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

Had her mother survived? Saasha had been in the rear half of the car, so the explosion wouldn’t have gotten her…but neither would she have been able to escape through the hole as Nyx unintentionally had.

Tal, though—Tal would have been right in the epicenter.

Helenia glanced up from Kenna’s paw. “What did you say?”

Nyx bent down, shoved the furs on the sled aside and yanked the snow shovel out without answering. She thrust it into the frost and immediately hit something hard that had a slight give to it. When she pulled the shovel out, its edge glittered with red-brown crystals. Frozen blood.

It couldn’t be Tal. His blood was not this color.

She still had to be sure.

She tossed the shovel aside and dropped to the ground, scooping handfuls of snow out with her bare hands, revealing the body beneath the frost like a sculptor carving away stone to expose the art hidden inside. But this was a grisly art indeed: a man in servant’s clothing, his open mouth packed with ice, one of his hands still clutching an empty, heat-warped tray like a shield.

Nyx didn’t spare a prayer on him. She had never been the praying type, and anyway, though it might make her a heathen, she cared little for this dead but anonymous servant. Once she had uncovered enough of his corpse to be certain he wasn’t her brother, she left him and snatched up the shovel again to dig in another spot.

A hand on her arm, made thick by a knitted green mitten, restrained her. Nyx whirled. “Don’t—” she started, but Helenia wrapped her in a hug that smothered the rest of her sentence, which she probably would have regretted saying anyway.

“Be still a moment and let me help,” Helenia murmured, releasing her. Though it made Nyx’s skin crawl to stand in one place while her brother’s body might lay buried in the snow nearby, she trusted Helenia and waited.

The other girl waded through the snow back to the row of dogs. Most of them were lying down now, taking the opportunity to rest and save their strength as they had been trained, but one was straining at his harness and whining. It was Maluk, a grizzled old veteran with gray-peppered fur and eyes that had begun to go bluish. Despite his age, Helenia had kept him on the team because he was canny, with an innate sense of where the ice was too thin to bear the sled’s weight and where to find the wily mountain goats whose meat fed their township during long winters. Now, he had caught a scent that made him lay his ears back and stare at the approaching Helenia with begging eyes, and once she unclipped his harness from the lead, he leapt over the snow like a cannon shot and began digging.

Maluk had been raised by Tal, Nyx remembered. She hadn’t seen the old dog this intent on anything since he’d left.

Breathless, she followed Maluk. Every other footstep broke through the thin, new crust of frost to sink deep into the fresh snow beneath, but she gave no care to the bite of cold on her shins. By the time Nyx had reached the dog’s side, the hole was as deep as he was. She stood back a bit and waited, arms folded so she wouldn’t be tempted to shove him aside and finish the hole herself. Helenia caught up and wrapped an arm—and a fur she’d grabbed from the sled—around Nyx’s shoulders. Together they held a tense, silent vigil until Maluk leapt out of the hole and went to his owner with a low whine. His muzzle shone oddly. It was, Nyx realized, crusted with silvery crystals.

She lunged forward. She dropped to her knees at the edge of the hole. She peered in. Her breath stuttered, a haze of steam that she wished would cloud her vision entirely. Her shadow fell long and blue-black over a grim scene: a patch of snow stained silver.

“His body isn’t here,” Helenia said. Her voice was loud and clear enough to cut through Nyx’s paralysis. “If it was, Maluk would’ve dug it up. It’s only blood.”

Only blood. Only blood.

“He was here,” Nyx said, her words choked as she carefully scooped out the snow around the blood, widening the hole to search for more evidence of what had happened. “He was injured.” Because of me. Because I failed him.

Her questing fingers caught on a tuft of fabric. She pulled on it and it unfurled into the snow, smooth as butter: a twist of burgundy silk. It was ragged, torn, barely a scrap—but oh, Nyx remembered what it had looked like when it was whole.

A wine-red cape pooled on a filthy floor. A torn corner where it snagged on a nail. My name is Elodie. And now you may thank me in truth, because unlike torture, my name is a gift I have given no assassin before.

Nyx didn’t realize she was shaking until Helenia dropped another, heavier fur over her shoulders. Nyx tugged the warmth closer around her and managed a strangled laugh; her girlfriend, only nineteen and already a mother hen.

“What is it? What does it mean?” Helenia asked, picking up the silky slip of fabric.

Nyx’s lips felt numb. Her skull echoed with memories, too crowded to admit the present moment. After a moment she managed to force out, “It was hers.”

Helenia dropped the silk like it was something rotten, something that might infect her. “She was here, then, with Tal. She is alive.”

“I already know she is alive.”

Helenia frowned. “How do you know? I thought you said the last you saw of her, she was in a bad way.”

“I know she is alive because my oath tells me so.”

Helenia was deadly silent for a long, long moment. “Your what tells you so?” she asked, calm in a way that meant she was envisioning murder. Probably because Nyx hadn’t yet been brave enough to tell her all the