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

she remembered why her blood was wrong, and she remembered what color it should be, and she knew what she could do now to save herself.

She called up her fire, concentrating on the palms of her hands. She didn’t need much magic. Only a little bit. Enough to melt the ice. And, if she was lucky, enough to warm herself before she died of exposure.

Nothing happened.

Tendrils of watery red snaked away from her injured palms into the icy water. Her power was gone. It had been gone ever since the explosion—the explosion caused by her poisoning—and without it, she was doomed.

It should be impossible. Magic lived in the metallic blood of its bearers. Even if the poison had weakened her, stolen her strength, it could not have changed her so wholly. But changed she was, and she could no longer fathom how she might save herself.

Tal’s shadow was still above her. She fixed her eyes on it. At least she wasn’t alone. She had been alone all her life. She didn’t want to die alone, too.

The need for air finally became too great. It pried her mouth open and forced her to inhale. Water shoved itself down her throat, a cruel and painful invasion, a leaden weight in her lungs. Her body jerked violently. She began to drown.

You are nothing but the Destroyer to me and to everyone I care about.

Elodie discovered, to her chagrin, that she was a coward after all. She was alone and freezing and dying and scared, scared, scared. Darkness like ink bled over her vision, stealing even Tal’s shadow from her. Her sodden lungs forced her to inhale again, and her body jerked and burned with it.

What little strength she’d had evaporated. Her body stilled. Her hands floated away from the icy surface. She began to sink. Her flesh would bloat and rot and then her bones would drift down to the lakebed, food for the sungills that had evaded her.

Mark my words: one day soon, you will face a reckoning.

The Destroyer remembered everything.

And then she died.

TAL’S SWORDS WERE TOO FAR AWAY. He could not break the ice with his bare hands. He had lost too much blood already, was shivering uncontrollably with the shock and the cold, was battered by the memory of Elodie’s fingers glazed in his silver blood and her possessive cry as she’d launched herself at his attacker. He could not save her. And yet his oath drove him to do the impossible anyway.

His hands curled into fists against the ice as he cried out. The pain was a blur, a lace of agony laid over his whole body until he could not tell the pain of his wounds from the pain of the oath. Between his fists, through the ice, the Destroyer was a blur of light on dark. Her palms were pale smudges laid flat. He couldn’t see her expression.

The oath bore down on him. Helpless against it, he drove a fist into the ice. It didn’t even crack beneath the blow, but the oath forced him to do it again, and again, until his knuckles were another point in the map of pain that was his body. Somewhere nearby, the mooncat howled and splashed as it finally latched onto a solid piece of ice and hauled itself out of the lake. Its fur was a double-coat, insulated enough to trap warm air in its layers and keep its hide dry; it would not freeze to death. The creature shook itself and water droplets arced through the air, a thousand rainbows. It snarled one last time and then loped away down the valley, giving up its meal as too costly.

Tal paused in his blows, shuddering, every breath a gasp that cost him far too much effort. That was when he remembered the knife in his boot: the ornamental dagger that Elodie had taken from a corpse, which she had given him to skin the rabbit, and which he’d never given back because he wanted to see her helpless. A feeling crashed over him now at the realization that he still had it, something akin to relief, but there was no time to register it. He snatched the little weapon from his boot, lifted it high, and brought it down hard on the ice.

It was a thoughtless blow, one that could have ended with him being dumped into the freezing water along with Elodie, but he was too used to saving her without thought for his own safety. It was sheer luck that the ice cracked away from him, toward the hole a dozen yards away where its structure had already been weakened. He stabbed downward again, then swung himself sideways to kick through the spider-webbed ice, crying out at how the movement jarred his old and new injuries.

The ice broke into shards. The hole was just wide enough for him to reach through. He managed to pause long enough to peel his coat and shirt off—if he got them wet, he would surely die of exposure even before his injuries or the rust phage had the chance to do the trick—and then laid flat on his stomach atop the ice and reached into the water to find the Destroyer.

She was sinking. Her form was a blur, her hair blocking her face. One of her hands trailed upward, thin red blood leaking from it, mingling with Tal’s as he grabbed her forearm and pulled her upward with all his strength. She came in a wash of icy water, limp and yielding, her waist and legs still in the hole. The ice crackled ominously at its edge. He wrapped his arms around her torso—soft, freezing, drenched—and braced himself, then pulled one more time with all the strength he had left.

It wasn’t until she was lying prone on the ice, head in his lap, hair soaked with red and silver blood and glacier-clear water, that he realized she was already dead.

Time seemed to crystallize. It spread out