by Naomi Hughes
He spotted the dagger lying on the ground a few inches from his face. He grabbed for it.
A hand closed around his arm and bore it to the ground, where it was then pinned by a knee. The dagger was plucked neatly from his grip. “Back, Maluk,” said a calm female voice.
The jaws around Albinus’s wrist released. He turned his head to see a girl leaning over him. She was hefty and curvy, with brown skin and long, curly black hair and a face made for smiling. She wasn’t smiling now, though. In fact, she looked very angry indeed.
He licked his lips. He could talk his way out of this. After all, judging from her clothes she seemed to be a mere peasant, and what peasant would dare kill the Lord of Copper? “My dear girl—” he started, but felt suddenly faint and oddly queasy.
“I imagine that would be the poison taking effect,” the girl said conversationally, and nodded to the ground next to Albinus’s shin, where a purple-stained arrowhead lay dripping with blood both silver and copper.
Dread hardened in Albinus’s gut. The thing that had poked him in the leg earlier—that was what it had been. “You…you could save me if…” he started, trying frantically to remember if this particular poison had an antidote, but the girl merely looked at him.
“You have just held a dagger above my girlfriend with the intent to murder her. Before that, you helped formulate the poison that sickened her every day for two years. I would let Maluk rip your throat out if you weren’t already dying. I’m sure I’ll feel terrible later for not saving your life, but I’ll have to settle for saying a prayer for your soul in penitence.”
His vision wavered. He tried to call up his magic to save himself, but his concentration was too erratic to direct it. His head drifted toward the ground. The world went silent and the Lord of Copper closed his eyes, never to open them again.
“Good riddance,” Helenia said softly to Albinus’s corpse. Maluk growled softly in apparent agreement.
“I’m not sure if I’m impressed or intimidated,” said a weak voice from beside her. Helenia twisted around quickly to see Nyx pushing herself up to sitting. Helenia checked her over—not bleeding, breathing seemed normal, a little shaky but none the worse for wear.
“Be intimidated,” she answered sharply when she was sure Nyx was okay. “Then perhaps you’ll give it a bit more thought next time you consider leaving me drugged in the woods while you run off alone to face the Destroyer.”
A change came over Nyx then, her face going grim. She picked up the dagger and turned her head until she spotted the Destroyer—who was still unconscious, but twitching slightly as if she would wake at any moment—on the opposite end of the stage. Nyx started trying to stand.
“Stop being stupid,” Helenia snapped.
“I am obligated to do no such thing.”
“Sit down this second or I swear, I’ll turn down your proposal.”
Nyx stopped. She looked at Helenia. “What proposal?”
“The proposal where you get down on your knees and beg me to marry you even though—I repeat—you left me drugged in the woods while you ran off to face the Destroyer.”
Nyx blinked a few times, then sat back down. After a moment she managed to reply, “Is this the same proposal where you break down crying with happiness and kiss me senseless right after you agree to be my wife?”
Helenia’s lips twitched. “It might be,” she allowed, “if you can manage to keep yourself from murdering anyone for the next twenty minutes while I get this mess straightened out.”
Nyx considered this. “Ten minutes,” she negotiated.
Helenia let out a noise that was part laugh and part exasperated huff, and then leaned across the space between them and kissed her foolish, feral, beautiful fiancé senseless.
Nyx broke away after a moment, her eyes widening. “Tal,” she gasped, and scrambled to her feet again, searching for her brother.
Helenia put out a hand to keep Nyx from falling back down, as she was still disoriented from whatever had caused the magical blast a few minutes ago. “He’s okay,” she said quickly. “I saw him as I was coming to stop Albinus from killing you. He’s breathing. He’ll likely wake up any moment.”
“It worked?” Nyx rubbed a hand across her head and then collapsed back to sitting. “I think I might believe in God now,” she said shakily. “How did you get here? What did you…” Nyx trailed off, probably because she’d finally regained enough of her senses to look around and see the flood of Saints who were currently flowing around them, securing the exits to the garden and marching toward the palace gates.
When Helenia had woken up back in the temple clearing, she’d quickly put the clues together to realize what had happened and the danger that Nyx was almost certainly going to throw herself into. She’d travelled past the city and straight onward to the Saints’ mountain base, but rather than merely evacuating them, she’d gathered them into a makeshift army, promising that there was going to be a prime opportunity to strike the palace soon based on Tal’s vision. They’d met up outside the city with the former prisoners who Tal had released from the dungeons, and had thus been updated with more recent events.
After that, Helenia had gone ahead into the city and visited safehouse after safehouse until she tracked down Saasha and made the woman tell her what was happening. A part of Saasha must have wanted Helenia to save her daughter, because the woman held nothing back, telling Helenia every detail of the plan she’d manipulated Nyx into carrying out.
Helenia had wasted no time returning to the waiting army of Saints and using the chaos of the impending trial to get them into the city. They had arrived in the garden too late to have any effect on the planned assassination—but not too late, it turned out, to use the destabilization of the empress and the deaths of half of the high court leaders as an opportunity to invade the palace.
She told Nyx all of this.
“You are brilliant,” Nyx informed her.
“I know,” Helenia said primly, and kissed her again.
When Elodie woke twenty minutes later, she was predictably disgruntled about the invasion of her palace. The two dozen Saint guards surrounding her provided reason to keep her peace, but unfortunately, Elodie had never been good at keeping peace. She was far better at making threats.
“Jostle him one more time and I’ll break your fingers off,” she said to the young copper Smith who had been captured and then swiftly put to work by Helenia. He was currently checking Tal over to see why he was still unconscious. Maluk growled to back up her threat, one of his paws placed protectively on Tal’s chest.
“My—My lady,” the copper Smith stuttered, eyes wide. “I—”
“Don’t call me that.”
Helenia interceded. “I doubt threats will inspire the boy to work harder.”
Elodie shot her a glance. “In my experience, threats very often prove inspirational.”
“Ugh,” Nyx said from her spot a few feet away, where she was ostentatiously sharpening her confiscated dagger on one of the rocks that had cracked off from the stage. It seemed to be some sort of stress-relief measure for her. “I forbid you to banter with her, Hel.” Her voice lacked some of the spite that it used to have whenever she spoke to or about Elodie, though.
Helenia snorted. “I banter only with you, my darling.” She turned back to the Saint she’d been speaking with regarding the palace’s invasion. Apparently two wings had been taken mostly bloodlessly during the chaos. The remaining lords and ladies of the high courts had barricaded themselves in the last three wings and the fighting was now proceeding room to room.
Elodie found that she didn’t much care who won. She had already burned her crown and given up her magic. She supposed she might as well give up her empire with it. All she cared about was that Tal would wake up, and be well.
Although, she thought ruefully now, he would probably care who won the battle, and how many innocents and Saints would die in the process.
“Fine,” she said abruptly, looking back at H
elenia.
Helenia sent the Saint she’d been speaking to away with new orders and then turned back to Elodie. “Fine, what?”
Elodie waved a hand at the far edge of the stage, where the bodies of several leaders of the high courts were slowly growing cold. “Pick a crown. I think gold would suit you best, personally, but you can choose for yourself.”
Helenia tilted her head. “What exactly are you offering?”
“A truce. A compromise. Pick your crown, and tonight, I’ll put it on your head myself and name you co-empress. I know the courts; they’re full of people just like Albinus, all of them scheming how to stab each other in the back—sometimes literally—to gain power for themselves. You’d have to drag them kicking and screaming before they pledge loyalty to any outsider you might try to install if you get rid of me. Co-ruling is the only relatively peaceable solution. We can end the fighting before it escalates.”
Helenia’s eyes slowly narrowed. “Co-empress. I am…not sure about that.”
“Well, get sure quickly, because it’s the best offer you’re going to get,” Elodie snapped, her gaze returning once again to Tal’s face. She thought she had seen him twitch. “I know how the empire runs and how it will respond to the sort of change you want to initiate. I can help you save lives and livelihoods during the transition.”
“The transition to what, pray tell?”
She waved a hand. “What is it they do in the east now? A democracy, or something like that. I’m assuming that’s what you were hoping to achieve.” A democracy would mean her moving out of the palace—away from the den of vipers where she had never, ever felt safe—and finding someplace to settle down and finally learn about herself. And maybe, if she was very, very lucky, she could also learn what she and Tal were together.
If he would only wake up.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Helenia and Nyx exchange a shocked glance. A democracy was indeed all the Saints could have hoped to achieve in their wildest dreams.
“You will pardon the Saints involved in today’s incursion?” Helenia asked—the tentative beginnings of a negotiation that Elodie knew was certain to go on for quite a while. “You will formally forgive Nyx for her attempt on your life? For all of her attempts on your life, that is.”
Nyx paused in her dagger-sharpening, her wary gaze settling on the two of them.
“Yes, very well,” Elodie said impatiently. It wasn’t as if Tal was going to tolerate her trying to exact vengeance against his sister anyway. And if she was honest, there was a good-sized part of her that had come to grudgingly admire Nyx; she was stubborn, courageous, and charmingly violent.
Nyx scoffed. “As if we would believe you. As if you would forgive the crimes of a Saints assassin.”
The young copper Smith interrupted, probably eager to be away from the group. “I see no signs of rust phage or the poison. He is merely recovering, and will wake when he’s ready, my lady.”
Tension drained from Elodie all at once, leaving her trembling with relief as the Smith waited for her reply. She looked down at Tal. She remembered that he had looked this same way when she had found him after the train’s explosion, too. She’d thought then that he looked beautiful. He still was. The drumbeat of his footsteps, the green eyes that showed her everything he was feeling, the strength of his character—he was beautiful in all that he was.
She reached out and brushed a strand of hair off of his face. He leaned into her touch, and she smiled.
“My name is Elodie,” she said to them all. “And I will forgive who I wish.”
Tal dreamed.
He dreamed of a boy from the mountain ward whose belief had changed his destiny. He dreamed of his sister, happy. He dreamed of an empire forged anew with effort and compromise and hard-won trust.
He dreamed of a god who was proud of him. A god who authenticated the pain he still felt, and would always feel to some measure. A god he would love and question and wrestle with and fight for every day of his life—a life that he would now, quite unexpectedly, get to live.
Last of all, he dreamed of Elodie.
In his dream, her indomitable spirit shone through her brown eyes like sunlight through stained glass. Bloodred tear tracks were drying on her cheeks. Her hands were burned and blistered, a match for his own scars. She was injured, as he was, but she had also finally made room for her own happiness.
She leaned over him. She kissed him. And then he opened his eyes, and realized he was not dreaming at all.
EVERYONE KNEW A WITCH LIVED AT THE BASE OF THE MOUNTAIN.
The seasons there were strange, where the steam of the Entengre met the heartless frost of the Skyteeth, where the mote trees splayed their drifting seeds across the frozen mud and blooming snow roses alike. The witch, too, was a strange and fearsome contradiction. Wild, irreverent, lovely, ferocious—every person who visited her cottage described her differently. The only thing that was the same was the way their voices shook when they returned to tell the tale.
All of this, Theon had learned in his first week in the village there at the base of the mountain. He was a weak boy, he knew, small for his age and easily frightened, but at least in this matter everyone else seemed to be frightened too.
“I’m not frightened,” his sister insisted one dark evening as they returned from the schoolyard, their empty lunch baskets swinging, a neighbor’s cat yowling at them from a nearby porch.
The boy longed to impress his sister. Twelve years old and already she was the most painful sort of idol: the kind who had no idea that anyone at all worshipped them. “I am not frightened either,” he told her.
Her teeth gleamed in the red light of sunset. “Prove it.”
His heart stuttered, but he mustered himself and lifted his chin. “How shall I prove it?”
“Bring me one of the cursed flowers that grows under her window.”
And that was how Theon found himself creeping through a witch’s garden.
It was a wild and overgrown garden, the sort that could swallow a monster whole, much less one small boy. There were enormous hellebore blooms with bold yellow pistils, fragrant night-blooming jasmine, pops here and there of coppery witch-hazel, and everywhere, everywhere there were roses. Their thorns seemed to reach for him, whispering as they scraped gently over his sleeves and curled at his ankles. He crept through it all carefully and tried to comfort himself with the thought that the garden could not truly be as wild and dangerous as it seemed. Everywhere there were small signs that this plot of land was both beloved and mercilessly tended to. Smooth paving stones were set into the many wandering paths, and there were no brown petals to be seen on the beautiful ice-white roses he slipped past now. Not a single weed dared show its sprouts anywhere. But tame or not, the garden was still an easy place to get lost in, and the boy had to follow the trail of smoke from the cottage’s chimney to find the witch’s place.
The closer he grew to the hulking shadow of a house, the quicker his heart beat. It wished to gallop out of his chest and go hide under his bed, he thought. A large part of him was terrified that he would be found out by the witch. She would do something terrible to him. Eat his liver on toast, perhaps. His mother had pursed her lips and shook her head when he’d expressed that worry to her just yesterday.
She isn’t dangerous, she’d said, then paused and let her eyes slide sideways as if she was reconsidering her words. Well. She isn’t a witch, in any case. She was once powerful and then gave up her power, and now she gardens. Don’t bother her and hopefully she won’t bother you.
Theon hadn’t believed her. He’d heard enough scary stories to know when an adult was censoring out the frightening bits.
Now, though, as he tiptoed closer to the window of the cottage, he repeated the words over and over in his mind like a prayer. Don’t bother her and she won’t bother you. He would not be seen. He would not be caught. He would take a flower—a small flower, or maybe just a petal or a leaf or a pebble, something too small to be discovered m
issing—and then he would go. No one but his sister would ever know he had been here at all.
The cottage was near enough now that he could make out its details in the thin moonlight. Earlier he had thought of it as a hulking monstrosity, something with eyes and teeth that lurked in the dark, but now he could see that it was actually quite small and jarringly pretty. It was as neat as the garden was wild: whitewashed bricks, a sensible red-tile roof, and painted window boxes for flowers—though the plants spilled out of their containers in every which direction, as if in protest against all the orderliness.
His eyes lingered on the nearest window box. One of the cursed flowers that grow under her window, his sister had specified, and although he couldn’t tell if these particular blooms were cursed or not, they were definitely under a window. He tried to measure the distance between himself and the box. He would have to leave the shadowy garden and slip across open ground to get there, and he was trying to decide which method would be best: quick, or quiet.
He was not quick enough to escape the witch if she spotted him. He decided on quiet, and crept out of the rosebushes.
The window before him glowed with honeyed light. He could make out the interior of the room beyond the rippled glass. There was a table, and a crackling hearth, and a floor swept clean except for the three immense hauler dogs who were splayed across it. At the table sat a man. He looked about the age of Theon’s father. But unlike Theon’s father he was tall and lean, with a soldier’s corded muscles visible on his forearms as he lifted a writing quill to tuck it behind one ear. His hair was longish and dark and rumpled and he wore round, silver-rimmed spectacles. He was saying something to a little green-eyed girl who was nested in his lap, and the devotion in his gaze said she was his daughter. As Theon watched, the girl reached up and plucked the quill out from behind his ear with a triumphant giggle, then scribbled down something on a sheet of parchment before them. Theon twisted his neck to try to read it: Alaya. Her name, he guessed. Her father laughed gently and made a half-hearted grab for the quill, but Alaya squealed and curled herself into a ball around it, nearly knocking them both to the floor.