Mercurial Page 14

  There were no further attentions to be had. He was far too weak to build a fire and they’d used all their firewood in the cave anyway. The sled with the scavenged clothing was too far away for him to drag both himself and her. He was bleeding out, and even if he survived that, he was still dying of rust phage. He could not take care of both himself and Elodie. If he revived her, she would surely only die again without the attention she needed, and he would swiftly follow.

  But it was the right thing to do, and Tal was as helpless as he had ever been against that—so in one final act of faith, he lowered his mouth to the Destroyer’s.

  He pressed his lips to hers and exhaled. His breath feathered across her lips, melting the frost. He felt her chest rise against his with the inflow of air.

  He lifted his head and gasped an inhale. Pain curled its grip tighter on him, unbalancing him, dragging him toward unconsciousness. He resisted. He had chosen to do this and he would see it done. “Help me,” he rasped. The prayer was coated with bitterness and the expectation of answering silence, but a prayer it was nonetheless. The Unforged God didn’t answer, but Tal found himself able to bend down and breathe into Elodie’s mouth again, and again, found the strength to lay her flat on the ice and push his palms hard against her breastbone the way his stepmother had shown him. He pressed down once, twice. Again.

  The wrongness within him eased. A slow, gentle warmth replaced it: his god’s support. He couldn’t find it in himself to push it away.

  Beneath his hands, Elodie’s chest suddenly contracted. She jerked onto her side and violently vomited up the water that had drowned her. Spasms shook her and she made a soft, reedy sound that was nothing like the Destroyer. He found himself reaching for her. Pulling her hair back—her loose, wild curls crunched in his hands, already frozen—so he could see her expression. Her eyes were open but glazed, unfocused. She looked as if she were half in a dream. She turned her face to his and lifted a trembling hand to touch his bare shoulder, the white line on his collarbone.

  “So…so many scars,” she murmured, with the hoarse, drowsy tone of someone who wasn’t awake at all. “Who gave them to you?”

  “You did,” he answered, his voice wretched.

  Her hand fell away. Her eyes drifted shut again. She was breathing, but now she was shivering hard enough to crack her head on the ice.

  He reached for the shirt and coat he’d thrown aside. There was no oath driving him to defend her, no outside force left to puppeteer his actions, but nevertheless he moved quickly to strip off her wet and freezing clothing. He had seen her naked before, but never vulnerable, and the difference now seemed immeasurable. It was the Destroyer lying with her head in his lap, her body bare and bleeding against the ice, but it was also a girl. Someone helpless, and God help him, someone he wanted to protect.

  He cradled her head as he pulled his own shirt over her, and then his coat over that. Both were large on her petite frame. She pulled up her knees, curling herself into the new warmth. He drew her onto his lap and she curled into him too, ducking her head tightly against his breastbone, her panting breaths warm on his chest, her shivering wracking his own body. Her weight drove sharp points of pain into his injured legs but he didn’t have the strength to shift her, and he doubted there was any way he could hold her that wouldn’t hurt him.

  There was nothing else he could do. He was still losing blood, and she was still half-frozen and unable to maintain consciousness. Death was coming for them both. He held the Destroyer and waited for it.

  Minutes ran and blurred like a painting in the rain. The sun crept higher in the sky. Its light felt liquid, but not in a pleasant way. It poured too brightly over the ice, thick and cold and biting like liquor gone bad. A thin glaze of ice began to form back over the hole in the lake. Tal wasn’t sure how long had passed before he realized, with a dangerous sort of slowness, that he no longer felt the cold.

  Elodie’s frozen hair was plastered against his chest. Her whole self was tucked into him as if he were the only safe place in the world. Her breathing had slowed and her own shivering had stopped; a bad sign. Just an hour ago he would have considered it a good one. He no longer knew what he wanted. He no longer understood how he felt. His god had betrayed him, which had been devastating, but now he had betrayed himself and he was still doing it—sitting here cradling a murderess as if she were a thing that could be broken, a thing that could be loved.

  Except she wasn’t a thing. She was a person. He hadn’t thought that of her for years and had expected never to think it again, and yet here she was: Elodie, murderess and Destroyer, person. Deadly and then dead, and now, somehow, neither.

  His thoughts spun slowly into one another, putting down roots, spreading web-like branches that stretched one into another until he couldn’t make sense of any of them. He bowed slowly forward, head dipping toward the ice, vision blurring.

  His last thought was of Nyx. She dropped to her knees before him, grasped his face in her hands, leaned her forehead against his. Her sobs shook him. He laid his head on her shoulder and let himself close his eyes. Hers was a good face to carry with him into the darkness.

  Nyx slapped him. “Stop dying immediately, Tal, or I swear I will kill you myself.”

  His head snapped back with the force of the blow and his eyes opened. He blinked. His vision went from dream-blurry to painfully sharp. Nyx still knelt before him but now he registered the details of her: short braids with burnt ends, expression set in furious lines wet with her tears, a heavy fur coat draped over her shoulders. Her clothing still had spots of melted metal on it from her hair beads.

  “Nyx?” Tal dared to ask. His voice came out as a croak. The sound of it made Nyx’s expression twist. She swept the coat off her shoulders and wrapped it around his. Something furry and gray and vaguely familiar wiggled underneath it with him, panting against his side. Pinpricks of warmth began to spread over him.

  He was not dead. He was not hallucinating. His sister was here. Alive. And recovered, somehow, from her torture.

  Her torture at the hands of the Destroyer.

  Involuntarily, Tal’s gaze fell to the girl in his arms, his breath hitching as he registered the new danger of this situation. Nyx followed his gaze. He saw the moment she recognized who he was holding. Her expression turned to something flat and hard and utterly emotionless. He realized, with a jolt, that it was the same expression he himself had worn so often over the last two years. The grief of seeing it now, here, on the face of his sister, was enough to pull him fully from his shock just in time to clap a hand over the Destroyer’s neck, where Nyx’s dagger was already slicing toward skin.

  The blade that had been meant to open Elodie’s throat slid over his knuckles instead. The pain was dull compared to everything else. He scrambled for the right words, the words to make Nyx stop, to make her understand something that even he couldn’t yet understand.

  His sister made a choked sound when she saw her dagger wet with silver, but she barely paused before she grabbed a handful of Elodie’s hair and wrenched her head backwards to expose more of her neck. Her movements were quick, vicious, fluid, the way she had taught Tal. He knew her thoughts. She believed him to be acting under his oath to protect the Destroyer. She thought if she moved quickly enough, she could kill her before he could stop her, and then he would be free.

  He couldn’t tell her he was already free. He couldn’t tell her—if she didn’t already know—that part of her own metal oath no longer bound her, either. If he explained that the Destroyer had already died, he would have to explain why she was alive now, and that was something he was not at all prepared to do.

  So he lied.

  “Stop,” he said, blocking Nyx’s blow, latching his hand over her wrist. The fur slid half off his shoulder and the furry gray thing beneath it—was that Maluk?—whined. “Nyx, stop. My…my oath, it’s the only thing keeping me alive. So that I can protect her. If you kill her it’ll kill me too.”

  Nyx didn’t move the
dagger, which was hovering not far from the Destroyer’s now-exposed neck. Elodie’s shoulders shuddered lightly. A frown creased her mouth as she tried to curl back into Tal, and Nyx snarled to see it. “I’ll save you,” she promised. “Helenia is coming. She’s bringing help. And she’s almost certainly stolen more healing tincture, too. You will live.”

  “Not unless you let the Destroyer live.” He had to say the words through gritted teeth, but still, he said them.

  Nyx’s blank mask shifted to frustrated rage, and Tal shook with relief. He did not want his sister to need that mask the way he’d needed it. Nyx said, “If I let her live, she’ll kill me. She was about to kill me on the train.”

  The memory of that moment rose in Tal’s mind. He flinched from it. “She doesn’t have her powers,” he replied, straining to get the words out, fighting the tug of his overwhelming pain and of unconsciousness. “Her blood is red. She has no fire. I had to save her from the ice, she couldn’t even use her magic to save herself.” It took too much effort to say so much and his hand dropped from Nyx’s, numb and useless. The dagger hovered where it was for a moment longer, trembling with Nyx’s need to drive it home.

  “Fine,” she snapped at last, sheathing the dagger with an angry motion. “I’ll kill her after help arrives.”

  She could do it, and easily. Even if Tal had still been under the sway of his oath, he couldn’t have stopped her, not with his swords so far away, not weakened nearly to the point of death by the cold and his injuries. He dragged in a shaky breath and tried to force his mind to think. “A trial,” he said. “She should face a trial. The Saints should pass her judgment.”

  Once a jury ruled her worthy of execution, he would surely be able to accept her death. It would be out of his hands, no matter what he felt or how little he understood those feelings.

  Nyx hissed an exhale, still hesitating. Her eyes tightened in consideration. “They could have her staked,” she said slowly. “They could have her flayed. They could open one vein for each of her victims. They could burn her.”

  Tal looked down at Elodie. He did not want Nyx to see his face when he thought of those verdicts, any of which a Saints jury could surely pass down. He didn’t want her to see the way the thoughts twisted into him with both discomfort and a terrible, hungry keenness. He was ashamed anew at how he felt: hopeful that they would hurt the Destroyer, and ashamed of that hope, and hopeful that the Destroyer might live, and ashamed of that hope as well. But more than anything else, he abhorred the dark satisfaction in Nyx’s voice when she spoke of torture and death. She had changed while he’d been gone.

  She had changed because he’d been gone.

  “Nyx,” he said brokenly, because he did not know what else he could say.

  Nyx sheathed her dagger. “A jury, then,” she said, and together, they waited for the Saints.

  THE SOUND OF SCREAMS, AS FAMILIAR AS A CHORUS to an orchestral conductor, dragged Elodie slowly from the emptiness of her dreams. At first, she thought she was moving from the blackness of deep sleep into her old familiar nightmare; it happened often enough that she was sometimes able to jar herself to waking at this point and avoid the nightmare entirely. She pulled herself, hand over hand, toward consciousness. She said the name of the person who was always there to wake her: “Tal.”

  The word was barely a murmur but it did the trick to drive her closer to wakefulness. The arms that were wrapped around her shifted slightly, which was when she realized she was being held. The movement also shifted her legs and allowed frigid air to slither further beneath her shirt, which was when she realized she was mostly naked.

  She stopped moving. With crystalline clarity, she recalled exactly what had happened.

  The mooncat. Tal’s scream wrenching at something within her, something she hadn’t known she possessed.

  The fall through the ice.

  The freezing water pushing itself into her lungs.

  The memories.

  She squeezed her eyes shut more tightly, but her breathing sped up, betraying her wakefulness. She felt the person holding her go suddenly very still.

  One of her hands was tucked against the warm skin of a collarbone. Carefully, slowly, she splayed her fingers over it. Her thumb grazed the narrow, puckered line of a scar. With that, she ascertained who it was that held her.

  So many scars, she faintly recalled murmuring. Who gave them to you?

  You did.

  This scar was from the fire at the palace. She’d lost control. Burned down nearly an entire wing. He’d saved her. Not before she’d blasted him with a beam of bright white flame, though, one that had carved deeply enough to notch bone.

  Her hand was shaking now. From the cold, she tried to tell herself.

  Her fingers crept sideways. The notch below his neck. This one was ragged, messy. An assassin’s crossbow bolt meant for her. He’d been left behind as the guards hustled her to safety, and had treated the injury himself before returning to the palace. Now she knew why; he couldn’t risk anyone seeing his blood.

  Lower. Fourth rib from the bottom. He’d woken her from a nightmare. Startled and still under the influence of its blind terror, she’d lashed out at him with a hand full of sparks.

  Now, Tal’s chest trembled beneath her palm. “Please,” he said, strained in a ragged, broken way she’d never heard before. “Stop.”

  Returning to herself and the present moment, she was thoroughly horrified. He was under an oath. That was why he’d been helping her, why he’d promised to protect her yesterday, why he’d rescued her from the frozen lake today. He was bound to her, and here she was, running her fingers over his chest like a lover. It was a violation. She had no right.

  She had never, she realized with the same quick and lurid clarity as a moment ago, had any right to Tal at all.

  She snatched her hand back, her body going as rigid as his. “Tal, put me down,” she said. Her voice was hoarse and her throat ached like fire. Near-drowning did that to a person, apparently.

  He disobeyed, as he always did whenever he could. His hands tightened around her. Despite herself, she felt immediately safer. Or at least, she did until he said in a low tone, “If I put you down, they’ll kill you.”

  She could keep her eyes closed no longer. She opened them, and saw who had been screaming.

  The Saints had found her.

  She was curled on Tal’s lap on the ice of the frozen-over lake. He had no shirt or coat because she was wearing both. Her own clothing lay in a sodden heap a few steps away. A gray dog was curled up against her and Tal, bushy tail covering its nose, calm bluish eyes tilted up to regard her. Draped over all three of them was a fur the size of a cloak. Beyond the cloak, the Saints screamed for the Destroyer’s head.

  There were perhaps a dozen of them, and they mostly seemed to be directing their screaming toward each other or toward the figure of a girl who stood between them and Tal, arms crossed, chin lifted. Many of the people Elodie could make out wore the Saints’ traditional mask, a mostly-flat plate of metal with only the barest contours of a nose and cheeks, and empty holes for eyes. Several of the Saints were still hurriedly tying the masks on; they didn’t want the Destroyer to be able to identify them, she realized.

  Here, her thoughts stuttered. The Destroyer, she’d thought, as if she were a different person. But it was her head they were shouting for, it was she who they feared might identify them and then find and punish their families in vengeance.

  She retreated into herself. She couldn’t face this. Not yet. She would sink back into the darkness of sleep and perhaps, when she woke, she would better understand what it was she was supposed to do now. And who it was she was supposed to be.

  She gave herself over to unconsciousness. It stretched up and swallowed her—but just before it did, one last recollection slid into her mind.

  Blood. Silver blood on the snow, on the mooncat’s jaws, on her hands as she dragged Tal to safety. He was injured. Worse than he ever had been before in her servic
e. And here they were—with him shirtless and bleeding out on the ice to save her.

  She tried to fight her way back to consciousness. Tried to push off the heavy mantle of sleep she’d already started to pull around herself, so she could help him, so she could make him put her down and save himself. But it was too late. Sleep, and her old nightmare, had already claimed her.

  The dream started as it always did: with her sister.

  They were young. They were in the woods outside the palace. Scorch trees, unfathomably tall, dripped their namesake red moss toward the forest floor. Elodie wanted to stop and weave a fairy dress from it, but Sarai was gripping her hand hard enough to grind her knuckles together, hauling her through the maze of trees at a near-run. It was dark. Elodie tripped.

  Sarai turned back and hauled her to her feet, her fingers leaving imprints on Elodie’s skin. Sarai was twelve, older and stronger than Elodie’s six years, and her grip hurt. Elodie didn’t complain, because she knew something was wrong. She could smell it in the dense, humid silence of the air, the way it crowded close around Sarai, as if to protect her.

  Something heavy, something inescapable, was crashing through the brush behind them. The moss quivered with it.

  Sarai stopped. “We can’t run,” she said, and then she bent down to look Elodie in the eye. “You shouldn’t have to run. You shall never have to run again, I swear it.”

  Terror rose up through the nightmare then, coloring everything with its touch, turning the dreamscape surreal and disjointed. The sky was a web of crimson moss on black night, the stars pinpricks too far away to shed any light at all. Elodie was lying on her chest. Something had knocked her to the ground. Something had stabbed her in the back. Her blood was thick in her mouth. She was drowning in it. Wind raged all around her, a keening scream that made her want to cover her ears. A man stood above her. She couldn’t make out his face—but he was more than the blank, looming shadow of her usual nightmares. In fact, she thought distantly, all of this dream was far clearer than it normally was. Then her lucidity faded, and she was wholly her dying child-self again.