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

She turned back to Tal, squaring her body to his as if they were fighters in a ring, and lifted her chin. “No.”

“What?”

“You heard me. No. I won’t go back without you. I won’t save the Saints from my sister unless you let me save you, too.” It was a gamble, but one she was more than willing to follow through on, if that was what it took. She had never met anyone from his mountain base and the few Saints she had met had unanimously wanted her dead. She owed them nothing. She didn’t particularly care if her sister killed them or not. But Tal cared. She would use whatever leverage she could to keep him alive, and she refused to feel even the slightest bit guilty about it. He had a claim on her soul and she was done denying it; he would live, even if it damned her. Not, she supposed, that she could be any more damned than she already was.

He closed his eyes. He didn’t look angered by her blackmail like she would have expected, though. When he spoke again, she realized why. “Your sister will die in the attack on the base.”

She stared at him. Slowly, the words sank through her until she could pick them apart and decipher the truth beneath them. “Your vision,” she guessed finally. “You didn’t tell the Saints all of it.” Her hands began to shake and she curled them into fists, digging her nails into her palms to punish her traitorous body.

“Yes. I saw your coronation. That could only happen if Sarai dies.” His answer was without a trace of guilt, so unlike him that for one wild moment she wanted to laugh. He sounded like her.

She exhaled. The mist swirled around her, and when she inhaled again, the taste of copper slipped under her tongue and coated her teeth. It was because of the mines upriver, she thought, but couldn’t rid herself of the idea that it was blood and not metal at all that she was tasting. “You are saying that Sarai will die if I don’t stop her from leaving now.”

She had thought before that Tal had a claim on her soul. It was true, but her sister had a claim on it too. Sarai had done terrible things to her but she had done them in the name of a sister’s love, and it was that same love that drove Elodie to take a step away from Tal and toward the bridge now. “You’re lying.”

“I am not.”

She twisted quickly to look at the palace. The sun had begun to set. Hues of orange and pink laved the buildings on the other side of the river, gilding the roof tiles and glazing even the gutters in bright, hopeful stains, but none of it could touch Elodie through the mist. She could just make out the palace crouched like a dragon above the river, and the rust-and-cobalt shape that was slowly rising above its crenellations. The zeppelin was floating up to the level of the docking tower, where the empress and her soldiers would board.

If Sarai was dead and Tal was gone, what would be left for Elodie? She would be the magicless ruler of a palace full of her enemies, and the only two people in the world who she loved would be dead.

Love, she thought again. The realization was a fire. It burned through the shed skin of her past self, burned through her confusion, her anger, her fear, her helplessness. She loved Tal. Not merely cared about him. Not simply felt safe near him. This was the claim he had on her soul, and now that she finally recognized it, she wasn’t shocked at its presence, but was instead shocked at just how deeply its roots had had to wind into her heart before she registered its presence. What a fool she had been, to miss it before. And what a fool she was now, to think it made any difference.

She could not save Tal. He did not wish to be saved. Even now he was already half-faded from the world: skin pale, sweat and mist mingled on his brow, eyes like glass marbles—fragile and unnatural in the way they caught too much of the light. He had brought her back to life when he had no reason to. Had she any right to ask this from him, too? To care for a person he should rightfully despise, just because she had finally realized she loved him? To save himself for her sake, when all of the despicable acts he’d committed over the last two years had been for her sake?

He wanted freedom. And even if it meant the ruination of them both, she wasn’t sure she could deny him that any longer.

“Please,” she said softly, trying one last time, even though she had resolved earlier that she wouldn’t lower herself to beg. “Please don’t leave me.”

He reached into the pack he’d slung over his shoulders and withdrew something that shone blackly, catching all the shades of the sunset as the mist beaded on it: her crown. It was a delicate, twisted thing, its sharp angles too brittle to last, and yet somehow it had survived the arduous journey intact.

Tal held it out to her. “Goodbye, Elodie,” he said, but the sound of her name was not enough to soften the sight of him holding her crown. She reached for it, and when she had gripped it, a memory surged through the metal like a spark of static electricity: the two of them standing at the palace docks not far from this spot, his hands on her crown as he swore to protect her. The metal was inert now, empty of any such promise.

She accepted the crown. He released it. Her hands dropped heavily to her sides. The roots he’d wrapped around her heart stretched and broke away, one by one.

The zeppelin was rising