Mercurial Read online

  Still, a terrible, morbid curiosity nudged him forward. He edged closer to the shadows. “Who are you?” he said, regretting the words even as he spoke them.

  A strangled laugh. Her voice was sounding less flippant and more pained with every passing moment. “I know it’s been two years, little brother, but I thought you’d recognize my blade if not my face.”

  Tal froze. The dread rose up, drowned his hope in horror, and swallowed him wholly after. He fumbled at his belt. His movements were clumsy, and the dagger he’d tucked there fell onto the ground with an ungraceful clank. The handle was etched silver. Scratches marred the blade. He’d put most of them there himself, when she’d been training him.

  “No,” he breathed, trying with all his strength to stop the next word from slipping out, trying to stop it from being true, but he was helpless against it: “Nyx.”

  His older sister. The one he’d left behind that day two years ago, when he’d gone to fulfill his visions against her will. His gaze shot back to her. She’d grown into herself while he was gone. Her lanky limbs were now lean with muscle, her face sharp with angles and intelligence. A multitude of small scars crisscrossed over her arms. Training injuries. She could afford them as he could not, because she had no affinity, no unsanctioned metal in her blood to connect her to the Unforged God and provide her with a special magic. Not that she’d ever wanted to be a Smith anyway. She’d raged against his visions, raged against the god who would have him fulfill them.

  And yet here she was in a Saint’s mask.

  It was an unimportant mystery compared to the urgency of the moment. Tal could feel the oath sinking its tendrils into him now, like a vine strangling a tree. He had seconds to figure out how to save his sister. His mind jolted from possibility to plan to wild idea and back again. In the last two years, he’d tried everything to get out of his oath. Throwing his weapons down only meant he had to kill with his bare hands. Holding the oath back through sheer force of will sapped his strength quickly and only bought seconds. He’d even tried destroying the crown that held his oath—an act that he knew would kill him along with it—once last year, when his bitterness had finally grown beyond the reach of his faith. It hadn’t worked. The magic of his promise had taken over and moved him like a puppet to safety.

  But he hadn’t been truly desperate then, not like he was now, with his sister—the only family he had left—standing before him. “Nyx,” he ground out, “run.”

  But she shook her head and pushed away from the wall, moving toward him. He flung himself backwards. His hands were clenched so tightly that his swords shook and his knuckles ached. “Run,” he ordered again as the tendrils of his oath sank deeper. He had seconds. She had seconds.

  His god was cruel, or perhaps just uncaring. Tal had realized that long ago. This, though, this was beyond cruelty, and far beyond indifference. The boy he used to be urged him to pray, to repent of whatever he’d done wrong to earn this horrific fate, but he shoved the urge away with as much violence as he could muster.

  “I want to be taken to the Destroyer,” Nyx said, stopping in front of him. She wavered on her feet. He’d cut her shoulder deeply, and she’d lost a lot of blood.

  He registered her words. His eyes widened. “No. Nyx, no, that’s worse.” Whatever the Destroyer might do to a failed assassin would be far, far more painful than the quick death she’d sent Tal to deal out.

  “It’s my right,” Nyx insisted. Her words were still labored, her familiar voice made alien by pain. “I have…a right to a trial.”

  It was true. The oath eased away, gave Tal full control of his limbs again, but he could only stare at his sister. His mind was still working frantically but he could think of no solution. Either he killed her now, or he took her to the Destroyer to be killed later. Both options were unfathomable. He squeezed his eyes shut.

  A gentle hand, sticky with blood, touched his face. “Tal. It will be well. Trust me.”

  He swallowed. Shook his head. It was his last effort at denial, though, and just as useless as all the attempts before. He opened his eyes. “I don’t have a choice,” he admitted roughly.

  Nyx’s lips curved. She patted him on the cheek. “I’ll need your help to walk.”

  “I’ll carry you.”

  “I’d rather look heroic and noble…limping my way off the field of battle like one of the old legends.”

  “You mean you’d rather die of blood loss before you even reach the train,” he snapped back, and then flinched—both because he remembered he’d been the one to injure her so gravely, and because a comparatively peaceful death by blood loss might be preferable to what she was about to face.

  She heaved a sigh. “Always so serious,” she muttered. “Fine. Carry me. But set me down when we get to the surface. I’ll at least look noble…when anyone else can see.”

  He looked away. “The Destroyer is not impressed by nobility.”

  Nyx leaned into him, and he wrapped his arms around her, lifting her carefully off the ground. They passed the side tunnel where the townspeople were still hidden. The group stared out at the pair, eyes even wider than before.

  Nyx lifted her head off her brother’s shoulder to address the survivors. “If you get away, go to the mountain ward. The township closest to the pass,” she told them in a low tone. “Ask for Helenia of the Saints and tell her I sent you. She’ll see you resettled.”

  The townspeople were silent for a moment, then a rustle went through them like trees rattling their branches in a winter breeze. One man at the front slowly lifted his hand. It formed a fist with his thumb turned toward himself, as if he were holding a hammer, about to drive it downward onto red-hot metal fresh from a forge fire. It was a salute. One by one, the other townspeople copied it.

  Nyx returned the sign, though her fist shook with the effort. Tal turned his gaze forward again as an ache clenched deep in his chest. The survivors were honoring his sister. They knew where he was taking her.

  He walked in silence after that. When they’d reached the surface and were staring at the train before them, he picked up Nyx’s dagger—which had been left where it had landed in the street—and tried to give it back to her, so she would at least have some small measure of self-defense. His oath wouldn’t allow it, though, and locked over his muscles to make him throw the weapon further into the ashes of the city. He stared after it, hopelessness and hatred twisting around his chest like a bone viper.

  “What’s this?” came a low, dangerous voice from behind him.

  He turned around. The Destroyer was framed by the train’s doorway. Petite as she was, her anger filled up the space like another presence, like a storm about to break. Her mercurial eyes snapped and crackled with fury as she stared at Nyx—who was, despite her orders, still alive.

  Tal, despairing, fought back the urge to throw himself in front of his sister. The Destroyer couldn’t know that they were connected. She would use it against both of them. She wouldn’t be able to tell simply by looking at the pair that they were siblings—they’d had different mothers, and looked almost nothing alike—but any attempt by Tal to defend Nyx would only make things far worse than they already were.

  He gritted his teeth. “The Saint demanded her right to a trial,” he managed. “I have brought her back to you.”

  Against his will. Against everything he’d ever hoped for or believed.

  He wanted to squeeze his eyes shut again. He wanted to scream. He wanted to—he wanted to pray. He teetered on the urge like a man on a cliff before desperation finally tipped him over its edge. Please, he begged his god silently. Please. I’ve given you so much. Don’t take her too.

  Nyx was leaning heavily against Tal’s side, staring at the Destroyer, her expression mingling insolence and disgust as only a big sister could. “Take me back to the Alloyed Palace with you,” she commanded, as if she were the lady and the Destroyer her prisoner.

  The Destroyer bared her teeth. She held up a hand that glowed red with heat, giving N
yx a long moment to understand what she would do with it, and then reached out and clamped her fingers around Nyx’s injured arm. An awful sizzling filled the air. A thin trail of smoke rose up, curling its way through the ash that drifted down around them. The tendons in Nyx’s neck went taut as she tried, and then failed, to hold back a shout of pain. Every muscle in Tal’s body tightened in response.

  …and to never harm you myself. He’d never regretted more that the Destroyer had made him add that clause to his oath. He wanted to run her through with his blades. Wanted to incinerate her, the way she’d incinerated so many townspeople yesterday. He wanted her to feel the way he did now: helpless, afraid, alone.

  “You wish to face your trial? Very well,” the Destroyer said, her anger vanished like mist, leaving no trace besides a distant, satisfied iciness in her voice as she shouted for the guards. “Take her to the cells,” she ordered when they arrived, thrusting Nyx at them. “And give the order to set off, if it pleases my sister. I am past done with this place.” Then she turned on her heel and strode away.

  Tal was left with nothing to do but follow. The light fabric of the Destroyer’s robe wafted around her as she walked ahead of him, revealing dots of Nyx’s blood spangled across its hem in a violent constellation.

  His hands clenched and unclenched. His breathing was jagged with rage. He wanted to smash something. Wanted to throw things, break things. He couldn’t; nothing on this train belonged to him, and he would join the prisoners in the cells if he intentionally broke something that belonged to the lords and ladies.

  And, he realized suddenly as an eerie, otherworldly calm slid over him, he couldn’t risk ending up in the cells. Because there was something he needed to do while he was free.

  The train shuddered, a great beast waking from hibernation as the Destroyer’s order was relayed. Magic hummed through the intricate patterns inlaid on the cars’ metal wheels. The ash-swathed town outside the windows slowly gave way to a wintry landscape: stark gray trees draped in a delicate lace of freshly fallen snow, the polished-black eyes of a wary fox gleaming in the shadows, the looming Skyteeth mountains whose icy peaks shone with glaciers. Tal ignored it all.

  His footsteps were muffled on the thick, luxurious rug as they made their way to the Destroyer’s room, which held the cot where he spent so much time suppressing his nightly visions until they morphed into regular nightmares. Today, when the Destroyer allowed him to rest, he wasn’t going to suppress them.

  Today, he would make his god give him the answers he needed.

  He was going to find a way out of his oath. He was going to free his sister. And then, he was going to kill the Destroyer.

  ONCE, THERE WAS A GIRL WHO WAS AFRAID.

  It was not an unreasonable sentiment. She’d lived through more than a dozen assassination attempts in the last year alone, after all—at least one of which had been strategized by a member of her own family. Under such circumstances, a healthy dose of paranoia was mere self-preservation. But every once in a while, when she allowed herself to feel around the jagged edges of her corroded soul, she wondered whether she would have so much cause to fear if her blood flowed crimson rather than quicksilver.

  These were the thoughts that came to the Destroyer as she strode down the corridors of her sister’s train, cloaked in a nightgown and in her own icy, billowing dread.

  Her gait was commanding, her expression as gracefully cruel as ever as she stepped from one car to the next, but inside, she writhed. That assassin—that girl, barely older than the Destroyer herself—had gotten far too close. She remembered what it was like to taste the wind from the assassin’s blade, remembered the sound of steel meeting steel like temple bells pealing through the town where no bells should have ever rung again. Most of all, she remembered the awful, seething vulnerability that had caught in her chest, in the exact spot where the girl’s blade would have struck.

  She planted a hand on the door to her chambers and pushed it open, leaving a slender handprint charred into the lacquered wood. It sizzled and smoked but it couldn’t satisfy her. Her heart rapped out a rhythm so strong it was almost painful, and she burned with the need to pace, to scream out her anger, to punish someone so she could prove that she was not and would never be the vulnerable one. She really did need to go to Albinus for her treatment as soon as she could. His medicine was the only thing that could help her at times like this, the only thing that could make her feel in control again, untouchable, encased in the shield of her power.

  She envied her sister. Sarai wore the Iron Crown, a relic of the ancient emperors. It housed one of the strongest enchantments in existence, one that had taken the power of dozens of great Smiths to forge. It was the secret to the power of the entire metallurgic class; wearing it, Sarai must never feel vulnerable.

  Footsteps sounded behind her, paced so precisely they could be set to music. The sound paused as someone closed the chamber door behind them. Tal. She didn’t look at him, but the harsh rhythm of her heart abated ever so slightly at the reminder of his presence.

  He was with her. He could be trusted to protect her, as no one else could.

  She pulled open the door to her wardrobe and selected an outfit without looking, then slid out of her nightgown and robe. Glacial mountain air crept around the edges of the car’s velvet curtains and exhaled over her bare skin, raising goosebumps. She didn’t look at Tal and he paid no attention to her. No man in his right senses, especially not one bound to her by a metal vow, would look at her with a gaze of desire rather than one of fear. And that was fine with her; desire protected no one, while fear was the most useful tool in her arsenal.

  She pulled her chosen outfit on. It turned out to be a blouse woven from fine, soft, wine-red wool, with a sweeping cape dangling from one epauleted shoulder. She pulled on the black trousers that went with it and then laced up her sturdy heeled boots. She began to close the wardrobe door, but paused as she caught a glimpse of her reflection.

  Her black hair tumbled wildly around her shoulders, still unkempt from the night of lost sleep. She’d been having a nightmare. Bits of the dream drifted back to the surface of her mind: a shadowed, towering bear of a man looming over her, and her own weak, warbling attempt at a scream as her mouth filled with blood. Not a nightmare, then, but a memory.

  Her eyes tightened. She looked away from her reflection, and spotted Tal’s. He stood at a loose attention behind her. His brown hair was unkempt, too. It fell over his face in strands, cutting his expression into slivers. Tight jaw, a dark slash of brows etched above stormy green eyes. He was angry with her. That was normal. Angry enough that he couldn’t hide it, though—that was new. It hadn’t happened for over a year. Not since he’d finally accepted that she was a force he would never evade.

  Her gaze fell to his hands. They were curled into fists, but she could see an edge of pink skin where she’d healed him. Her own hands curled, her fingers brushing lightly over the spot where she could still feel his touch on her palm, feel the incandescent flame that had smothered between them. He hadn’t screamed then. Not until he was on his knees.

  Sarai had liked that. Satisfaction had settled over her like the ash on today’s wind, clear to see for anyone who knew her. The Destroyer hadn’t liked it, though. The sound of his anguish had unsettled something deep within her, a feeling like bones grating against each other. The feeling hadn’t stopped until she’d healed him.

  You’re going soft, her sister had scoffed. In the mirror, the Destroyer tore her gaze away from her guard and set her jaw. She was fire, she was mercury, she was death. She was a weapon in the hand of her empress. She was not and could never be soft.

  She snapped the wardrobe’s door shut hard enough to rattle the mirror as it swung out of view. “My crown,” she said flatly. It wasn’t often that she gave Tal orders—he wasn’t a servant—but she needed to see her crown in his hands, needed to reassure herself that the oath it kept still held.

  Without comment, Tal stepped to her bed, whe
re her discarded crown hung on a cant off a bedpost. He picked it up with both hands. It was a barbed, twisted thing, reminiscent of brambles and rose thorns, and she always looked suitably elegant and terrifying when she was wearing it. She didn’t like the way he gripped it now, though—like it was a thing he could break.

  Her heartbeat finally settled then, going slow and cold like a viper’s. Her thoughts cleared. Her worries crystallized into ice: frozen and still, clear facets open to her study.

  She leveled her gaze on Tal, coolly watching his approach. When he reached her, she held out a hand, the same one that had burned him earlier. He flinched. She raised one eyebrow and waited. After a moment his grip on the crown eased and he dropped it into her hands, lowering his eyes.

  He turned to pace back to his corner. She let out a quiet breath. He was still hers, then. Still unable to harm her no matter how he might wish to.

  Something was wrong with him, though. Something was different about today. Or perhaps…perhaps something was different with today’s assassin. The Destroyer paused, her hands half-raised with lifting the crown to her brow, casting her mind back to when the assassin had stood before her. The girl’s sharp, high cheekbones and strong facial features marked her as having ancestry from one of the Skyteeth mountain tribes. Perhaps she was from the same ward as Tal, then, maybe even someone he knew from his life before. An ex-lover? A childhood friend, maybe? Or simply a face that brought back memories of his past?

  Whatever it was, there was something off about that girl. The Destroyer would have to endeavor to find out what.

  She set the crown on her head and stepped toward the door. She would interrogate the prisoner now. She would not wait until her trial and inevitable sentencing, could not afford to sit back and do nothing during the time it would take for the leisurely return journey to the Alloyed Palace. If Tal was somehow connected to the assassin, she needed to know about it.

  As she reached for the knob, a timid knock sounded from the other side of the door. A servant stood in the hallway, half-bent already in an obeisance, tugging at the fingers of his white gloves in agitation. One finger was stained a watered-down brown.