Mercurial Page 9

  She swooped in and tucked her arm around him again, bracing him until he staggered up to standing at her side. His body was rigid and tense wherever she touched him. No matter. He didn’t have to relax, only survive. Together, they hobbled slowly toward the cave. The wind cut out as soon as they entered, and although it was still freezing and also smelled far worse than it had outside, Elodie breathed a sigh of sheer relief. Safety, at last.

  She carefully lowered Tal to sit against one of the slightly-damp walls. The air here was caustic with the bite of mildew, rotting vegetation, and decaying…something. Perhaps a wild animal or two had sheltered here during the last snowstorm and then perished. It wasn’t the most encouraging thought. “Maybe it will smell better in here once we start the fire,” she murmured.

  The cave was laden with gloom and her eyes were still adjusting, but she spotted a gleam of silver and heard the rasp when Tal unsheathed one of his swords. She stilled for a moment, feeling like that hare must have when the deadly debris was hurtling toward it. She keenly felt the absence of the dagger’s weight at her waist and recalled, too late, that Tal had never returned it to her. Had she misjudged him after all, and he was as prone to betrayal as she ought to have suspected? Was this the moment he would turn against her? Surely he knew how foolish that was. Surely his need for her outweighed his obvious distaste for her company.

  Tal exhaled a breath that turned to mist and hung in the air between them. “I’ll keep watch,” he explained, eyes on the cave’s entrance. “It smells bad in here because something carnivorous has been using this as a den. Hopefully it won’t return before the blizzard is over.”

  Elodie’s dread evaporated. It left behind a vast tiredness that weighted her marrow and made her want to curl up and sleep right where she stood. Fear, she reflected, was exhausting. She much preferred the weightless exhilaration of her sled ride.

  “Of course,” she replied, managing to sound mostly normal and not as if she’d momentarily been planning how she might kill him before he could waylay her.

  She fled back into the blizzard. Three steps out of the cave, she stumbled on one of the bits of bloodied clothing that Tal had used as a blanket before their crash, and she stopped to wrap it around her head like a macabre scarf. Then she went in search of the wood. She forged through the growing blank whiteness of the storm for as long as she dared, periodically returning to the cave with her armfuls of kindling and occasionally another piece of the lost clothing, before Tal stopped her.

  “The blizzard has grown too much,” he said. “Stay inside now.”

  Irritation prickled. She filed that away under the category of things she’d learned about herself: she didn’t like being ordered about. But he was right, so she stomped the snow off her boots and dropped her current load of firewood atop the rest.

  Time to start the fire. Purposefully not looking at Tal, and trying to seem as decisive as possible, she unhesitatingly grabbed a chunk of wooden floor tiling about the size of her arm. She sat down on the freezing rock and placed the wood in front of her, then reviewed what facts she could infer about fire-starting. Ideally, she’d have some sort of magical mechanism that could provide a spark, or a piece of…what was it? Some sort of stone that could be struck to make a flame? Flint, that was what it was called. But she had nothing like that, so it would have to be friction that would start her fire. The question now was how to create enough friction to actually make a spark.

  She dared to quickly glance at Tal. His attention was fixated on the cave’s entry in a way that told her the whole of his attention belonged to her current activities. Her skin prickled in embarrassment and she snatched up another piece of wood at random—a long piece of door framing—and rubbed it as fast and hard as she could against the side of the floor tile.

  A smothered choking sound alarmed her. She glanced up, and in the dim gray light saw that Tal was laughing at her. From his shocked expression, the laughter had caught him by surprise as much as it had her, and she had only a moment to marvel at how completely humor had transformed his features before his gaze went hard again.

  On the heels of her surprise flashed a jolt of anger—how dare he mock her efforts to save them both?—before that too quickly fizzled out under the weight of her tiredness and worry and shame. She dropped the wood, turned her face away from him, and cried.

  She did it without making a sound. It was easy, as if she had practiced it often. Her tears did nothing to ease the turmoil of feelings twining around her chest, and the tracks of wetness on her cheeks only chilled her further. Crying was foolish. She should stop immediately.

  She couldn’t.

  A long moment passed. “Are you giving up?” Tal asked, his tone a challenge. “I hadn’t thought you the type.”

  “Be silent,” she snapped, but her voice was too strangled to make the command as sharp as she wanted it to be.

  There was a long quiet. In it, Elodie felt Tal realize that she was crying, and debate what, if anything, he ought to do about it. Her shame curled its roots deeper. She was not some defenseless maiden who needed to guilt a boy into saving her. Except, apparently, she was. She had proven utterly useless; she had failed to rescue their only food from a mere fox, failed to start a fire, failed to even remember more about herself than her first name. They would both die here and it would be her fault.

  “You’re starting too big,” Tal said.

  She took a deep, shaky breath, trying again to force her tears to cease through sheer willpower. “What?”

  “The wood. The pieces you’re trying to start a fire with, they’re too big. You need to break one up into kindling—much smaller pieces, about the size of twigs.”

  If she listened very carefully to his voice, she could almost hear a kernel of kindness in it. She didn’t want to need his kindness but it warmed her nevertheless, which irritated her further. But at least it also managed to stop her crying. “Oh, now you have useful advice,” she muttered, but did as he said. The wood had already been cracked and splintered by the explosion and broke apart easily, and the bits from the inside of it were dry, untouched by the snow. Soon a pile of wood slivers sat before her.

  “Fire needs oxygen,” Tal told her next. “Arrange the kindling so that air can circulate through it.”

  She leaned the pieces up against each other, building a small, flattened cone-line structure. She sat back. “Now w-what?” she asked, her teeth clattering together as she shivered. The temperature was beginning to drop sharply.

  “Take one of the longer sticks and put it between your hands—no, flatten your hands out—there. Now rub your hands back and forth to make the stick spin.”

  She followed his instructions, her brow crinkling as she concentrated. She put the stick against a slightly larger piece of wood, which was in turn placed next to the pile of kindling. Then she repeated the rubbing motion. By the time the wood started to smoke, her palms were full of splinters and her already-injured hand was bleeding once again, but she only hunched her shoulders and bore down harder. She had not been defeated by snow, and she would not be defeated by wood. She would start a fire or die trying.

  Then, miraculously, a tiny flame leapt up from the shallow hole she’d drilled in the wood. “Quickly,” Tal told her. “Use one of the twig-sized pieces to move the flame over to the kindling.”

  Not daring to breathe, she snatched up a splinter and touched it to the flame. The little fire withered down to a barely-visible blue core as she watched, but then caught to the splinter just before it went out. Moving slowly, she slid the now-burning bit of kindling beneath the stack she’d built—and the fire began to spread.

  She raised both hands in the air and shouted in victory. She was not useless. She had proven it.

  A sharp intake of breath sounded from across the cave. “Your hand,” Tal said. His voice sounded strange, faraway. Elodie looked up with a frown.

  “What?” She glanced at her hands and winced. She’d have plenty of splinters to pick out, a
nd she really ought to rebandage her injury too. Blood was streaked across her palms and down her wrist and had already soaked through one sleeve.

  “You’re…you’re bleeding,” Tal said, staring at her hands as if he’d never seen blood before. Perhaps he was squeamish after all. This time, she determined, she wouldn’t make fun of him for it. He had just helped her learn how to build a fire, and as she saw it, that could be the start of a fragile truce between them. She was loath to ruin that.

  “I am, but not nearly as badly as you were,” she said, motioning at his crimson-stained trousers. He didn’t respond. He was staring at her bloody hands, shock paling his features, one hand clenched tight around the hilt of his sword as if it was his anchor. “Tal?” she inquired, finally lowering her hands. “Are you well?”

  His gaze jerked back to hers and he shook himself. The shock fell away, his features schooled into blankness. “Fine,” he said abruptly. “You should rest. I’ll keep watch and build the fire up.”

  “You need to rest too.”

  “I wouldn’t be able to sleep right now,” he said, his tone tight.

  She shrugged. She was very tired—still recovering from whatever had happened on the train, she supposed, and the trauma of losing her memories—and unwilling to argue further. She curled up on the rocky ground and slept.

  THE DESTROYER WAS HAVING A NIGHTMARE. This time, Tal let her stay in it.

  Instead of waking her, he occupied himself with carefully unwinding the bandage wrapped around his broken leg. It was too tight and crusted with the dried hare’s blood he’d smeared it with; he’d been in a hurry to hide the silver bloodstains before the Destroyer saw them. But over the last hour or so—while he stared motionlessly at the sleeping “Elodie” over the fire that he had taught her how to build—the injury beneath the makeshift bandage had begun to take on a new and foreboding type of ache. It felt like grains of sand were caught just beneath his skin, gritting against one another every time he moved. He’d known what it had to mean but had delayed checking because he wasn’t sure whether he wanted his suspicions to be confirmed, or to be found unmerited.

  The bandage peeled away. His injury wasn’t overly dramatic, merely a gash the length of his hand. Viscous silver blood leaked slowly from the torn flesh and muscle. The broken bone wasn’t visible. But what was visible was far worse: tiny dark-orange flakes peppered throughout the wound, each one producing a lacy, crystalline vein structure that dusted his skin like snowflakes.

  Rust phage.

  Grimly, he rewrapped the bandage. Such was his luck. Nearly eighteen years of successfully avoiding injuries that would expose his blood to either infection or the metallurgy class, all to be ruined in a single morning.

  His choices were few now. He would not heal naturally from this. It was fatal to anyone with metal in their blood in a matter of days. He would grow weaker, and then feverish, and then lose consciousness and ultimately die. A copper Smith would be able to heal him at this early stage, of course, but revealing his illness to any member of the noble class meant revealing his silver magic. And that meant death. It had been so for ten years now, ever since a group of silver Smiths failed in their attempt to lead a coup. With the significant advantage of being able to see bits of the future, the rebel faction—which had included both of Tal’s parents—had hoped they might finally succeed in overthrowing the nobles. Instead their attempt ended in the empire-sanctioned slaughter of anyone who had silver in their blood. If Tal’s secret was revealed, not only would he be executed, but his entire home ward would be punished for illegally sheltering him.

  All of this he considered with a remote sort of calm. He felt far away from himself, disconnected from the world as he had understood it. Too many impossible things had happened in too short a time. He could not maintain his shock any longer. He needed to move forward. He needed a plan. But, of course, there was a massive complication to any plan he might come up with, and she was sleeping directly across the fire from him.

  The Destroyer. Elodie.

  An eddy of wind slithered into the cavern, making the fire leap momentarily higher. Sparks hissed into the frosty air. They wreathed Elodie’s features, dancing in the space between him and her, framing the tension in her petite jawline and the way her lips twisted in a quiet cry. Hearing the soft, familiar sound made him remember how different she had sounded a few hours ago, when she’d laughed wildly as they careened down the slope. And before that, the unrepentant triumph in her voice when she held that headless hare aloft. I got in a tug-war with a stoat, she’d proclaimed. I won. Mostly.

  His hands curled into fists against the cold stone ground. How dare she be funny? How dare she expect his gratitude? How dare she smile, and banter, and laugh, as if she hadn’t murdered hundreds of people only the night before and listened without remorse to their screams?

  He hadn’t thought anything could be worse than protecting the Destroyer, but this was so much worse. Elodie was everything he despised hidden away inside the shell of a girl he might otherwise have admired.

  He wanted to be sick as soon as the thought came into his mind. Earlier, once or twice, he’d caught himself talking to her unguardedly as if she really were someone else. He had told himself at the time that it was to keep her from suspecting him and remembering her past, but the truth was, she was treacherously easy to talk to. Her cruel air had been replaced with an oddly innocent ferocity. She spoke differently too—less formal, less measured, unweighted by her own past. He wondered if this was who she might have become, had she not been born the Lady of Mercury.

  He shook himself. Her blood might be red now and her eyes brown, but she was yet who she had always been. The fact that his oath still compelled him to protect her proved as much. The question now was, how could she possibly have been so changed?

  It had to be a side effect of the poison. Or perhaps this was what the poison had been intended to do—make her forget, render her powerless and weak. He wondered how long it would last. He wanted to hope that it would last as long as possible, but couldn’t deny there was a part of him that would rather the Destroyer return soon. If things were far more difficult with her at his side, at least she was easier to hate.

  But in the meantime…maybe this situation could prove beneficial.

  The idea came together slowly. His oath required that he deliver the Destroyer to safety, which in this case could only mean the Alloyed Palace. But between them and it lay the mountain ward—the Skyteeth, the peaks and alpine valleys he’d once called home. The Saints had an outpost near his old township there. If Tal could tweak his route back to the palace so that he and the Destroyer travelled through his home…then perhaps the Saints would find them, and be enabled to finish their assassination attempt after all.

  The Destroyer would be too wary to be led into such a trap and her powers would make springing it too dangerous. Elodie, though, was a different story. She seemed to have no access to her magic. And more, she seemed to have a drive to help him, some sort of warped sense of care for him. He could use that. He could win her trust—and then lead her straight to the Saints. She wouldn’t be able to fight back. He would still be bound to try to protect her, but this time the assassins would have an advantage. It might just be enough.

  Across the fire, Elodie curled in on herself and shivered violently. The crown she’d tied to her waist rattled on the rocks. Her dark hair slid over her shoulders and splayed in long curls over the stone, exposing her neck to the night air and to him. His hand tightened on the sword at his side. He looked away.

  Was it righteous, what he was planning to do? It would be a betrayal akin to murder. He had killed before, so very many times, but this was different. This wasn’t something he was being compelled to do; he’d be earning Elodie’s trust and then leading her into a trap, and doing everything he could to give the Saints the chance to spring it.

  But Elodie—the Destroyer—deserved death. Her soul was crusted black with the blood of good men and women.
The count of her victims might even include Nyx by now. Tal flinched from the thought but forced himself to think it anyway, because it steeled him to the task he’d set before himself.

  Helping the Saints kill Elodie might not be righteous. But it was right.

  And, he recalled suddenly, the Saints would likely have access to a copper Smith who could heal the rust phage, too. The poison Nyx had drank, the toxin that she had then transferred to the Destroyer during her torture, had smelled of hemlock and copper. It had to have been a magical tincture, which could only have been sourced from one of the few copper Smiths who were not members of the metallurgy class. Which meant if Tal went home, the Saints there might be able to save his life in more ways than one.

  Decision made, he lay his head back. He didn’t sleep, though. He had to stay awake at least until he’d built the fire up enough to last the night, and also, he did not want to face the possibility of another vision. Two years ago, his god had betrayed him to the Destroyer with a promise that he would be the one to save her, and save the kingdom through her. Tal’s new plan to have her killed instead would likely not meet with the Unforged God’s approval.

  He didn’t care, he told himself. His god had betrayed him. Perhaps this was the way to make him sorry for it.

  He closed his eyes and rested.

  Weight. Quiet. A silent darkness dazzling with possibility, with the presence of something unfathomable—like being cradled in the womb of the earth.

  Or like being entombed.

  Despite his efforts, Tal had fallen asleep, and now a vision was coming. He could feel it humming at the corners of his consciousness. It felt oddly urgent, trembling in its desire to be birthed. He caught glimpses of it: tall trees, crimson moss draped across branches, a starlit night.

  Like lightning from nowhere, the numb, distant shock he’d been feeling flashed to fury. The last time he had allowed a vision in, it had led to him rescuing the Destroyer instead of his own sister. And now his god wanted in again. To do what—to enforce Tal’s oath, to make him cease his plan for justice against her?