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

As she’d been examining her injury, she’d had to support most of her weight on her other arm, and now suddenly its strength gave out. She tumbled three feet to the ground and twisted her ankle in the process. She lurched back to standing with a snarl and marched to the base of the wall, hands curled into fists—which reminded her with a bolt of pain that she was injured.

There was a length of torn fabric dangling from one of her shoulders, the remnants of some sort of cape or cloak. She tore a strip of it off and wrapped it clumsily around her injured hand, tying it as securely as she could and then wondering whether the binding ought to be kept loose instead. Apparently her medical expertise was as limited as her wilderness survival skills. She left the makeshift bandage tight and then sat down in the glass dust to take off her boots. They had tall, elegantly curving heels that made them objects of beauty, and would now also make them objects of great use. She turned them around and drove them heel-first into the wall before her. They carved handholds about as well as punching the permafrost had, and saved her any further injury. She was breathing harder than ever now, and her entire body was trembling with effort, but she pushed herself onward remorselessly and soon reached the spot where she’d fallen before.

She paused to peer at the melted hole where she’d been injured. A bit of debris was in there, gleaming silver. Curious, she secured her current footholds more deeply—doing her best to ignore the freezing-cold snow melting into her socks—and then carefully freed one hand to reach into the hole.

She drew out a twisted black crown.

It was a beautiful thing, delicately wrought, made for someone with a petite brow. The design brought to mind brambles and thorns—which was why, she thought dryly, it had gouged a hole in her hand. It didn’t look familiar but it did look valuable, which meant that she might be able to either fetch a reward for returning it to its owner or perhaps sell it if—when—she extracted herself from whatever situation she was currently in and returned to civilization. In any case, it was light enough to cause her no trouble to carry. Moving carefully so as not to upset her footing, she tore the rest of the cape off her shoulder and tied the crown to her belt with it before continuing upward.

When at last she hauled herself—slowly, painfully, powered by sheer grit of will—over the top of the snowy wall, she flopped onto her back and did not move for several long minutes. Snow melted beneath her and seeped through her tunic. Her breaths came in long shudders and her muscles burned in a way that said her regrets would run deep tomorrow. But today, she had accomplished the first of the tasks set before her, and she was, for a brief but fierce moment, proud of herself.

The feeling was alien. She prodded at the edges of it cautiously.

A light scratching sound, like tiny claws on ice, pulled her from her thoughts. She raised her head and looked around.

She was surrounded by debris, a stain of catastrophe on the otherwise pristine landscape. Shards of half-melted metal thrusted up from the frost like twisted trees. Unrecognizable bits of char littered the ground. The trail of destruction led upward to a mountain slope some distance above, where she could make out train tracks. The beams and rails had been laid into a wide notch carved into the mountainside. The craftsmanship of it was exquisite, she noted, or at least it must have been before whatever had happened. The tracks were utterly ruined now; a good fifty feet of them were simply gone, a crater pocking the side of the mountain where that section had been. Still, though, those tracks had to lead somewhere. She could follow them and be assured of eventually reaching whatever destination she had originally been travelling to, or from. It was very good news indeed.

The scratching sounded again. She glanced around in search of it, and that was when she saw the bodies. There were perhaps a dozen of them. Many had been burned to unrecognizability, but some seemed to have died not from whatever explosion or fire had caused the…train wreck, she guessed it must have been…but had instead been impaled by debris or killed upon impact with the ground. The snow steamed red all around her.

Some of the bodies, she noted, still wore clothing that could be salvaged. And hers was soaked through and highly impractical in any case, made of formerly fine fabric that aimed for beauty rather than warmth. Her boots, in particular, would need to be replaced. They weren’t practical at all for walking on snow. If she was very lucky she might even find a pair of warmer socks.

Keeping an eye out for the source of the scratching, she moved toward a body whose clothing seemed mostly intact. It had been a woman, a kitchen servant from the looks of her uniform. Her feet looked to be about the right size, and her tunic was warm and sensible, though her trousers were too shredded to be of use. Quickly, Elodie stripped the body down and changed, trying to minimize the time her bare skin spent exposed to the frigid air. The boots were a touch too big but spread her weight much more evenly atop the frost. The tunic smelled like smoke but she supposed that was the least of her worries.

The scratching sounded again. She followed the noise quickly enough this time to be able to spot its source: a stoat, its fur a gorgeous ermine white, its little claws skittering against the crusted ground as it made off with the mangled body of a snow hare. The hare was singed, one leg missing, and it was nearly decapitated with its head dangling from just