by Anna Holmes
Somehow—I’m not sure how—he’s made it worse. “This whole time?”
He nods slowly.
I can’t help it. I slap him. Right in the not quite right face.
He takes it surprisingly well. He never held up well to roughhousing when we were kids, but then, there’s a lot that seems to have changed. My cheeks burn with hot rage, and everything else, everyone else seems to have fallen away. “I looked for you. You helped me look for you. You let me look for you.”
He looks at the ground. “I know. I wanted to…Tressie, I’m sorry.”
“You’d best be.”
“I am. And I’ll tell you again and again later if you let me look at those wounds right now.”
That’s right. My legs are threatening to fall apart. Riley stirs uncertainly behind this strange version of my brother. He’d never been a fan of Simon’s. I hardly blame him for not knowing what to make of Kai. I hardly know what to make of him. “Like hells I’m going to trust you with that,” I answer.
He shuts his eyes, folding his hands over a bouncing knee. “Tressa. Please don't do this. Not because you're mad at me. You know what will happen if we wait—”
“And what makes you think you can handle it?”
“Experience.”
“You watched Granddad a couple of times. Before you left to fight in the army that murdered him.”
“I didn’t—” He recoils as though I’ve hit him again. “I didn’t fight, Tressa. I was a medic.”
“That’s not what you told our parents.”
“I know,” he snaps. “I know. I was stupid. I lied and told them I was a soldier because I knew it would piss them off more.”
All those dinners ruined by his sullen political tirades. All his slammed doors. Their final fight they thought they were having out of my earshot. The flames two years later. “They died thinking that,” I yell. “I hope you're happy.”
“I’m the exact opposite of happy.” This I’ll believe. His clenched hands shake, and he’s staring at the ground with ferocity that I’ve never seen from Simon or Kai.“I don’t want to lose my sister too. Please. Let me take a look at that and then I’ll explain what I can. Then you can shout and I’ll take it with as much happiness as I muster these days.”
I stew in my silence for a moment, two. For the first time, I become aware that the others are all watching, various shades of unease tinging their expressions. “Fine,” I say at last. “But she gets locked away first.”
Kai turns to look at her out of the corner of his eye, his jaw set. “Gladly.”
It might have been a mistake to board Fran.
We weren’t overwhelmed with options, however. I am decidedly earthbound. It takes Caelin and Riley and their respective mounts to even get me up the gangplank, but there's not quite enough room for two and a half horses, and they're not exactly known to sidestep. Alain stands in front of me in the doorway, finger crooked against his chin, measuring something mentally. “No,” I tell him preemptively.
“No what?” he asks, not even pausing in his calculations.
“I see you trying to work something out. You’re shinier than Caelin. Knock it off.”
He crooks up the corner of his mouth. “Am I that transparent?”
“Don’t start that next. The blue’s weird enough.”
He laughs, then looks over his shoulder. “My apologies to you and your brother.”
“What—?” he lifts his hands, and the floor under me bows up and carries me across the cabin of the ship like a wave, gently letting me off next to the bench at the far wall. Alain brings his hands to his waist and pushes his palms downward, letting go of a breath. His veins visibly throb under his skin, bright enough to reflect off the brass floor he just bent and straightened again.
“What did I say?” I shout, voice bouncing around and back at me in this metal canister.
Riley jogs over, his eyes wide. “Are you hurt? That’s stupid—of course you’re hurt. Are you hurt…more?”
I tilt my chin up to look at him. “I’m fine, thanks. Just hacked off at all the brilliant boys in my life who keep trying to magic themselves to death.”
“It’s going to take a little more than messing about with the floor,” Alain assures me.
Caelin and Kai emerge from the hold. He holds out his hands to help her off the ladder, but she jumps up on her own. Caelin says, ”Thanks. Crow is secured, for now, at least. I think someone ought to go tell Rin to call off the search party and retrieve the brothers Rye.” She glances at Riley, then Alain, then adds, “On second thought, I think I should.”
Riley shakes himself. “Oh— I can, if…"
She grins slightly. “Nah, nobody ever lets me run my own errands. I'm going to savor it.” She comes over to my side and places a hand to my shoulder. “You going to be okay?”
There’s a lilt to this short question and a furtive look over at Kai that seems to suggest if I’m not, she’ll punch him so hard his children's children will feel it. I appreciate it. “Yeah. I got these two.” I gesture vaguely to Alain and Riley. “Be safe.”
She gives me a little salute and makes her way down the gangplank. Kai sets a worn leather bag down next to me and settles down to work as calmly as he can. Riley's crossbow still sits cocked in his hands, and Kai shoots it furtive glances in between his preparations. “So, uh…that’s the Queen, then. And you work for her.”
“Yep,” I answer tersely.
“I never got to ask how that happened.”
“Accident. A happy one, for the most part.”
He digs around in the bag and retrieves some vials, which Riley eyes suspiciously. Again, while it’s appreciated, I’m not worried. This is all very familiar from our rough and tumble childhoods and our mother’s remedies. Kai starts combining them, which results in an acrid smelling fog that instantly brings back memories of herbs drying over my mother’s prized brick hearth, the creaking of worn wood floorboards, the tastes she'd sneak me of the buttered rolls she'd bake while the medicines brewed. The memory begins sweet and ends bitterer than the solution smells. She, her midwifery, her songs, her sly kindness, all gone. The only thing left is that blasted hearth. It was made to withstand fire, after all. Even the Legion's horrible conflagration. “Did you know what happened to them?” I ask.
“Will it help you to know?” His voice is quiet, his eyes fixed on the purple fluid swirling amidst the clear one.
“It’ll tell me how the rest of this conversation ought to go,” I reply tersely.
“I didn’t turn them in, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“When did you know?”
“When I tried to visit,” he answers, still watching the combination of the liquids. “I wrote to them. Letter after letter. None returned after the first two. I—think I knew then, but I didn’t want to believe it. So I went home and it was….” He shakes his mixture and starts looking through the bag again. “I deserted after that. I couldn’t stay on even as a healer in an army that did…that. Perhaps especially as a healer.”
“How noble,” I mutter.
“Oh, there was nothing noble about it,” he answers, eyebrows raised. “I was angry. I deserted. And when they started looking for me, I changed my face, fled to Kenn, married a widowed merchant lady and started a business. It was completely selfish. I’ve been paying for it and will continue to pay for it. I was trying to keep you from paying for it, too….” He shoots a guilty glance down at my shredded knees.
“Oh, come off it,” I snap. “People want to kill me based entirely on my own merits, thanks. If you left, what are you doing with Crow?”
Kai sighs heavily. “How much do you know about General Pell?”
Alain starts slightly. I frown. “Only that I’d like very much to kill him.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“What happened to that high-minded healer nonsense?”
“As a doctor?” he asks frankly. “All people would be healthier if that monster were not in the wor
ld.”
Well, Alain at least certainly would be. I look over at him slowly. He’s trying to keep his composure, looking around the interior of the cabin, breathing with unnatural regularity, but I see his closed fist shaking a little. I can tell he wants to ask by the way he keeps glancing over here sideways, but he seems to be deferring to me. There are a million questions rattling around my brain and I wish there were a way to get them to stop bouncing for a moment so I can tell the difference in importance between “why do you have two voices” and “were you working with Pell to dismantle Alain and put him back together like an automaton”. At last, I string words together in the proper order. “When did you work with Pell?”
Kai hangs his head forward as he selects a clear glass tube from his bag. He inserts it into his vial and draws some of the mixture from it and moves for my right leg. “This will sting.”
“The medicine or the answer?”
“Probably both.” He casts a guilty glance at Alain, then starts applying the disinfectant. He’s right. It does sting. So much so I can barely breathe. But I want to hear the answer to this, so I hang on and I wait. “Before I abandoned my post, there was this strange order. We were told to consider a hypothetical situation in which a young patient ingested cryst and to write a script to stabilize him. I thought it absurd.” He looks at Alain regretfully. “It was…substantially less hypothetical than I thought at the time. No context was given, until….” he shuts his eyes, braces himself. “It was…some weeks before the treaty was signed. I was minding the stall while my wife was negotiating with another lord, and this man came up to me. He asked me how many stepchildren I had. I thought nothing of the answer—most in Kenn were aware Fran, the real Fran, had remarried—so I told him five. The next day…I had four.” He pauses to clear his throat, steady himself. “I—received a letter at Bet’s funeral. It said that if I wanted to continue to have four, I needed to report to my old camp in Elyssia. So I did, and there he was.”
Alain leans on his elbow, his face turned to the wall. His fingers clench into his kneecap. I just feel numb. The idea of my brother married, with a family, grieving a child is so abrupt and foreign to me that I can’t wrap my mind around it. From the crease to his eyes, I can tell he wishes he didn’t have to.
I ache to tell him to stop telling the story, but it seems that now that he's started, it just comes spilling out. “It seems as though I accidentally stumbled on something during what I thought was a thought experiment—what really should have stayed a thought experiment. I was given new variables, new…complications.” He shakes his head, moving on to my other leg. New burning obscures some of his next words and I stop myself from retching so that I can focus again. “…sparse guard. Mostly just him and me and his personal entourage. Once I realized what I was working on, I attempted to escape again. That…earned me this.” He points to the light blue scar arcing above his eye. “They gave me the antidote without telling me what it was. An additional method of control. I had to stay if I didn’t want to die. So I resolved to die. They didn’t let me do that, either. I tried working out the antidote on my own. When that was discovered, they burned my notes and transferred me to a prison camp.” He turns his face back to Alain, his expression pained in a different way. “That…is where I worked on you.”
Chapter Fourteen
Alain
It’s everything I can do not to jump up from this chair and wring the life out of this two-faced jackal. All his talk of ethics and the oath of a medic, and this is how he turns up. “This is the first I'm hearing of it,” I snap.
He holds up a hand, his eyes widening. “You’re….”
“Blue, yes. Your doing, it seems.”
“I’m more concerned about the fact that you’re reacting with the alchemist’s fire and the precipitate in this mixture,” he says, holding up the flask in the flickering lamplight. “You are definitively not meant to do that.”
“Funny thing about wreaking experimental magical modifications on human beings,” I spit. “Never quite seems to go the way you think it will. What is it I’m meant to do, exactly?”
Arrow, or Nuthatch or whatever we’re supposed to call him, sighs. “You won’t like it.”
“Whether I like it or not, you people have taken enough out of me. You owe me this, Doctor.”
“I…do,” he admits. At length, he leans down to retrieve a roll of bandages and begins winding it around Tressa’s knee. “I’ll fill in what I can. I’m still not sure of all of it myself. Pell isn’t one for sharing any more than what you need to know to be useful to him. But I suspect that he plans to duplicate any success at bolstering your abilities on a large scale.”
“How large?”
“Did you ever review the prisoners of the other camps?”
“Not much,” I answer. It had been too hard to remember mine, let alone imagine what went on in the others.
“I think if you’d gotten to, you’d have noticed a higher than normal rate of incarceration of alchemists.”
As much as I’d like to dismiss anything he says out of hand, all I can do is remember the rows and rows of alchemists chained to their benches in the eastern camp, working on their own individual jars of glowing blue substances. I’d assumed it was more of the fire that consumed the upper town in the royal city and Tressa’s parents’ farm. “Gods,” I blurt.
“I could be wrong, but—and I mean no offense to you on this—but the sheer number of people involved…I somehow doubt the Legion would expend that sort of manpower on a handful of people.”
“A handful,” I repeat dumbly.
“Well…to be precise, two.”
“I’m not the only one?”
“You were always the intended subject.” He sets his jaw, shakes his head as he finishes wrapping Tressa’s legs. “I—are you sure you want to hear this from me?”
“Arrow—Nuthatch—whatever your name is,” I reply, looking at him over my folded hands. “If not you, I’m not sure from whom I’d hear it, so spit it out.”
“Your mother.”
It feels like the ship is closing in around me, the edges of my vision almost fogging over, crystallizing. Of course. My mother, the blue mage, the monster. Never satiated. Of course she would want more than she was already gifted with. And as demanding as she was of herself, with us…she was never satisfied with good. We had to be better. The best.
And Elle. Elle, magic devoid, sickly, bright but stunted…I pull myself out of the strange illusory tunnel and look at him urgently. “What would all this do to someone who isn’t a caster?”
“I’m not sure,” he answers slowly. “But there’s a reason you’re asking, so I assume….”
I stand up. “Can you take us to the Northern Shore? No, forget that, I’m not asking after all that. Take us there.”
He looks at Tressa uncertainly. “Do you want to wait for your queen, or….”
“Yes, yes of course,” I snap.
The energy around me seethes, warms my skin, pulls at my hair. I feel it cycling through my gills, into my lungs, expanding twofold. Tressa, Bannon, and this odd double-person all stare at me, and at length, the doctor gets to his feet. I can feel him observing, analyzing. Frankly, it hacks me off, and I turn to him to say so, but I find that my suspicions are wrong. He is stricken and searching.
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I knew they’d be pumping you full of something, whether I wrote it or not. Whether it was safe or not. I tried my best to make it safe.”
“A year,” I tell him. “A year I’ve known you and you didn’t say anything.”
“I never connected you to my patient,” he answers quietly. “They never showed me your face. You were unconscious. An attempt, I suppose, to keep my conscience stifled. It wasn’t.”
“What are you doing with Crow?” Tressa wants to know.
“She caught up to me. Threatened to sell me out to Pell if I didn’t work with her on this. I assumed she already had and sent word to Fran. She and the c
hildren moved to an undisclosed location. I was hoping to keep you out of it, but she went and spoiled that.”
I understand the desperation. By tradition, Rosalia is no less family oriented than the rest of the world. By practice, the Legion considers them as they consider us all—a tool to be used and discarded as necessary.
These thoughts hover near me even after Caelin returns and verifies what Nuthatch has said, even after Fran—the metal one—takes to the skies. Tressa slips into uneasy sleep at the hands of the sedative her brother provides. I'm not at all surprised he has them. I would need them to sleep, were I him. Bannon keeps glancing over at her as though he might misplace her if he didn't every so often. Caelin and Gavroth are interrogating Jori, for all the good that’ll do, and August is enthralled by the landscape passing under us. I clear my throat to ensure that my voice will be swallowed by Fran’s mechanisms and lean over to Bannon. “Does she know?”
He looks up, startled. “Know? Know what?”
I pull a face at him. “The capital of Lithemiel. Come on, Bannon. You’re smarter than this.”
“I don’t know what you’re insinuating,” he tells me shortly.
“Obviously you do, because you never get this defensive with me if you’re not accusing me of treason.”
“Have you done any treason lately?” Bannon asks, lifting a purplish eyebrow.
“No.”
“Don’t you still have more important things to be worried about?"
I lean my head back against the metal hull and let go of a laugh. "And now you’re deflecting. All right, I get it. But I think—and this is just my experience—pining is substantially less effective than talking when one is smitten.”
His face disappears entirely. “That— you….”
I shrug. “Take it from one who has pined. Or don’t.”
“Let’s get one thing straight. I do not pine.”
“Oh, right, because that’s not your way. No emotions for Lieutenant Bannon but patriotism, sarcasm, and righteous fury, right?”