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

The Destroyer. A mooncat. Rust phage. How could Nyx protect her brother from so much? What sort of sadistic god would demand such a test of faith from him?

Nyx’s feet began to move again. Her voice shook. “I will save him,” she said quietly. Even if you will not. It was a silent and unholy challenge, and Nyx regretted it not one whit.

Helenia shrugged off her coat and thrust it onto Nyx. “I love you,” she said fiercely. “Go and find your brother.”

“I love you too,” Nyx replied, trying to put her whole heart into the words, afraid she might not get the chance to say it again. “And I will. I swear it.”

THE SUNGILL HAD EVADED ELODIE FOR NEARLY AN HOUR, but she refused to admit defeat.

She sat unbowed before the jagged hole in the ice, through which she’d dangled a thin, reedy vine. A beetle and a sharply whittled twig were tied to its end. The little fish—whose shadow she could see flitting about in the alpine lake below the cap of ice—had not yet taken the bait, but it was only a matter of time.

“I told you, we don’t have the right bait for sungills,” Tal noted unhelpfully from his spot by the shore a few yards away. Behind him rose a crown of peaks haloed by creamy, whipped clouds, which the late-morning sunlight painted in delicate shades of champagne and coral. Such a beautiful rendering of such a lethal landscape. Idly, Elodie wondered if the morning sky was trying to trick them or trying to redeem itself. Or, perhaps, if it simply was what it was: both transcendent and merciless.

She jiggled the fishing lure. “And I told you, this is the only bait we have. Also, I don’t recall asking for commentary.”

“It’s been an hour. If the fish is still evading you, we should move on.”

Elodie set her jaw. “You need food. You’re looking even paler today than yesterday. If you’re going to recover, you need a proper meal.”

Tal looked away. His hair—which was unkempt, flecked with snow and rabbit blood—spilled over his face and hid his eyes, but not the tense line of his jaw. For a disorienting moment, an image flickered in the recesses of her memory.

A boy with hair splayed over his face, cutting his expression into slivers. Tight jaw. A dark slash of brows etched above stormy green eyes. A mirror snapping shut: my crown, said a voice, so clear and cold that it hurt, like swallowing a chunk of ice whole. Beyond it, she faintly heard Tal’s voice saying something to her.

Elodie reeled sideways. She caught herself on one hand, and blinked. “What—what did you say?” she asked Tal, shaken by whatever had just happened. A vision? A memory? Some odd trick of her mind, a result of lingering shock?

“I said I can eat when we get closer to the township,” Tal repeated, his voice tight, his face turned away from her. “I can go a day without food. And you shouldn’t be out on the ice anyway. It’s not thick enough.”

“It’s held me so far.”

“And while it’s held you, it has been slowly melting from your body heat. It could crack at any moment, and then I’d have to jump in and save you, and then we shall both die of exposure.”

“I will not be cowed by a bit of melting ice. And I have faith that if I do fall in, you would find a way to save us both.”

Tal rubbed a hand through his hair, a quick, frustrated motion. He muttered something under his breath.

“See,” Elodie said, turning her attention back to the fishing hole, “your hunger makes you irritable. Further proof that stopping to resupply now is the best course of action.”

“It is not my hunger making me irritable.”

Elodie only continued gazing serenely at the hole. A thin crust of ice had begun to grow back over it, and she leaned forward to knock it loose with a stick. The noise sent the sungill darting away, its shadow blending back into the murk at the bottom of the alpine lake. Elodie glared at it, then sighed. Maybe there was other, more attainable game nearby that she could hunt instead, or warrens or dens beneath the snow that she could pillage. She would be happy to wring the neck of a fox or a dusk mouse or even one of those stringy-looking burrowing owls she’d spotted a few times. She was starving. More than that, though, she was growing genuinely concerned for Tal.

She snuck a glance over her shoulder at her travelling companion. He sat with his back against a scraggly lone pine tree, his eyes unnaturally bright and half-lidded as if the sun was too much for him. He’d barely moved since they’d stopped and a light sheen of sweat shone on his brow. She worried he was getting some sort of wound fever, and she had no idea how to cure it or how to help him at all, really, other than getting some food in him. Disgusted yet again at her own helplessness, she vowed that if she lived through this, she would immediately apprentice herself to a physician or a wilderness explorer or both so that she would not find herself in such a situation again.

A flash of movement caught her eye. Jiggling the vine in an attempt to lure the sungill out of hiding one last time, she scanned the shoreline. She was expecting to see potential prey, a goat or perhaps another hare—so it took her three long seconds to recognize that the creature creeping up behind Tal was a mooncat.

Sinuous shoulders draped with a wide ruff of ivory fur. Canny moon-yellow eyes. Deceptively soft, broad paws that extended gently across the snow, distributing the great cat’s weight so that it seemed to float atop the thin crust of frost. The crescent fore-fangs that scissored down on either side of its jaw were the white of