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

she felt an unexpected fizz of happiness at the sign of his trust. The dog, at least, seemed to like her—which was fortunate, because the gesture won her no goodwill at all from Tal. He barely glanced at her when he returned, dragging a dead hind behind him.

Then she and Tal took turns sleeping atop the packs that night as the other stood on the rails and mushed. Elodie didn’t wake him when her shift was over, instead letting him doze on as the fat, nearly-full moon rose. The stars flushed and faded in its presence, entirely outshone. They had the grace to know when they were beaten. Or perhaps they simply lacked the will for the fight.

The sled continued its southerly course, the foothills flattening around them, the Skyteeth receding into the distance, the scorch tree woodlands growing into a blur of crimson on the horizon as the sun dawned. The sled’s retrofitted wheels meant their journey was an uncomfortable, bone-rattling one. She didn’t know how Tal could sleep through it. When he woke, his eyes glassy with fever, she got her answer. He was limping visibly as he walked around to take her spot. Something lurched painfully in her chest at the proof of his growing weakness.

“I can keep going,” she said, clinging to the handle even though she was dazed with tiredness and starch-stiff from balancing on the jouncing rails most of the night.

“No,” Tal said shortly, and it turned out her will was as weak as the stars’, because she lay down on the packs without further argument and slept through the entire day. She felt perversely safe with him watching over her, as she always had, even though he had held a razor to her throat less than twenty-four hours ago.

They were both silent the next day as they traveled through the dripping crimson moss of the scorch woodlands, though she was sure they had different reasons for their reticence. The closer they came to the palace, the more ghosts rose up to pursue her, and she had little endurance left to outmaneuver them. As for Tal, she was beginning to suspect that he was keeping something from her. She could see it in the way he avoided looking at her, in the tightness of his expression when he did and how quickly he looked away again. So when they came to the bank of the Entengre river and the plated-metal palace rose up before them at last, Elodie looked not at it, but at Tal.

He said nothing, same as the last two days, but now it wasn’t just his silence that worried her. It was the quality of that silence. Always before it had been a tensely-held thing, not a lack of speech between them but rather the presence of something weightier and more terrible, something that could allow no words through the gaps in its defense. Now, though, Tal’s silence was empty. As if everything that could be said had already been said, and there was nothing left at all to fill the blank space that stretched between them.

And now, the way he was looking at the palace: not with the resignation and hatred that he’d always had, but rather as if he’d never seen it before, as if it were a thing he’d only ever heard of in stories, and now he was trying to match those stories to the sight before him. She saw her home through his eyes: every wall a curse, every spire a blade. Every room filled with monsters.

She watched him look at the Alloyed Palace, and she knew that he would leave her.

She broke the silence at last, because she realized now that he never would. “You’re not coming back with me.”

The river’s mist rose around them, a delicate sheen under the dying evening light. His eyes, which were already bright with fever, looked luminous in the haze. “I told you,” he said quietly, “that there was nothing that could make me go back.”

Her mind seemed to hang somewhere outside her body, suspended in the fog like a beetle in amber. Though she had spent the last two days trying to find some way to convince him to stay with her, the realization that he was refusing now to go back for even as long as it took to save his own life left her utterly without reply.

She could beg his forgiveness for her sins. She could promise his safety. But she could not lower herself to grovel for something he could never give and she couldn’t rightfully promise him her protection either. If she had no magic, she could do nothing to stop any distant cousin or half-royal acquaintance from hurting him to get to her. And if she did have magic, then she would be the one to hurt him, one way or another.

“Tal,” she said at last. “Don’t do this.”

“It is not something I’m doing, but something I am refusing to do,” he said, so calmly that she thought she might throttle him. How could he so easily accept his own demise when the thought of it made her half-mad with desperation?

“Let me save you. Let me make reparations to you,” she tried next. “I don’t expect you to stay with me. But at least don’t let yourself die just to spite me.”

He exhaled, something that was almost a laugh, and turned at last to face her. “If I wanted to spite you, we wouldn’t be standing here.” He nodded at the palace. “It’s nearly evening. Your sister will be preparing the zeppelin any moment now. You must go to her before she takes off.”

Elodie glanced at the bridge that stretched across the river. Few people were on it at this time of day. She would be able to get across it and to the palace in the space of perhaps ten minutes. Judging by the timing of the base attack—or at least, what Tal’s vision had revealed about the base attack—she still had