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

out his hand. This was how he would begin to ask his sister’s forgiveness. This was how he would try to make up for his actions, for his lie. Elodie, with her red blood and brown eyes and sharp wit and innocent ferocity, might have been a person he could care for—God help him—but Nyx was the only precious thing in his life, and this was something he needed to do for her. After a moment, Nyx slowly lifted the razor and set it in his hand.

“I will kill her myself,” he told them all, and wrapped his fingers around the weapon’s handle.

ELODIE LAY VERY STILL AND LISTENED TO THE SAINTS DEBATE HER DEATH.

The sun had been setting, staining the temple with shades of rose and plum, when whatever they had dosed her with had first begun to wear off. The heat of the fire on her face had woken her. At first, the only thing she could do was try to turn her head away, unable to even summon the strength to open her eyes. And then familiar footsteps—the steady drumbeat that had underscored the terrible symphony of her last two years—moved past her, and someone said, “Tal has had a vision.”

The words took a moment to penetrate the fuzz that filled her mind, and then she remembered…silver Smith. Tal was a silver Smith. She must not tell anyone. No—she shook her head, trying to jar herself into clear thinking. If they were saying Tal had a vision then they must already know what he was. It was no use worrying about him.

And then she heard what his vision was, and heard the stony anger in Nyx’s voice when she said we kill her now, and she abruptly realized Tal was not at all the one she should be worrying about.

Her breathing quickened as she lay there. She felt the warmth of fire on her face but none at all sparking in her veins. She could not stand. Could not even make a pitiful physical attempt to save her own life—not that her strength would have been a match for any of theirs, even if she hadn’t been drugged. She wondered how much it would hurt when Nyx killed her. She supposed that would depend on how much Nyx wanted it to hurt, and the answer to that was, of course, probably a lot.

Tal. Tal would save her. Tal was the only person she could ever trust to be on her side, if only because he had no choice. They would almost certainly think to restrain him, but he had fought off Elodie’s attackers in worse conditions before—her breath caught as she remembered the incidents, one bloody, fiery scene after another, too much to hold in her mind at once—and surely he could do it again.

And then he said, “You do not need to hold me back,” and Elodie’s entire world inverted.

Numbly, distantly, still unable to do as much as open her eyes, she listened to him explain. She was dead, he said, and she recalled the burning cold of the water, the blur of his shadow through the ice, how much heavier liquid felt in her lungs than air. His voice shook with shame when he spoke of saving her. When he said I breathed for her, she felt the ghost of his lips on hers.

She had died.

Which meant his oath was gone.

But—but he’d saved her. She scrambled for the logic of it, for the good news, for anything other than the panic that was now scrabbling madly through her mind. He had saved her of his own free will, because…because he wanted to? Because he cared for her?

He could not care for her. She was not a person people cared for. She was an unlovable creature; she had made herself such.

She remembered the warp and weft of his scars under her fingers. The way he’d snapped at her before that: You are not a kind person. Stop touching me. All my nightmares are of her.

And she knew then he was sorry he had saved her, and that now he would kill her.

Her panic intensified. She forced her eyes open and began to consider how she might save herself. The uncomfortable heat of the fire on her face resolved into snapping flames a few feet away: a bland yellow-and-orange color, nowhere near as vibrant and alive as her own magic. But it still burned. It was here, and her magic was not. Maybe she could use it.

She didn’t want to use it. She didn’t want to wield fire, not against Tal. Never against Tal. And it wasn’t as if she could just stick her bare arms into the flames and toss the burning wood at the Saints without injuring herself, too.

There was a pot suspended over the fire. It had to be full of some kind of hot liquid. She could…what? Pick it up and toss the scalding coffee or soup or bone stock over the Saints with all the strength she didn’t have, and then flee into the forest to find her way home using all of the survival skills she also didn’t have?

And even if she did make it home, the Alloyed Palace would be less of a refuge for her now than it had ever been. So many had tried to assassinate her when she was whole, when she was protected by both mercury and Tal. How long before someone succeeded now that she had neither? Returning there would be like walking into an adders’ nest. Despair filtered through her panic, making it all the more potent as she imagined striding through those cold metal-plated corridors with an empty space at her side. It wasn’t only that she would be unprotected. She would be alone. There was Sarai, of course, but she was as much the Iron Empress as she was Elodie’s sister, and no matter how much love was between them, her loyalties could never belong wholly to Elodie.