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

“That is, I suppose, your attention.” Something like glee loosened his features, dimming the pleasant fear. He had some sort of trick planned.

Her eyes narrowed. “You suppose correctly, cousin. I will let your improper address slide this one time but in the future, you will call me Highness, as you did my sister.”

Albinus clenched his jaw and his glee diminished. She could see his mind working quickly, trying to calculate how he might come out ahead in this situation—how he might use his knowledge of her secrets to blackmail her or gain the leverage to dethrone her, probably. She stepped forward until she was right in front of him and then leaned forward even further. “You have not outed me in all these years because you were frightened of my sister,” she murmured. When her breath brushed over his ear, he shuddered. “You should now be frightened of me.”

She stepped back. Albinus swallowed, gritted his teeth, and then lowered himself to the floor. He performed a full obeisance to her as he once had to a young Sarai. The Destroyer let him stay there for a long count of five, and then said, “Good. You may rise, and tell me about this prisoner that requires my attention.”

Albinus dipped his head—likely to try to hide the impotent rage that gripped his every feature now—and gestured at the hall behind the Destroyer. “He is there. Your Highness. Normally such prisoners would be executed on sight, but he has demanded his right to a trial. With your leave, I will assemble the representatives of the high courts to witness the event tomorrow morning.” Then he raised his head to meet the Destroyer’s eyes, and she saw that it was not rage, but a bright and devilish malice that shone from his expression. She had embarrassed him in front of her guards, and he did not care—because whatever was happening now, it could only be to his great favor.

A premonition feathered across her spine. Slowly, she turned.

The prisoner knelt on the opposite side of the hall. Dried blood of many colors spattered his clothing, his dark hair, his skin. Fresher blood stained the carpet beneath him silver and orange, leaking from a long, shallow cut that followed the line of his cheekbone. When he met her eyes—her newly mercurial eyes—he flinched.

His presence pulled her forward like a magnet tugging at the mercury in her blood. She knelt before him so that their gazes were level. The soldiers behind her were too well-trained to gasp or mutter amongst themselves, but she could hear the whisper of their feet against the carpet as they shifted their weight, uncertain of what was happening.

Tal didn’t look away from her, but she could see the desire to do so playing across his features. She lifted a hand—slowly, so that he had time to brace himself and not flinch again—and brushed a knuckle over the cut in his cheek. He closed his eyes then, and though his mouth was still tight with fear, he leaned into her touch so slightly that she would not have felt it if she was not so keenly attuned to him.

“Who,” she said, her voice as cold as the Skyteeth blizzard that they had survived together, “has cut him?”

One of the guards standing at his side cleared his throat. “I did, Your Highness. It is protocol to check the blood of an accused—”

She was on her feet. She was lifting a hand. She was calling up every scrap of power within her, more than she had used to burn her sister’s pyre, more than she had brought to bear on the copper door, more than she had used to incinerate the entire mining town last week. He had hurt Tal. He had made him bleed, revealed his greatest weakness for the world to see. She would make him pay dearly for it.

Tal stood then. His hands were manacled behind his back and he was favoring one leg—the one weak from rust phage—but he still managed to put himself between her and the guard. “My lady,” he said. “Please don’t.”

She stopped. The words arrested her, the sound of her old title falling from his lips like poison. Don’t call me that, she recalled saying. The memory tore briefly through the veil of her emotions once again, and she gasped at the sudden loss of equilibrium.

Behind her, Albinus’s voice rang out. “He begs for his own life!” he said, trying to sound scandalized but barely hiding his elation. “Will you allow such impertinence from a boy who has lied to Your Imperial Highness for years, flouted your wise sister’s laws in the halls of your own home?”

Tal held the Destroyer’s gaze. To everyone else assembled, it looked as if he were indeed pleading for her to spare him. The two of them were the only ones who knew the truth: that she was seconds away from killing every single one of these guards and Albinus too, that she was so close to violence she could already hear the way they would scream and writhe beneath her fire. That the only reason she stayed her hand was because Tal had asked her to. He was still holding her with his gaze now, refusing to release her, or perhaps it was her who was allowing him to steady her.

“I will allow whatever I see fit,” she told Albinus at last. Some of what she was thinking must have bled through to her voice, because when he answered again, his voice was slightly more subdued.

“His crimes are not limited to bearing silver blood, Your Highness. He was found in the dungeons. He freed over a dozen zealot prisoners and killed half that many dungeon guards.”

Her eyes widened. He had come back? He had come back…to the dungeons, to free the prisoners who had tried to assassinate her, when he’d said there was nothing that could sway him to return to the palace?

Apparently, he had only meant that she wasn’t enough