Merek doesn’t even look at them as he passes, his eyes fixed on me, Kirin behind him. “What is it?”
“Aurek is training the children to fight. That’s what those men were doing at the caves—bringing weapons. Teaching the boys how to use them.”
Merek looks thoughtful. “Are you sure?”
“We overheard men talking about their training,” Kirin says.
“No, I believe that. I just mean … why children? He has men, and he has his golems. He doesn’t need the children to fight. At the moment he’d already outnumber us on a battlefield. Numbers aren’t his problem.”
“They would be if everyone rose up against him,” Kirin says.
“But we don’t have everyone. We need the townspeople for that, and they can’t and won’t fight so long as their children—so long as their children …” Merek stops, and in that silence I understand what Aurek has done.
“That’s why,” I say. “That’s what he wants the children for. A shield—a human shield. If he has child soldiers on his walls, the townspeople won’t attack them. They won’t stand with us when we fight. We won’t be able to fight.”
“Surely the children wouldn’t fight their kin, though?” Kirin says, shaking his head.
“We don’t know what these children are being told,” I murmur. “Whether they’re being told to fight or their families will die, whether they’re being told to fight because their families are fighting, too. Whether they’ve been told their families don’t love them anymore, and that only Aurek does.”
At that, Merek moves to my side, but I can’t look at him. I know he, like me, is thinking of his mother and her manipulations. But I don’t have time to think of the past now.
“We have to get them out,” I continue. “We always planned to get the children out before we attacked. That hasn’t changed. It’s just become more urgent, in light of this new development.”
One by one, they all nod. I look up at Merek.
“Errin’s gone to make the Opus Mortem,” I say to him. “She’d appreciate your help.”
He nods, his expression troubled as he leaves us.
“Every three days these men come?” I ask Kirin, and he nods. “And you left the woods how long ago?”
“It took us two days to get back.”
So they would be due at the camp again tomorrow. I make some rapid calculations and come to a decision. “Come on.”
“What are we doing?” Kirin asks.
“We’re going to the strategy room,” I say. “You need to know what’s going to happen next because I’m putting you in charge of overseeing it. Then I need to put my armor on.”
Half an hour later, I stand, fully clad in my leathers, in front of fifty anxious faces, Kirin beside me, also in his armor, and bearing a sword and shield.
“Aurek is training the children to fight,” I say without preamble, and immediately the room explodes into panic. Kirin smashes his sword against his shield until they fall mostly silent, and I can continue. “As soon as I’m finished here, small teams of fighters will leave to go to the camps, tell the watchers our information, and reinforce their numbers. At midnight tomorrow, the camps will be liberated. All of the captors are to be slain; no mercy is to be shown. The children at the caves will be brought here; in Monkham, moved south into the small woods there. Those at Chargate will be taken deeper into the woods, to where our old camp was, and at Haga, the woods near the south mountains. There they will remain until word is sent that we are victorious.”
I take a breath and carry on. “Once the camps are all clear, the uprisings will begin drawing Aurek’s army away from his castle. And once the fighting has begun, we will go down into Lortune, where we will battle our way to the castle and engage with the Sleeping Prince.”
“But you said we had two moons.” Ymilla speaks up from where she’s nestled in beside Ulrin once more. “It’s barely been one.”
“I know. But we can’t allow the children to remain in the camps if this is what’s happening. Not least because if the townspeople hear their children are being used like this, there is a very real possibility they’ll turn on their captors before we’re ready—before we’re coordinated across Lormere. And if that happens, we will lose our only window to attack him. It has to be simultaneous—every town at the same time—and we have to be in control of it. So it will be tomorrow.”
Silence rings around the room, a devastating contrast to the cheers and celebrations of the last time we came together. After moons of waiting, of stewing, the moment is upon us, and I can taste the fear in the room, bitter and gritty, like the pith of an orange. It tastes how feasts with Helewys used to.
“If you don’t want to fight, I understand,” I say, speaking without planning to, as Kirin turns to me sharply. “I can’t ask you to die for me. So if you want to leave, and hide, I won’t stop you.” I look around, noticing how many of them won’t meet my eye, and my heart sinks, because this is all the force I have. But I’m not Helewys, and I’m not Aurek. I want them to choose.
“Kirin will give you the rest of your instructions.” I look at him and he nods. “And, Hobb, you have the best idea of who is skilled where. Work together to make sure our teams are as strong as they can be, and send the scouts and additional warriors out tonight. Everyone else should go back to bed for now. Get some sleep if you can.”
I don’t say anything else, leaving them there, the stillness of the room following me. I had expected them all to start shouting once I left, but no one speaks.
I head to the armory first and strip off the armor, only put on for effect, and then make my way to the laboratory.
A greenish, bitter herbal odor snakes through the air in the corridor as I approach, making me wrinkle my nose. I knock on the door, then push it open.
In here the smell is nauseating, but Merek and Errin don’t seem to notice it. They’re both working separately at different ends of the bench, both with duplicate tools before them: a fire pit, vials, bottles, flasks, jars of powders, bottles of clear and blue-tinged liquids. Both have rigged up some arcane system with pipes and bottles and other things I don’t know the name of.
Merek looks up as I enter, and his expression stops my heart. He’s not smiling, but the look on his face is fierce with joy. He gives me a small smile but then returns to his work, absorbed back into it immediately, and I realize it’s the first time something has ever pulled his eyes from mine like this.
I walk over to Errin and see that she’s preparing the asulfer and the quicksilver. I missed this part in the Conclave.
“Almost ready,” she says. “I just need to wait for the mandrake reduction to finish.”
My mouth turns down at the corners. “What’s Merek doing?”
“Making the Opus Magnum.”
“Why?”
“For the casualties. It was Merek’s idea. We’re prepping it in secret, and then if Silas wants to use it afterward to help people, that’s up to him. I don’t agree, but as Merek said, it should be his decision.”
I nod. It’s a clever idea; I should have thought of it. “Can I help you at all?”
“If you want.” She moves along the bench to peer into the pot atop her small fire, wrinkling her nose and pulling a grotesque expression. “I think we’re there. How much do you remember from last time?”
I look down the bench at Merek, who’s sprinkling yellow flower petals into a ceramic bowl with deep concentration before adding six drops of what I recognize as their spagyric tonic.
“I remember that part,” I say.
“This time you can see it all, as we’re working backward. We’re going to start with the quicksilver and the asulfer. Silas set them alight and collected the smoke, but we need to boil them and collect the steam.”
“All right,” I say, already confused.
Errin, though, seems to know exactly what she’s doing, and she takes two stone dishes already full of glowing-hot stones and uses tongs to push them into two small cauldr
ons full of water. The red quicksilver goes into one, and the yellow asulfer the second. She fits them with lids that have tubes coming out of the top, traveling down into flasks.”
“I designed them myself,” she says proudly when I stare at them. “The steam will collect, and become liquid, and drip into the flasks.”
“They’re wonderful,” I say, and she laughs.
“Thank you,” she says. “In the meantime, the mandrake reduction is ready, if you could crush the calcified yew bark into a powder?” She nods toward a pestle and mortar and I take it, lifting the heavy pestle and beginning to grind.
We work like that, the three of us, for the next hour. Merek finishes his Opus Magnum first, not needing to wait for anything to distill, so he comes to help, taking over from me when the pestle makes my arms ache. Errin watches closely as a thin layer of red-and-yellow water collects on the bottom of her flasks.
“All right,” she says. “I’m ready.”
A strange hum seems to fill the room, barely audible but somehow loud despite it, settling over us like a mantle. Even Stuan, until now motionless by the door, seems to feel it and stands up straighter.
“Start praying to your Gods,” Errin says. Then she moves.
She pulls a white bowl to her and simultaneously adds the red-and-yellow solution. The white bowl is placed over the fire pit, and then she reaches for the other ingredients. The mandrake, the wheat, the flowers, the tonic, the angel water. All added with precise, exact movements. When I glance at Merek, I see him watching hungrily, his expression sharp, and I feel a rush of pleasure that he’s able to see this, to do this thing he always wanted to. I reach out and take his hand, and he squeezes my fingers without ever looking away from the alchemy.
Finally, Errin unwraps a piece of paper, revealing the crystals inside it. Sal Salis. Salt of salt.
She looks up at us, and I hold my breath as she sprinkles it into the mixture.
I don’t quite know what I expect to happen, but nothing does.
Merek lets out a long, shaky laugh that implies he was waiting for something to happen, too.
“The Opus Magnum doesn’t change until the blood is added,” Errin says.
“Of course,” I say, rolling up my sleeve. “Do you need me to sit down?”
Errin hesitates. “There’s something I have to tell you. Something no one outside of the alchemists knows.”
Merek, still gripping my hand, steps closer to me.
“What?” he asks.
Errin looks between us.
“Tell us,” I say.
“To begin, you have to know that the power of alchemy lies almost entirely in the blood of the alchemist,” Errin says, and I nod, because I already know this; it’s what my mother said. Errin fixes her attention on Merek. “The blood is the active ingredient. The Elixir only becomes the Elixir when Silas’s blood is added. Until then, it’s just the Opus Magnum, a base potion. And so is the Opus Mortem. It’s poisonous, yes. It would kill any mortal man. But the thing that makes it dangerous to Aurek now is Twylla’s blood. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” Merek says.
“Good. What is the acknowledged purpose of alchemy, in the books?”
“To transmute base metals to other substances,” he says. “It’s turning lead and iron into gold, using the Opus Magnum.”
“And if the active ingredient in the Opus Magnum is blood …”
“There’s iron in human blood.”
Errin nods. “Yes. And every time an alchemist performs their alchemy, every time they mix their blood with the Opus Magnum, it changes it. And it changes a part of them.” She pauses. “They’re all cursed. The aurumsmith’s curse is called Citrinitas, and it turns part of them to gold. Real gold. They have no idea which part until they do the alchemy. Every time, it could be a fingertip, a toenail … something internal …”
Then I understand. And I keep understanding, implications battering me like waves. “Oh Gods.” My stomach rolls violently. “Wait—Silas?”
“The philtersmith’s curse is called Nigredo. It seems to cause death of the flesh. As he heals, it hurts him. It’s in his hands, so far. It’ll likely be his feet if he carries on. He can still use them, but not well. It’ll get worse, the more he does.”
“And you think if Twylla adds her blood to the Opus Mortem, she might develop this curse?” Merek speaks my thoughts aloud, and I look at Errin.
“Not those curses. She’s not a philtersmith or an aurumsmith.”
“Then what am I?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think there’s a word for it yet.”
“When were you going to tell us?” Merek’s voice is clipped and precise, a contrast to how I feel.
“There didn’t seem any point until we had the ingredients.”
Merek is gripping my hand so tightly now that I’m in pain, and I pull away. He looks momentarily hurt, then glares at Errin again, as though that, too, is her fault.
“Merek,” I say gently, and he turns back to me. “I have to do it anyway. You understand that, don’t you?”
“But we don’t know what might happen. You might …” He swallows. “Tell her,” he demands of Errin. “Tell her it can wait until she’s had time to consider this and make a proper choice about it.”
Errin looks at me helplessly. “If you really want to …”
“Of course I don’t.” I do, a little. I also understand that I can’t, not really. But it means the world to me that they would give me a choice. That Merek wants me to have time to make a choice. I look up at him. “I’m choosing this.” I say the words aloud. “Knowing what it might mean. And it’s not Errin’s fault. Stop shouting at her.”
“I know.” He looks so wretched that I reach up and take his face in my hands.
“I’ll be all right.”
He leans down so his forehead rests against mine, bringing his own hands up and resting them atop my own. “Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“And if you’re not?”
“Then, hopefully, you’ll be too distraught to be angry that I lied.”
He sighs, amused despite himself. “I’m staying with you.”
I close my eyes for the briefest moment, then pull away from him, turning to Errin. “All right.”
She holds out a small knife to me. While Merek and I talked, she continued working, pouring the potion into seven vials. “One drop of blood in each,” she says. “You need to prick your finger, wait until a drop of blood wells up. Then I’ll press the vial to it and we’ll let them mingle.”
I nod. Seven vials—seven attempts at murdering him.
“Is that many really necessary?” Merek asks, and I shush him.
“Ready?” Errin asks.
Suddenly I’m back in the Telling Room, waiting for Rulf to take my blood. How odd that it’s come to this. How strange that here I am, giving up my blood to make a poison. How similar, and different, all at once.
Dreamily, I take the knife and make the first cut.
I suck my breath through my teeth; I’d forgotten how much it hurt. We all watch, waiting for the blood to well up from the tiny slit. It blooms deep red, and then, the instant before it can run, Errin presses the first vial onto it and tips it up, so the blood mixes with the Opus Mortem against the cut. The poison turns a brilliant white, and Merek, who has been staring at me so hard I’m surprised I’m not bruised, gasps, and covers his face with his hands.
“What is it?” I ask, ice filling my veins. “What’s happened to me?”
Errin looks up at me. “Your hair.”
“Is it still there?” I reach for my hair and pull it around. “Oh.”
A thick section has turned white, like Silas’s, like Aurek’s. It’s shocking against the red. But it could have been so much worse.
“Is that it?”
Errin nods, and Merek lowers his hands, breathing out slowly. “That’s it,” he says. “Forgive me. I was so … Thank the Gods.” He turns away and
runs his hands over his head.
“Are you in any pain?” Errin asks.
“No. Except for the cut.” I look up at Merek’s back and smile.
“All right.” Errin takes a deep breath. “Next one.”
I make another cut, and another, and another. Merek returns to my side and places his hand on my shoulder as we work. I make seven cuts, cutting almost every finger on both of my hands. Every time I mix my blood with the poison, Merek’s fingers tighten on my shoulder as assumedly another chunk of my hair turns white. I wish there was a mirror so I could see it happening. I don’t move, though, watching Errin as she concentrates on mixing the Opus Mortem with my blood, until we’re finished and all of the vials have been blooded.
“I survived,” I say when Errin has corked the last bottle. She looks at me, a smile already at her lips. I watch as it slides from her face like water on a pane of glass. I watch, in slow motion, as the vial she was holding slips from her hands. I even move to catch it.
“Your eyes,” she gasps, not even looking at the poison as the vial smashes against the floor and it leaks everywhere.
Merek is in front of me within a heartbeat, and then he recoils, too.
“What’s wrong with my eyes?” My voice is too loud, too shrill.
Stuan steps forward, and then flinches as he sees me.
“What’s wrong with my eyes?” I repeat. I can still see just as well as ever.
Stuan keeps coming, unsheathing his sword.
Merek moves in front of me as if to defend me, but Stuan holds up a hand, offering me the hilt with the other. “Look.” He holds out the shining metal.
I push Merek aside and reach for the blade, taking it gently and holding it up to my face.
It’s not only my hair that’s changed color. My eyes, once green, are now completely white.
All three of them are staring at me, their expressions a mix of repulsed, fascinated, and shocked.
“Stop looking at me,” I demand, and they do, all of them turning away. I raise the sword again and examine my eyes. The irises have vanished, and I have to admit the effect is disturbing. With entirely white eyes set in my pale, freckled face, and the colorless cloud of my hair framing it, I look monstrous. I look dead.
The Scarecrow Queen Page 26