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

half off his shoulder and the furry gray thing beneath it—was that Maluk?—whined. “Nyx, stop. My…my oath, it’s the only thing keeping me alive. So that I can protect her. If you kill her it’ll kill me too.”

Nyx didn’t move the dagger, which was hovering not far from the Destroyer’s now-exposed neck. Elodie’s shoulders shuddered lightly. A frown creased her mouth as she tried to curl back into Tal, and Nyx snarled to see it. “I’ll save you,” she promised. “Helenia is coming. She’s bringing help. And she’s almost certainly stolen more healing tincture, too. You will live.”

“Not unless you let the Destroyer live.” He had to say the words through gritted teeth, but still, he said them.

Nyx’s blank mask shifted to frustrated rage, and Tal shook with relief. He did not want his sister to need that mask the way he’d needed it. Nyx said, “If I let her live, she’ll kill me. She was about to kill me on the train.”

The memory of that moment rose in Tal’s mind. He flinched from it. “She doesn’t have her powers,” he replied, straining to get the words out, fighting the tug of his overwhelming pain and of unconsciousness. “Her blood is red. She has no fire. I had to save her from the ice, she couldn’t even use her magic to save herself.” It took too much effort to say so much and his hand dropped from Nyx’s, numb and useless. The dagger hovered where it was for a moment longer, trembling with Nyx’s need to drive it home.

“Fine,” she snapped at last, sheathing the dagger with an angry motion. “I’ll kill her after help arrives.”

She could do it, and easily. Even if Tal had still been under the sway of his oath, he couldn’t have stopped her, not with his swords so far away, not weakened nearly to the point of death by the cold and his injuries. He dragged in a shaky breath and tried to force his mind to think. “A trial,” he said. “She should face a trial. The Saints should pass her judgment.”

Once a jury ruled her worthy of execution, he would surely be able to accept her death. It would be out of his hands, no matter what he felt or how little he understood those feelings.

Nyx hissed an exhale, still hesitating. Her eyes tightened in consideration. “They could have her staked,” she said slowly. “They could have her flayed. They could open one vein for each of her victims. They could burn her.”

Tal looked down at Elodie. He did not want Nyx to see his face when he thought of those verdicts, any of which a Saints jury could surely pass down. He didn’t want her to see the way the thoughts twisted into him with both discomfort and a terrible, hungry keenness. He was ashamed anew at how he felt: hopeful that they would hurt the Destroyer, and ashamed of that hope, and hopeful that the Destroyer might live, and ashamed of that hope as well. But more than anything else, he abhorred the dark satisfaction in Nyx’s voice when she spoke of torture and death. She had changed while he’d been gone.

She had changed because he’d been gone.

“Nyx,” he said brokenly, because he did not know what else he could say.

Nyx sheathed her dagger. “A jury, then,” she said, and together, they waited for the Saints.

THE SOUND OF SCREAMS, AS FAMILIAR AS A CHORUS to an orchestral conductor, dragged Elodie slowly from the emptiness of her dreams. At first, she thought she was moving from the blackness of deep sleep into her old familiar nightmare; it happened often enough that she was sometimes able to jar herself to waking at this point and avoid the nightmare entirely. She pulled herself, hand over hand, toward consciousness. She said the name of the person who was always there to wake her: “Tal.”

The word was barely a murmur but it did the trick to drive her closer to wakefulness. The arms that were wrapped around her shifted slightly, which was when she realized she was being held. The movement also shifted her legs and allowed frigid air to slither further beneath her shirt, which was when she realized she was mostly naked.

She stopped moving. With crystalline clarity, she recalled exactly what had happened.

The mooncat. Tal’s scream wrenching at something within her, something she hadn’t known she possessed.

The fall through the ice.

The freezing water pushing itself into her lungs.

The memories.

She squeezed her eyes shut more tightly, but her breathing sped up, betraying her wakefulness. She felt the person holding her go suddenly very still.

One of her hands was tucked against the warm skin of a collarbone. Carefully, slowly, she splayed her fingers over it. Her thumb grazed the narrow, puckered line of a scar. With that, she ascertained who it was that held her.

So many scars, she faintly recalled murmuring. Who gave them to you?

You did.

This scar was from the fire at the palace. She’d lost control. Burned down nearly an entire wing. He’d saved her. Not before she’d blasted him with a beam of bright white flame, though, one that had carved deeply enough to notch bone.

Her hand was shaking now. From the cold, she tried to tell herself.

Her fingers crept sideways. The notch below his neck. This one was ragged, messy. An assassin’s crossbow bolt meant for her. He’d been left behind as the guards hustled her to safety, and had treated the injury himself before returning to the palace. Now she knew why; he couldn’t risk anyone seeing his blood.

Lower. Fourth rib from the bottom. He’d woken her from a nightmare. Startled and still under the influence of its blind terror, she’d lashed out at him with a hand full of sparks.

Now, Tal’s chest trembled beneath her palm. “Please,” he said, strained in a ragged, broken way she’d never heard before. “Stop.”

Returning to herself and the present moment, she was thoroughly horrified. He was under an oath.