger, which he likely couldn’t wield with any degree of skill anyway. He must have been desperate to bend this swiftly-dissolving situation to his advantage. She would not let him do it. It was her fault that her brother was lying dead twenty feet away, but it was his, too. She would not let him walk away from that.

  The Destroyer pulled the arrow from Tal’s back. It wasn’t lodged deeply enough to do much more than superficial damage, but some sort of violet substance—undeniably a deadly toxin of some sort—dripped from its head. She tightened her hand around the shaft. It disintegrated into smoke instantly and the poisoned arrowhead clinked to the ground.

  She turned Tal over. She pulled him into her lap. Fire raged everywhere, without and within.

  His eyes were closed. His heartbeat had gone still. He was not breathing.

  She remembered how he had breathed for her after she had drowned in the icy lake. She bowed over him, bent her head to his, and gave him all of the breath in her body.

  She would give him anything. Anything. Her life. Her empire. Her crown.

  …her crown.

  The memory of her sister whispered: The copper magic would have been enough to instantly heal everyone on the train.

  Your fire—if you were using all your fire—is probably the only power strong enough to break it.

  She laughed wildly, and it came out a sob. Of course, this would be it. Of course she was finally going to have to make this choice. She could keep her crown and the power in her veins—or she could use up all of her magic to destroy the crown for good, and in so doing perhaps save the life of the boy she loved.

  Earlier, she had thought she might be torn apart by the pieces of herself that scraped through her like broken glass. Now that feeling intensified. Her magic surged protectively, hardening the shield of fire around her as she struggled with herself. If she gave her magic up, she would be vulnerable. Helpless. Weak. Tal had said she was made to withstand such things. But how could he know that? She didn’t know it, not at all.

  If she did this, maybe she could force Albinus to replace the mercury in her blood again afterward. But she didn’t know the formula for her treatments as Sarai had, and Albinus could just as easily poison her as re-infuse her. But then, he wouldn’t need to poison her, would he? The mercury was the poison.

  The pieces of herself grew sharper. The Destroyer clung to her power. Elodie fought fiercely to save Tal’s life. The battle held her immobile, and with every second that passed, Tal’s body grew colder.

  How long had she been drowned before he’d saved her? How long could a body be dead before death was irrevocable? She could not keep fighting with herself. Some part of her must win: the Destroyer, or the girl from the Skyteeth who’d lost her memories but found her own soul.

  Tal’s words came to her then: You were right when I said I loved Elodie. But you were wrong when you said you weren’t her.

  The fire around her, which had been raging as if driven by gales, went still. So did the fire within her. There was no duality in her, no distinctly different personalities harbored in her being. There was only a girl. She was small, and scared, and lashed out with whatever weapon she had at hand—her words, her magic, her anger—when she felt threatened. The poison within her had only amplified those natural instincts.

  It was not power and Tal that she had to choose between. It was not the Destroyer and Elodie. It wasn’t even strength and vulnerability.

  It was fear, and love.

  Nyx had one arm locked around Albinus’s neck and the other drawn back, about to plunge the thin throwing dagger deep into his chest, when a hand wrapped around her wrist to stop her. She looked up. The Destroyer stood before her. The tracks of tears still shone on her cheeks, but only resolution showed in her eyes.

  “I can save him,” the Destroyer said.

  Nyx stared at her. Her mind worked through the possibilities: this was a trap, the opening salvo to the Destroyer’s revenge for the death of her favorite toy, or an attempt to capture Nyx alive for interrogation. But none of that mattered, because the Destroyer had just said the single phrase that could make Nyx do whatever she wanted no matter how impossible it seemed.

  She dropped the dagger. “What do you need?”

  “I need Albinus,”
the Destroyer said steadily. “I need a copper Smith to channel magic from my crown.”

  Albinus gave an ugly laugh, the effect of which was dampened by the fact that he was currently choking to death. “I will do no such thing,” he gurgled, or at least that was what Nyx was pretty sure he was probably saying.

  Nyx picked the dagger back up and gave him a shallow slice across the ear, knowing a cut in such a sensitive spot would sting like hell. He howled and snarled and she bared her teeth in a smile. “Go ahead, Al,” she said, drawing the dagger back. “Turn her down again and let me mar your face further. It’s not that pretty to start with—you should probably be more interested in conserving what traces of palatability it still has.”

  Albinus gritted his teeth, glared at her, and then reluctantly nodded.

  Sorry, Helenia, Nyx said mentally. Apparently violence is sometimes a good answer.

  She dragged him to the spot where Tal was lying. When she saw her brother’s lifeless body, a shudder of grief and denial wrenched through her so powerfully that she nearly lost her hold on Albinus, who immediately tensed to make a run for it. Nyx got control of herself—she said she could save him, it might be true, she told herself fiercely even though she knew she shouldn’t believe it—and firmed her grasp on the Lord of Copper.

  The Destroyer took off her crown. Her hair was braided around it and strands of it tore as she yanked the crown away, but she paid no mind. She held it out above Tal’s body. Her jaw was clenched—with the effort it was taking to hold her power back, or perhaps with the same grief and fear that was raging through Nyx.

  “I am going to burn this,” the Destroyer told Albinus.

  He went still and then jerked. He gurgled something. Nyx eased her grip a bit so he could speak. He sucked down great lungfuls of air and then managed, “You can’t! The high courts will lose our advantage, the crown holds the power of the whole empire—”

  “Then it will be a good trade for Tal’s life,” the Destroyer said icily. “When I destroy it, you will channel the copper magic from it into Tal. You will use it to restore him. Fully. No poison, no rust phage.”

  Nyx’s heart sped with hope. It was like a drug, loosening her muscles, making her feel almost delirious with it.

  Albinus licked his lips, his gaze flitting from Tal’s body to the Destroyer’s face. “I’m…I’m not sure I’d be able to restore him fully, even with as much magic as the crown is rumored to hold.”

  The Destroyer lifted her eyes to Nyx, her features dark with the promise of violence—a violence that, for once, Nyx understood and was fully on board with.

  Nyx twirled the dagger in front of Albinus’s face. His eyes followed it as if hypnotized. She stopped its spinning and touched it to his cheek, making him shiver. Then she motioned at the Destroyer and the walls of fire around them. “If my brother dies, so do you,” she told him, conviction clear as daylight in her tone. “By knife or by fire or by my own bare hands.”

  “Or my own bare hands,” the Destroyer added. The curtains of fire around them leapt higher and crackled with her barely-restrained fury.

  Albinus hesitated a moment longer and then gave in. “Very well. We—we must hurry, though, his heart will have been stopped for too long to restart it soon.” His eyes darted around as if he were looking for backup. The few guards who were still in the courtyard were a sensible distance away, though, and didn’t look like they were about to charge through the flames to rescue the royal physician from their empress.

  The Destroyer lifted her chin, bracing herself. “I will have to focus,” she warned Nyx. “Keep an eye on Albinus. If I lose concentration, the release of so much magic of so many different kinds could blow up half the palace.”

  “I’m okay with that,” Nyx assured her.

  The Destroyer turned her focus to the crown and the boy beneath it. The walls of fire began to contract around them. “Nyx,” she said then, with her gaze turned away and her voice dangerously even, “am I right in assuming it was you who did this?”

  Nyx debated, but ultimately—“Yes.”

  “You could not have thought you would leave here alive.”

  Nyx wasn’t sure if it was a threat or an observation. “Revive my brother,” she said at last. “We can debate who’s going to kill who later.”

  The curtains of fire answered Elodie’s call. They spun ash from the ground and fed it into the wind that had been churned up by so much heat, and soon the flames spinning around her were soot black. They eclipsed the sun. They shaded the mountains on the horizon. They blocked out what was left of the fleeing peasants and the shouting soldiers, the bowing trees, the scorched irises and charred oleander. Only a few moments ago, the garden had been a riot of color and life. Now it was ruined, because her fire was capable of nothing else.

  The Destroyer. That was the name her sister’s subjects had given her when she performed her first public execution at eight years old. They had looked at her with awe in their eyes, and fear, and she’d found that nothing had ever pleased her more—except perhaps the warm and proud weight of Sarai’s hand on her shoulder. She would never feel that weight again, now. Neither would she sustain the mercury and magic that had been her sister’s first—and then final—gift. There would be nothing left within her except herself.

  She wasn’t sure if she could bear it.

  She pulled power from the fires around her, and from the magic that was blazing through her veins. She fed it into the crown. It began to warm beneath her hands.

  Once, she was afraid. Still, she was afraid. But: we were made to withstand such things, whispered the voice of the boy she loved. He was a boy of ill-placed faith, a boy whose belief in both her and his god was relentless, without mercy. He wanted nothing from her except the impossible. Somehow, he had made her want it too.

  The crown grew hotter and began to glow. The flames surged into it and through it. They too were relentless, and she would make herself so as well.

  At her side, Albinus tensed and then reached out a hand to Tal’s body. The magic within the crown was nearly to the breaking point and he was preparing to channel it.

  The fire was tearing through her, each fingertip a jet of flame, each artery and vein and capillary a raging torrent of sparks. She had lost control. Her power was following only itself, like a waterfall crashing down inevitably from the heights. She began to grow faint. She heard screaming, something feral and furious, and realized that it was both her and the fire.

  The crown melted.

  Nyx shouted. Albinus cried out in pain as he drew magic into himself, his veins glowing a bright copper that shone even through his skin. His hand on Tal’s shoulder spasmed into a claw. Tal’s body seized, his spine arching.

  The waterfall of Elodie’s power stopped all at once. There was a sharp pain in her eyes. Something wet curved down her cheek and spattered onto Tal’s shirt: a single bead of red blood.

  The flames that had been wailing in a cyclone around them stopped suddenly. They hung in the air, fire and sparks and suspended ash, and then, like an imploding star, they rushed inward.

  The last of the crown dissipated into steam, releasing a torrent of raw magic just as the curtains of fire collapsed around it. The two forces roared into each other with a thunderous crack that spider-webbed the stone stage with fault lines. A mighty wind rushed out from the spot where the crown had been and sent all of them flying, tearing branches from the trees and flattening bushes on its way.

  After that came a great silence.

  The garden slowly settled. The trees stopped thrashing. The multitude of small fires that had caught in the grass sputtered out, unable to chew through the green and well-watered plants without the fuel of magic. Four figures splayed across the stage like points on a compass: Tal, Elodie, Nyx, and Albinus, who was slowly sitting up.

  Copper burned through his veins still, more power than he had ever felt before. He flexed his fingers and watched the fascinating glow of it through his skin. His spies had foun
d out the truth of the Iron Crown’s enchantment years ago, but he had never guessed the sheer magnitude of magic within it. He had planned to wear it, but wielding it would do just as well.

  Blinking, he surveyed the damage around him. The soldiers and the few peasants who hadn’t fled were now either unconscious or dead. He didn’t trouble himself to check. He didn’t need them for what he knew he had to do next.

  He had always been clever, a quick planner, excelling at both spinning and revising schemes. His old plan to have the Destroyer assassinated wouldn’t work now but there was still a way to salvage the situation nicely. He just had to do it before any of his enemies woke up.

  The young would-be assassin—Nyx had been her name, he recalled—lay prone on the eastern end of the stage, her chest moving steadily up and down with her breaths. He staggered over to her and then knelt, searching for the throwing dagger she’d taken from him. He would need to kill her first, since she’d seemed to have both the greatest desire to see him dead and the actual ability to do the deed. After that he’d move on to Tal—his would be the most truncated resurrection in history, if Albinus had in fact succeeded in reviving him—and last of all, the newly powerless Destroyer, who was now as helpless as any babe without her fearsome magic.

  He found the dagger wedged under Nyx’s shoulder. He tugged it free and then pondered for a moment. He wasn’t nearly as self-assured in violence as this young woman had been, but being a man of medicine, he did know the best places to strike to ensure she never rose again. He moved the blade up to hover above her neck and then drew it back for the killing blow.

  Something gray and white and ferocious barreled into him, snarling, and latched its jaws on the hand that was holding the dagger. Albinus yelled in shock as much as in pain. The dagger fell, its hilt glancing off Nyx’s shoulder as the creature—a dog?—bore Albinus to the ground. He beat at the beast, mostly ineffectually, with his other hand. He scrambled for the dagger. The dog’s teeth were ripping through the tendons in his wrist now, grinding against bone. Some other sharp thing was scraping against his leg.