Mercurial by Naomi Hughes (ebook reader with built in dictionary .txt) 📕

from the group. “I see no signs of rust phage or the poison. He is merely recovering, and will wake when he’s ready, my lady.”

Tension drained from Elodie all at once, leaving her trembling with relief as the Smith waited for her reply. She looked down at Tal. She remembered that he had looked this same way when she had found him after the train’s explosion, too. She’d thought then that he looked beautiful. He still was. The drumbeat of his footsteps, the green eyes that showed her everything he was feeling, the strength of his character—he was beautiful in all that he was.

She reached out and brushed a strand of hair off of his face. He leaned into her touch, and she smiled.

“My name is Elodie,” she said to them all. “And I will forgive who I wish.”

Tal dreamed.

He dreamed of a boy from the mountain ward whose belief had changed his destiny. He dreamed of his sister, happy. He dreamed of an empire forged anew with effort and compromise and hard-won trust.

He dreamed of a god who was proud of him. A god who authenticated the pain he still felt, and would always feel to some measure. A god he would love and question and wrestle with and fight for every day of his life—a life that he would now, quite unexpectedly, get to live.

Last of all, he dreamed of Elodie.

In his dream, her indomitable spirit shone through her brown eyes like sunlight through stained glass. Bloodred tear tracks were drying on her cheeks. Her hands were burned and blistered, a match for his own scars. She was injured, as he was, but she had also finally made room for her own happiness.

She leaned over him. She kissed him. And then he opened his eyes, and realized he was not dreaming at all.

EVERYONE KNEW A WITCH LIVED AT THE BASE OF THE MOUNTAIN.

The seasons there were strange, where the steam of the Entengre met the heartless frost of the Skyteeth, where the mote trees splayed their drifting seeds across the frozen mud and blooming snow roses alike. The witch, too, was a strange and fearsome contradiction. Wild, irreverent, lovely, ferocious—every person who visited her cottage described her differently. The only thing that was the same was the way their voices shook when they returned to tell the tale.

All of this, Theon had learned in his first week in the village there at the base of the mountain. He was a weak boy, he knew, small for his age and easily frightened, but at least in this matter everyone else seemed to be frightened too.

“I’m not frightened,” his sister insisted one dark evening as they returned from the schoolyard, their empty lunch baskets swinging, a neighbor’s cat yowling at them from a nearby porch.

The boy longed to impress his sister. Twelve years old and already she was the most painful sort of idol: the kind who had no idea that anyone at all worshipped them. “I am not frightened either,” he told her.

Her teeth gleamed in the red light of sunset. “Prove it.”

His heart stuttered, but he mustered himself and lifted his chin. “How shall I prove it?”

“Bring me one of the cursed flowers that grows under her window.”

And that was how Theon found himself creeping through a witch’s garden.

It was a wild and overgrown garden, the sort that could swallow a monster whole, much less one small boy. There were enormous hellebore blooms with bold yellow pistils, fragrant night-blooming jasmine, pops here and there of coppery witch-hazel, and everywhere, everywhere there were roses. Their thorns seemed to reach for him, whispering as they scraped gently over his sleeves and curled at his ankles. He crept through it all carefully and tried to comfort himself with the thought that the garden could not truly be as wild and dangerous as it seemed. Everywhere there were small signs that this plot of land was both beloved and mercilessly tended to. Smooth paving stones were set into the many wandering paths, and there were no brown petals to be seen on the beautiful ice-white roses he slipped past now. Not a single weed dared show its sprouts anywhere. But tame or not, the garden was still an easy place to get lost in, and the boy had to follow the trail of smoke from the cottage’s chimney to find the witch’s place.

The closer he grew to the hulking shadow of a house, the quicker his heart beat. It wished to gallop out of his chest and go hide under his bed, he thought. A large part of him was terrified that he would be found out by the witch. She would do something terrible to him. Eat his liver on toast, perhaps. His mother had pursed her lips and shook her head when he’d expressed that worry to her just yesterday.

She isn’t dangerous, she’d said, then paused and let her eyes slide sideways as if she was reconsidering her words. Well. She isn’t a witch, in any case. She was once powerful and then gave up her power, and now she gardens. Don’t bother her and hopefully she won’t bother you.

Theon hadn’t believed her. He’d heard enough scary stories to know when an adult was censoring out the frightening bits.

Now, though, as he tiptoed closer to the window of the cottage, he repeated the words over and over in his mind like a prayer. Don’t bother her and she won’t bother you. He would not be seen. He would not be caught. He would take a flower—a small flower, or maybe just a petal or a leaf or a pebble, something too small to be discovered missing—and then he would go. No one but his sister would ever know he had been here at all.

The cottage was near enough now that he could make out its details in the thin moonlight. Earlier he had thought of it as a hulking monstrosity, something with eyes and