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

Albinus could fix her. Then she could protect herself again. But…fixing her would mean giving her back her fire. Her silver eyes, her mercurial blood. It would mean becoming the Destroyer again. And she realized, with a sudden and violent certainty, that she did not want that. And even if she did, even if she became who she had once been—she would still be alone. She would still be afraid.

She knew she was feeling an emotion, one that ran much deeper than her current skittering panic and fear. It was something powerful and unwieldy, something that would fill her and bury her all at once like a valley beneath a landslide, but it was far off yet, still fuzzy and amorphous beneath the influence of whatever they had drugged her with. She had to make it out of here before it overcame her or she would be utterly useless.

She managed to turn her head, just a twitch, but it was enough to make out the brown bottle that was leaning against a log at her side. It was unstoppered and smelled faintly of bitter black poppy. Ah; so laudanum was what they had dosed her with. And, apparently, had been about to dose her with once again before something distracted them, allowing her to finally surface from her drug-thickened nightmares.

She could use this against them. Laudanum was a weapon she would be happy to wield, one that required no strength beyond the ability to lift her hand. Admittedly, even that was a strength she did not yet quite possess, but if the Saints could just stay distracted for a few minutes more she was certain she could make it work. All she had to do was dump the laudanum in the soup.

And hope they ate it before they killed her.

Fixing the laudanum bottle with her coldest glare, she ordered her fingers to twitch. They did. She ordered them to reach for the bottle. They merely twitched with slightly more vigor. Damn. The Saints were still distracted, at least, huddled up around Tal as he explained—

Her fingers stopped twitching. Her glare faded. A tremor went through her whole body as she registered what, exactly, Tal was explaining. As far away as she was from their huddle, she could only catch a few of his words as they floated over the campfire:

Sarai. Albinus. Emperor.

Misfire.

Misfire. The word echoed strangely in her mind, a key in search of its lock. Something dark and dangerous and long-forgotten blinked its eyes open behind the surface of her thoughts, and suddenly her old nightmare yawned like a crevasse below her. Frightened, she tried to pull herself back from it. She was not a scared little girl with a mouth full of blood. She was here, she was now, she was awake. But Tal was still speaking:

Moss

Arrow

Red

And the words were all keys and her mind the lock rusted shut, finally creaking open.

Her nightmare pulled her in.

She was a little girl in bed, the emperor’s shadow suffocating her. It is a father’s duty, he said, more resigned than regretful, and then he asked his nephew to join him for a drink before he killed his youngest daughter.

No. No. That wasn’t right. That wasn’t her nightmare. Her father had been a hard man, impatient for Elodie’s blood to quicken, but he had never planned to murder her. She would have remembered such a thing.

Her mind and Tal’s words pulled her inexorably onward. Sarai launched herself out the window, Elodie crept after. And then it was her old nightmare, but in new and vivid detail: scorch moss dripping crimson around them, a man’s shadow—her father’s shadow—pinning her down as her mouth filled with blood. For the first time, when she spat it onto the dead leaves, she could make out its color.

Red. Red.

Her sister saved her. Her father died. His blood flowed thick, molten iron gilding the moss and leaves just as it should, not lying in a puddle red and thin and weak like hers.

Six-year-old Elodie passed out. Her nightmare ended. But Tal wasn’t done talking.

He spoke of Sarai carrying her to Albinus’s chambers, of her demanding his fealty. He gave in to Sarai, because of course, no one could ever do otherwise with her sister. Albinus had healed Elodie. But then…

“Sarai told him to infuse her with mercury,” Tal was saying, his voice rusty and dry now. “To give her magic even if it poisoned her in the process.”

The Saints went still with shock and then, like a covey of startled hens, exploded into a flutter of denial and questions all at once.

Elodie’s breath quickened, went jagged and rasping. This was not true. She would make Tal take it back. He was lying and she didn’t know why, except that he must want to hurt her. But he doesn’t know you’re awake, whispered a small voice in her mind, and she crushed it without mercy.

Laudanum. She needed to put the laudanum in the soup. She ordered her hand to move and this time it did. She closed her numb fingers clumsily around the bottle and then considered the pot of soup. To reach it, she would have to stand. She wasn’t sure her legs would hold her yet, and anyway, standing would certainly draw the attention of the Saints. Tossing the whole bottle in was the only option. She winced at the thought; she didn’t have the best aim even when she wasn’t drugged, and she could already hear how the glass would shatter on the edge of the pot, alerting the rebels and ruining her entire plan. But what choice did she have?

She had to make Tal stop talking. She had to get away from here, even if she didn’t know yet where she would go.

She pulled her arm back and gently, carefully, tossed the open bottle toward the soup. It bounced off the inside lip of the pot. The thick glass didn’t break, but it did make a sharp clanking noise. At that