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

in wordless horror as their father dropped to his knees and then fell on his stomach, his warm iron blood splattering the dead moss. He tilted his head against the leaves to look at Sarai, and the last emotion in his eyes was admiration. He had always taught his daughters to be ruthless; it was their heritage. He had not expected his eldest to take so well to the lesson.

Sarai wrapped her arms around Elodie and picked her up like she was a mother and not merely a sister. “It’s okay,” she whispered as Elodie’s vision began to dim. “No one will know.”

arai bore her unconscious sister to the royal physician’s office. The Alloyed Palace rang with shouts and the occasional blast of cannon fire. The rebels must have mustered for yet another attempt at a coup. It was providing enough chaos for Sarai to perhaps be able to slip through the palace halls unseen.

She didn’t want to be unseen. She bore her sister with a straight back, her chin lifted, a dark dare in her eyes to meet the gaze of any noble or servant that might glance in her direction. They all parted before her like a sea of reeds. They were her subjects now. A part of them knew it already.

Sarai snapped at a servant to open the door to Albinus’s office and then kicked it closed behind her. She was surrounded by cots, but she marched straight to her cousin’s desk—where he was sitting, pale eyes wide, frame rigid with shock—and laid Elodie atop it. Her sister promptly bled all over Albinus’s important papers, which Sarai found satisfying.

“Heal her,” she snapped.

A calculating sort of hardness slid over his expression then. He stood, carefully pulling his robes far enough away from the desk to avoid the rivulets of blood. “My dear young cousin,” he started, “I think we should fetch your father—”

“Then you may fetch him,” Sarai interrupted. “I will tell you exactly where to find him: lying in the scorch-tree woodlands with his throat cut open, watering the forest with royal blood.”

She watched him begin to understand. Fear replaced his calculated look, and another thrill of satisfaction uncurled down Sarai’s spine.

“I killed him because he was going to kill her,” Sarai went on. “I shall do the same to anyone who threatens my sister. Are you among that number?”

Albinus swallowed, licked his lips. His eyes flitted from his bloodied desk and the unconscious girl atop it back to Sarai. Then he ducked his head and stepped away from his desk, coming around its side. He bowed in a full obeisance, forehead brushing Sarai’s slippers, palms flat against the floor, lips dusty from brushing the ground. It was the bow made of a penitent subject to their liege.

“My Empress,” he said, voice tight. “Order me.”

“Heal her,” Sarai commanded again. As he rose and began to grab bottles and tools off the shelves nearby, she tilted her head, listening to the distant booms of cannon fire and the shouts from the hallway and the gardens. “I take it that the palace is under attack?”

“From the intelligence gathered before your…arrival, it seems to be a force of Saints led by silver Smiths.” He opened Elodie’s mouth and poured a tincture down her throat. Immediately the pain that had been twisted her sleeping features eased, and her breaths came more clearly. The flow of blood from her mouth ceased.

Sarai’s lips twisted. “Then the silver Smiths have foreseen the events of tonight, and attempt to take advantage of the uncertainty that will be caused by a royal patricide.”

“I suspect so, Highness.”

“Then there will be no patricide,” Sarai decided. “Call for two guards—unimportant ones who won’t be missed. Promise them a year’s wages and swear them to silence, then have them go and retrieve my father’s body from the forest. They are to clean up any evidence of his death there and transport him to his own bed, where he will be found with a rebel’s arrow in his throat. As soon as they are finished, arrange to have them killed in the Saints attack as well.”

Albinus scooped Elodie off his desk and laid her on a cot, sending a tight look at all the documents that were now drenched red. “Yes, Empress,” he replied, and tugged a nearby cord to summon a servant.

“After that,” Sarai said, “I want you to give my sister magic.”

Albinus, who had been gingerly cutting off Elodie’s shirt, paused. “What?” he said, forgetting in his incredulity to address her properly. She stared at him until he amended, “My Empress.”

“Give her magic,” Sarai repeated.

“I’m…I’m sure you have to know, Your Majesty, that is impossible. The quickening cannot be induced. If the element that will make someone a Smith is present, they will become one, and if it isn’t, they never will.”

“You are the royal physician. You were granted this position because you are brilliant above and beyond the rest of the House of Copper. I am taking all limits off your funding and ordering you to find a way to put metal and magic in my sister’s blood.”

Slowly, Albinus finished cutting Elodie’s shirt off. “I…have often wanted to experiment with something in that direction,” he admitted. “I will try. Likely she would make the ideal subject, since her blood will probably already have the right receptors, thanks to her genetics. What metal shall I attempt to work with?”

Sarai turned, scanning the shelves around her. The natural answer to Albinus’s question would be iron, but Sarai didn’t want Elodie to be an iron Smith. She didn’t want her to be what was expected, what was known. She wanted Elodie to be a force to be reckoned with; something new and fierce, a girl who would never be helpless again.

Her eyes landed on a vial of gleaming silvery liquid. She picked it up, held it to the light. “This one,” she said decisively.

“Mercury?” asked Albinus, startled. “But mercury Smiths never live past childhood. The