Mercurial Read online

  Rage and pain and guilt rose in Tal, a tide that had been held back for too many moons. He lashed out, kicking at the altar with all his weight. It shuddered and cracked.

  “Tal,” Helenia said from behind him, her voice choked, but he didn’t answer. The bone viper hissed and slithered in a bolt of ivory over the far side of the altar.

  Tal fisted his manacled hands together and drove them down like a hammer on the clay’s edge. This time it cracked, fault lines snaking through its side. He hit it again. Kicked it again. A starburst of pain flared in his shin, above the spot where his leg had been broken, right where the rust phage was even now festering and spreading. One more kick and the altar broke in half. It was not a clean break. Red-brown clay shards smashed against the ground and shattered. The dead leaves and wilted flowers tumbled out of the broken bowl around Tal’s feet. At the sight of them, ruined, used as fodder to line a viper’s nest, he finally fell to his knees and opened his mind to his god.

  The dreaming space pulled him in immediately. Pressure grew around him, folding him into itself. The vision—one with the same urgent feeling as the one he’d avoided when he’d slept in the cave with Elodie—waited just beyond. It didn’t swallow him up, though, didn’t pull him in. It waited for him to say what he needed to say.

  My God, he whispered into the darkness, I don’t know who I am any longer. I don’t know who you are.

  The silence seemed to diminish around him, to soften, though no sound disturbed it.

  I hate you, Tal said, feeling his distant real body shudder with the truth of it. Then, shuddering with another truth equally strong: I love you. I cannot make myself stop loving you. I am helpless against it, as I am helpless against her. Please tell me what you want from me.

  The vision wrapped warmth around him. It beckoned him forward. Utterly spent, utterly without the strength to resist, he allowed it to draw him into itself.

  THE VISION BLOOMED AROUND TAL UNTIL HE WAS AWARE of nothing else, not even himself.

  girl, perhaps six years old, lay in a luxurious bed. Silken scarlet sheets and a puffy chenille blanket seemed to swallow her whole. Only her eyes, brown and mouse-quiet, looked out of place amidst the extravagance.

  There were footsteps in the hall, and she was afraid.

  Two men came in. The door didn’t creak; it was too well-oiled. The girl quickly shut her eyes and feigned sleep, but her little rabbit heart tripped in her chest.

  The men stood over her bed. If she opened her eyes, she knew who she would see: her father and the royal physician, Albinus, who was also one of her cousins. She knew why they had come. She did not want to hear what they would say. She wished she was well and truly asleep.

  “Has there been any change?” asked the oil-slick voice of Albinus.

  “No,” answered her father—the Emperor—gruffly. “Her blood runs red as the day she was born. I can cut her, and you can see for yourself.”

  The girl quaked, quaked. Already she had a line of scars and scabs marching up her forearm like army ants. She didn’t want him to hurt her any more.

  Albinus sighed heavily. “I have researched your questions until my eyes bleed, uncle. A few metallurgists have historically been born with common blood, but even in those cases they usually quicken by toddlerhood, and always before seven years old. I’m afraid it’s confirmed: she’s a misfire. My condolences. At least you have the other one.”

  The emperor was a bear of a man. The girl could feel the weight of his shadow on her chest, making it hard for her to breathe. Or perhaps that was simply his magic. He was an iron Smith, after all, like her sister and their late mother. Like all of the members of her family going back for generations—except her.

  “How well this has worked out for you, Albinus,” her father said softly. “With my youngest daughter a misfire, you take her place as second in line for the throne.”

  Albinus was wise enough to stay silent.

  The emperor’s shadow seemed to lighten, shifting like a phase of the moon as his voice changed tone and became more businesslike. “Not to worry—my eldest is surely able enough to keep you in line. As for this one, there are already too many rumors that the Iron Crown’s magic is weakening. I cannot let it be known that its power has allowed a misfire even in the royal family.”

  “Shall I fetch a poison? I have some that are quite quick and untraceable.”

  “No,” said the Iron Emperor. “I will do it myself. It is a father’s duty. Come, have a drink with me first.”

  Their footsteps receded. The girl lay in her bed, rabbit-heart thrumming, mouse-eyes welling up, and wondered what she might do to convince her father not to kill her.

  On the other side of the room, a shadow shifted. Another bed was there, one as well-appointed as hers. A figure sat up in it: her sister, twelve years old and ferally beautiful with eyes that burned in the darkness. “Elodie,” she said, not bothering to whisper, her voice a low and certain alto that Elodie had always envied, “I will not let him kill you.”

  “How will you stop him?” Elodie whispered.

  “You could stop him. You don’t have to be helpless. You shouldn’t be helpless.”

  “My blood won’t quicken. They’ve tried everything.” The misery of it, the terrible vulnerability, welled up in her like water through the cracks of the earth.

  “You don’t turn seven for a few hours,” her sister insisted. “It is not yet midnight.”

  “Sarai,” Elodie whispered, almost soundlessly. “I am a misfire.”

  Sarai threw her covers off. “Then I will save you myself,” she hissed, and crossed the room to tug Elodie out of bed.

  Sarai flung the window open and threw herself out of it as if she were a thing with wings, a thing that had never known fear. Elodie crept out behind her. They fled through the gardens, blanketed in the heady scent of jasmine. When they slipped through the secret side gate, petals from the wisteria vines rained down and cloaked Elodie’s shoulders in shades of mauve and amethyst. Heather grass brushed at her ankles, making her itch, a welcome distraction.

  It wasn’t until they entered the scorch-tree woodland that they heard the sounds of pursuit.

  Sarai wound her fingers tightly through Elodie’s. They ran. Leaves crunched beneath them, moss draping the trees with crimson as bright as commoner’s blood—as bright as Elodie’s blood.

  And then: a root, twisting from the ground at just the wrong angle. A sharp pain in her ankle. Hitting earth that was padded with dead things, leaves and rotted mushrooms and fallen moss.

  The twang of an arrow being released. A pain like fire in her back. She screamed and tried to turn her head. Her cry turned to a gurgle as her mouth fill with blood. A shadow slid over her, a man standing at her back with his greatbow slung over his shoulder. Her father. He sneered in disgust. “You will die as you lived, I suppose: a mess.”

  “Don’t touch her!” came Sarai’s furious cry. She was kneeling over Elodie, hands wet with red.

  The Emperor pursed his lips and lifted his palms. “I don’t need to touch her, small one.”

  All the air in Elodie’s lungs vanished. She gasped like a stranded fish but no matter how her lungs worked, no air would come. Her father was killing her not with a quick and merciful poison, but with his own magic.

  She looked at her sister. Sarai was strong, the iron in her blood giving her the same powers as their father. Even so, she was not yet skilled enough to best him.

  But Sarai had never needed magic to prove herself strong.

  The older girl tore the arrow from Elodie’s back and, while their father was distracted with working his magic, drove it into his throat.

  Air flooded into Elodie again. She gasped it in, watching in wordless horror as their father dropped to his knees and then fell on his stomach, his warm iron blood splattering the dead moss. He tilted his head against the leaves to look at Sarai, and the last emotion in his eyes was admiration. He had always taught his daughters to be ruthless; it was their her
itage. He had not expected his eldest to take so well to the lesson.

  Sarai wrapped her arms around Elodie and picked her up like she was a mother and not merely a sister. “It’s okay,” she whispered as Elodie’s vision began to dim. “No one will know.”

  arai bore her unconscious sister to the royal physician’s office. The Alloyed Palace rang with shouts and the occasional blast of cannon fire. The rebels must have mustered for yet another attempt at a coup. It was providing enough chaos for Sarai to perhaps be able to slip through the palace halls unseen.

  She didn’t want to be unseen. She bore her sister with a straight back, her chin lifted, a dark dare in her eyes to meet the gaze of any noble or servant that might glance in her direction. They all parted before her like a sea of reeds. They were her subjects now. A part of them knew it already.

  Sarai snapped at a servant to open the door to Albinus’s office and then kicked it closed behind her. She was surrounded by cots, but she marched straight to her cousin’s desk—where he was sitting, pale eyes wide, frame rigid with shock—and laid Elodie atop it. Her sister promptly bled all over Albinus’s important papers, which Sarai found satisfying.

  “Heal her,” she snapped.

  A calculating sort of hardness slid over his expression then. He stood, carefully pulling his robes far enough away from the desk to avoid the rivulets of blood. “My dear young cousin,” he started, “I think we should fetch your father—”

  “Then you may fetch him,” Sarai interrupted. “I will tell you exactly where to find him: lying in the scorch-tree woodlands with his throat cut open, watering the forest with royal blood.”

  She watched him begin to understand. Fear replaced his calculated look, and another thrill of satisfaction uncurled down Sarai’s spine.

  “I killed him because he was going to kill her,” Sarai went on. “I shall do the same to anyone who threatens my sister. Are you among that number?”

  Albinus swallowed, licked his lips. His eyes flitted from his bloodied desk and the unconscious girl atop it back to Sarai. Then he ducked his head and stepped away from his desk, coming around its side. He bowed in a full obeisance, forehead brushing Sarai’s slippers, palms flat against the floor, lips dusty from brushing the ground. It was the bow made of a penitent subject to their liege.

  “My Empress,” he said, voice tight. “Order me.”

  “Heal her,” Sarai commanded again. As he rose and began to grab bottles and tools off the shelves nearby, she tilted her head, listening to the distant booms of cannon fire and the shouts from the hallway and the gardens. “I take it that the palace is under attack?”

  “From the intelligence gathered before your…arrival, it seems to be a force of Saints led by silver Smiths.” He opened Elodie’s mouth and poured a tincture down her throat. Immediately the pain that had been twisted her sleeping features eased, and her breaths came more clearly. The flow of blood from her mouth ceased.

  Sarai’s lips twisted. “Then the silver Smiths have foreseen the events of tonight, and attempt to take advantage of the uncertainty that will be caused by a royal patricide.”

  “I suspect so, Highness.”

  “Then there will be no patricide,” Sarai decided. “Call for two guards—unimportant ones who won’t be missed. Promise them a year’s wages and swear them to silence, then have them go and retrieve my father’s body from the forest. They are to clean up any evidence of his death there and transport him to his own bed, where he will be found with a rebel’s arrow in his throat. As soon as they are finished, arrange to have them killed in the Saints attack as well.”

  Albinus scooped Elodie off his desk and laid her on a cot, sending a tight look at all the documents that were now drenched red. “Yes, Empress,” he replied, and tugged a nearby cord to summon a servant.

  “After that,” Sarai said, “I want you to give my sister magic.”

  Albinus, who had been gingerly cutting off Elodie’s shirt, paused. “What?” he said, forgetting in his incredulity to address her properly. She stared at him until he amended, “My Empress.”

  “Give her magic,” Sarai repeated.

  “I’m…I’m sure you have to know, Your Majesty, that is impossible. The quickening cannot be induced. If the element that will make someone a Smith is present, they will become one, and if it isn’t, they never will.”

  “You are the royal physician. You were granted this position because you are brilliant above and beyond the rest of the House of Copper. I am taking all limits off your funding and ordering you to find a way to put metal and magic in my sister’s blood.”

  Slowly, Albinus finished cutting Elodie’s shirt off. “I…have often wanted to experiment with something in that direction,” he admitted. “I will try. Likely she would make the ideal subject, since her blood will probably already have the right receptors, thanks to her genetics. What metal shall I attempt to work with?”

  Sarai turned, scanning the shelves around her. The natural answer to Albinus’s question would be iron, but Sarai didn’t want Elodie to be an iron Smith. She didn’t want her to be what was expected, what was known. She wanted Elodie to be a force to be reckoned with; something new and fierce, a girl who would never be helpless again.

  Her eyes landed on a vial of gleaming silvery liquid. She picked it up, held it to the light. “This one,” she said decisively.

  “Mercury?” asked Albinus, startled. “But mercury Smiths never live past childhood. The incendiary magic is too destructive to be controlled. I only keep that vial as a poison. Mercury is known to induce madness and paranoia, violence, even.”

  “Violence is exactly what I’m looking for. Find a way,” she ordered. “And keep her asleep until you do. Give her a memory tonic. I want her to remember as little of tonight as possible. She has suffered enough.”

  Albinus bowed his head and went back to his work. Sarai stood by and watched as he gave her orders to the servant and then the two guards he called for. She pretended to be only a concerned, dutiful sister. She and Elodie had been attacked in their beds, she told anyone who asked. Saints had gotten in through the window and managed to kidnap Elodie, who had been injured before Sarai rescued her from the rebels’ clutches. No one doubted the story.

  Sarai was still awake when they found her father’s body in bed an hour later. The royal priest, a dour, useless old man, came to fetch her. He put on her head the Iron Crown, freshly scrubbed clean of her father’s blood.

  Her first order was the immediate execution of all known and suspected silver Smiths. Their foresight and ability to peer into the past was too dangerous, she said. They had killed their own emperor; it was not to be borne.

  In truth, she could not suffer to live anyone who might see the truth of what had happened this night.

  he fully grown Iron Empress stood on the deck of a war zeppelin. The great balloon above her hummed with magic, a Smithed aluminum skeleton overlaid with sturdy blue-and-rust canvas. Sarai’s golden hair streamed in gentle waves around her as if she was underwater: the wind’s normal bluster, tamed by her own magic. If she had worn a gown, its fabric would have streamed around her too. She would have looked beautiful.

  Today was not a day for beauty. Today, she wore plate armor. It shone brilliant beneath the moon, light reflecting keenly from its edges as if her whole self were a blade. At her waist hung a sword, entirely unnecessary. She waited at the prow of the zeppelin’s under-deck, loaded cannons to either side of her, rows of soldiers at her back, great balloon rising above, and searched for the rebels who had so foolishly stolen her sister.

  Ahead, a low mountain rose. It was pocked with holes like a stone anthill, old tunnels bored into the rock by generations of copper miners. The Entengre river surged from its deep aquifer source here, borne upward by the force of ancient volcanic geysers until it exploded out of the many tunnels in a cloud of steam and waterfalls that wreathed the mountain in an eternal sea of mist. Moonlit rainbows shone off it now, shifting and shimmering as the
balloon approached. It made for a stunning sight. It also made for an excellent place to hide a rebellion.

  She raised one eyebrow, cool and slightly amused. The Saints had been admittedly clever to hide here, in plain sight of the Alloyed Palace that was no more than a day’s walk to the west. They could spy on their enemies from hidden waterways and recruit rebels from her own capitol, all with little fear of being discovered; the volcanic gasses and heat interfered with her zeppelins’ ability to fly over this area. She was expending a great deal of her magic to get even this close without sending the great war balloon into a deadly tailspin.

  But the Saints had underestimated just how badly she needed to find, or avenge, her sister.

  She turned to the soldiers. “Go,” she said simply. She strode toward the dismounting dock and they ran past her, throwing themselves off the dock and into the air. They spread their arms and legs wide as they dropped and the thin membranes sewn into their suits stretched to catch the air and slow their falls. They glided silently toward the tunnels, controlling their direction by small movements that changed the way air flowed over their clothing’s special webbing—which had been woven only this morning for this very occasion. When they were a few yards from the peak, she lifted a hand and sent a cushion of air to catch them and lower them the rest of the way to the ground. Then she stepped off the bottom of the dock’s stairs and fell to the earth behind them like a bolt of bright lightning.

  They surged through the tunnels and killed everything in their path—everything except the one person Sarai had come here to save.

  Time passed; not long. A pair of hands held the Iron Crown over a girl’s head and then, slowly, lowered it. Beneath the heavy crown, the girl lifted her head, and her silver eyes shone like mercury.

  TAL WRENCHED HIMSELF AWAY FROM THE DREAMING PLACE. He was still on his hands and knees in the temple. His hands were coated in clay dust. Helenia’s hand was on his shoulder. Dead leaves and flowers from the viper’s nest brushed against his legs. He stayed there, gasping in air like a drowning man, as he tried to process what he’d seen.