Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

palace soon based on Tal’s vision. They’d met up outside the city with the former prisoners who Tal had released from the dungeons, and had thus been updated with more recent events.

After that, Helenia had gone ahead into the city and visited safehouse after safehouse until she tracked down Saasha and made the woman tell her what was happening. A part of Saasha must have wanted Helenia to save her daughter, because the woman held nothing back, telling Helenia every detail of the plan she’d manipulated Nyx into carrying out.

Helenia had wasted no time returning to the waiting army of Saints and using the chaos of the impending trial to get them into the city. They had arrived in the garden too late to have any effect on the planned assassination—but not too late, it turned out, to use the destabilization of the empress and the deaths of half of the high court leaders as an opportunity to invade the palace.

She told Nyx all of this.

“You are brilliant,” Nyx informed her.

“I know,” Helenia said primly, and kissed her again.

When Elodie woke twenty minutes later, she was predictably disgruntled about the invasion of her palace. The two dozen Saint guards surrounding her provided reason to keep her peace, but unfortunately, Elodie had never been good at keeping peace. She was far better at making threats.

“Jostle him one more time and I’ll break your fingers off,” she said to the young copper Smith who had been captured and then swiftly put to work by Helenia. He was currently checking Tal over to see why he was still unconscious. Maluk growled to back up her threat, one of his paws placed protectively on Tal’s chest.

“My—My lady,” the copper Smith stuttered, eyes wide. “I—”

“Don’t call me that.”

Helenia interceded. “I doubt threats will inspire the boy to work harder.”

Elodie shot her a glance. “In my experience, threats very often prove inspirational.”

“Ugh,” Nyx said from her spot a few feet away, where she was ostentatiously sharpening her confiscated dagger on one of the rocks that had cracked off from the stage. It seemed to be some sort of stress-relief measure for her. “I forbid you to banter with her, Hel.” Her voice lacked some of the spite that it used to have whenever she spoke to or about Elodie, though.

Helenia snorted. “I banter only with you, my darling.” She turned back to the Saint she’d been speaking with regarding the palace’s invasion. Apparently two wings had been taken mostly bloodlessly during the chaos. The remaining lords and ladies of the high courts had barricaded themselves in the last three wings and the fighting was now proceeding room to room.

Elodie found that she didn’t much care who won. She had already burned her crown and given up her magic. She supposed she might as well give up her empire with it. All she cared about was that Tal would wake up, and be well.

Although, she thought ruefully now, he would probably care who won the battle, and how many innocents and Saints would die in the process.

“Fine,” she said abruptly, looking back at Helenia.

Helenia sent the Saint she’d been speaking to away with new orders and then turned back to Elodie. “Fine, what?”

Elodie waved a hand at the far edge of the stage, where the bodies of several leaders of the high courts were slowly growing cold. “Pick a crown. I think gold would suit you best, personally, but you can choose for yourself.”

Helenia tilted her head. “What exactly are you offering?”

“A truce. A compromise. Pick your crown, and tonight, I’ll put it on your head myself and name you co-empress. I know the courts; they’re full of people just like Albinus, all of them scheming how to stab each other in the back—sometimes literally—to gain power for themselves. You’d have to drag them kicking and screaming before they pledge loyalty to any outsider you might try to install if you get rid of me. Co-ruling is the only relatively peaceable solution. We can end the fighting before it escalates.”

Helenia’s eyes slowly narrowed. “Co-empress. I am…not sure about that.”

“Well, get sure quickly, because it’s the best offer you’re going to get,” Elodie snapped, her gaze returning once again to Tal’s face. She thought she had seen him twitch. “I know how the empire runs and how it will respond to the sort of change you want to initiate. I can help you save lives and livelihoods during the transition.”

“The transition to what, pray tell?”

She waved a hand. “What is it they do in the east now? A democracy, or something like that. I’m assuming that’s what you were hoping to achieve.” A democracy would mean her moving out of the palace—away from the den of vipers where she had never, ever felt safe—and finding someplace to settle down and finally learn about herself. And maybe, if she was very, very lucky, she could also learn what she and Tal were together.

If he would only wake up.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Helenia and Nyx exchange a shocked glance. A democracy was indeed all the Saints could have hoped to achieve in their wildest dreams.

“You will pardon the Saints involved in today’s incursion?” Helenia asked—the tentative beginnings of a negotiation that Elodie knew was certain to go on for quite a while. “You will formally forgive Nyx for her attempt on your life? For all of her attempts on your life, that is.”

Nyx paused in her dagger-sharpening, her wary gaze settling on the two of them.

“Yes, very well,” Elodie said impatiently. It wasn’t as if Tal was going to tolerate her trying to exact vengeance against his sister anyway. And if she was honest, there was a good-sized part of her that had come to grudgingly admire Nyx; she was stubborn, courageous, and charmingly violent.

Nyx scoffed. “As if we would believe you. As if you would forgive the crimes of a Saints assassin.”

The young copper Smith interrupted, probably eager to be away