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

Had a gold Smith come upon them and used their powers to rescue the Destroyer? But if that was the case, why not slit the throats of all the Saints while they were sleeping, or take them prisoner?

And then she realized there was something else that could put a group of people to sleep, and took two steps sideways to peer into the soup pot. There was a stack of cleaned bowls next to it but the pot itself was crusted with the burnt remnants of stew. She rooted around until she found a stick and then used it to poke at the bottom of the pot—and immediately the stick clanked against something laying below the surface of the stew. With a snarl, she drew back the stick and drove it down hard, and the sound of shattering glass echoed through the clearing.

The bottle of laudanum. While they’d all been yelling at each other and listening to Tal explain his visions, the Destroyer had been awake, and had managed to dose their soup with the drug they’d been using to keep her unconscious. The Destroyer hadn’t had any to eat, of course, which was why she wasn’t among the sleeping bodies now…and Tal hadn’t eaten any, either. At the time she had thought he was too upset to eat—she had been, too, but her mother-hen girlfriend had forced her to eat anyway—but now, there was a small, dark part of her that couldn’t help but wonder if he and the Destroyer had planned this somehow.

She broke her stick over her knee and hurled the pieces in opposite directions as hard as she could. Then she turned and started toward a sled, meaning to harness the dogs while she waited for the others to wake—but then she spotted a page of paper pinned beneath the stack of washed bowls. Her name was printed at the top in familiar neat lettering. She snatched it up, tearing a corner off in the process, and read.

Nyx,

Go warn the base. I’ll try to buy you a day or two.

Forgive me.

 

She read her brother’s note three times before she could process what it meant. The only way he could hope to “buy her a day or two” to warn the Saints was by somehow keeping Sarai from attacking the base for that long. And the only way the empress would wait to rescue her sister was if she no longer needed to rescue her sister. Tal was helping the Destroyer get back to the palace.

Nyx dropped the note. It fluttered to the ground, where the dew-laden grass slowly soaked it, wet spots bleeding over the page like inkblots.

Tal had left her behind, again. Tal had chosen the Destroyer over her again.

She scrubbed a hand over her eyes, furious to find wet tracks on her cheeks. She was not going to cry. She was not going to stand here and whimper that her brother’s spirit had been broken by a monster. She was going to track him down, and she was going to stop him, and then she was going to end the Destroyer if it was the last thing she ever did.

She went back to Helenia, her steps steadier now that she’d had a few minutes to begin recovering from her drugged sleep. She knelt down and reached out a hand, but then stopped, her fingers hovering over Helenia’s shoulder. Her mind played out the scene that was about to happen: Hel would wake, Nyx would tell her what happened and what she was going to do, and then…Helenia would stop her.

Her girlfriend had always been soft-hearted. It was one of the reasons Nyx had fallen so hard for her; sometimes, many times, Hel was the only softness present in any part of Nyx’s life. She smoothed Nyx’s hard edges, provided calm in Nyx’s many storms, and had guided her through some of the worst weeks of her life after Tal had first left. But Helenia’s kindness, her tendency to think the best of others, sometimes extended to people it shouldn’t—as last night’s conversation had shown.

Helenia had recognized Tal’s and Nyx’s right to decide the Destroyer’s fate then, but she had argued stridently against execution, and if she were awake now she would do it again. She would tell her to trust her brother. To trust the god who had given him his visions. To have hope that this twist of fate might mean “Elodie” was indeed meant to be redeemed. And even if Nyx managed to talk her around, the time it would take would allow Tal and the Destroyer to get so far ahead that Nyx would never catch them.

Slowly, Nyx withdrew her hand.

The other sleds were all where they had been last night, and the dogs Tal hadn’t taken lifted their heads and watched as Nyx chose one and began hooking up the harnesses.

The rest of the Saints, including Helenia, would be fine. They would wake up soon and figure out for themselves what had happened. They would take care of warning the base.

And by the time they were done, the Destroyer would be dead.

DURING THEIR TWO-DAY JOURNEY SOUTH, Elodie did everything she could to endear herself to Tal. She was, predictably, not very good at it.

Throughout the first day, she noticed that he and Maluk seemed to have an affinity for each other. During their infrequent and brisk rest breaks, Tal checked the old dog over carefully, looking at each paw for any thorns or pebbles that might’ve gotten stuck, spending more time with him than any of the other four haulers. Maluk, for his part, leaned into Tal during these sessions and closed his eyes, the picture of canine contentment. So the first evening, when Tal went to hunt for the dogs’ dinner, Elodie dug through the packs until she found a brush and then used it to clean Maluk’s fur until he shone. The hauler leaned into her just as he did with Tal and