Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

She ignored all of it. She had already burned their town, her sole duty for this journey. She had no further business with these folk.

She stepped forward, her boots cracking like cannon shots against the sheet-metal floor as she surveyed the prisoners, searching for the girl from this morning. She found her easily. The assassin was the only one not cowering in her single-occupant cell, sitting instead with her legs crossed, wearing a haughty expression that spoke nothing of the pain she must be in. The blood on her shoulder glistened black in the bursts of light.

“My guard has impeccable aim,” the Destroyer said conversationally, tilting her head as she stopped outside the cell. “You never stood a chance, you know.”

The assassin bared her teeth in a smile. “Lovely to see you again. Why don’t you come in? I’d be happy to stain more of your clothes with my blood. Or your blood.” She delivered the words in a careless tone, but was panting with the effort of it by the end.

“Such bravado for one so young,” the Destroyer murmured.

“Please, I’m two years your elder. It’s only all the murder that makes you feel so old.”

The Destroyer reached toward the bars and skimmed one with a finger. The magic within the metal recognized her touch and the door to the cell swung open on silent hinges. She stepped onto the threshold. It was time to begin the interrogation proper. She held out one hand and allowed her magic to seep through her skin, curling to life as a surly red flame in her palm. “What are you called?” she asked.

The girl remained seated, her smile widening. “Your doom.”

Irritation and something else—a faint nudge of admiration, quickly smothered—stirred. “When you fled after your ill-fated attempt at some murder of your own, my guard reacted as if he recognized you. What do you know of him?”

The girl shrugged her uninjured shoulder. “Never seen him before in my life. What do you know of him?”

“I know that he is mine, and I will suffer no threat to him.”

An honest expression flicked across the girl’s face at last. She mastered it quickly, but she wasn’t nearly as practiced at concealing her emotions as Tal, and the Destroyer had more than long enough to recognize the fury and anguish that tightened the girl’s eyes and twisted her smile into a brief snarl. “He is not yours,” the girl said in a low tone void of her earlier bravado, “and it is not me who poses a threat to him.”

The Destroyer’s anxiety deepened a touch. Such strong emotion spoke of a close bond. It was as she’d feared, then—Tal did indeed have some sort of personal connection to the assassin.

A sudden anger cracked to life, swallowing up her anxiety. How dare this girl presume a claim to Tal, to the sole person the Destroyer could trust with her safety in a palace full of pretenders?

She stepped closer to the assassin and knelt down gracefully, her cape pooling behind her on the damp floor of the cell. Staining more of her clothes, indeed, she noted ruefully. “It wouldn’t do to have you bleed out before you get to your trial. That wound ought to be cauterized,” she said, and kept her eyes on the girl as she held out the hand with the flame and pressed it hard against the girl’s shoulder.

The girl screamed and jerked. To her credit, she managed to turn the flail into an attack, driving her head forward into the Destroyer’s chest. The Destroyer twisted smoothly away before the blow could do more than graze her ribs.

The coppery tang of blood turned acrid and smoky as the Destroyer pulled her hand away from the assassin’s wound and brushed off her palms, giving the girl a few seconds of respite to consider her situation. “Perhaps you wish to give me your name now,” she suggested.

The girl was on her hands and knees, fingers splayed against the floor. She took a shaky breath. “Thank you for that,” she said. “I’ve been demanding they bring a doctor in here to see to my wound before I bleed out…but it seems I no longer need to worry about it.”

The Destroyer considered the girl for a long moment. The earlier nudge of admiration crept back in and this time would not be smothered. She struggled with it briefly, but her fortitude was already weakened by having gone too long without her medical treatment, and after only a few seconds she gave in.

She leaned forward and inclined her head. “My name is Elodie,” she told the girl quietly. “And now you may thank me in truth, because unlike torture, my name is a gift I have given no assassin before.”

Few people remembered the Destroyer’s true name. It was a secret long kept hidden, not because public knowledge of it represented any sort of threat, but because she needed her sister’s empire to see her as a weapon—merciless, unbendable—and not a person.

Sometimes, though, she missed the syllables of her real name spoken aloud. Such an unpresuming name it was that her parents had given her. If they hadn’t been long dead, she might have asked them what they were thinking, to give a deadly princess such an incongruously sweet name.

The admission caught the assassin off guard. She eyed her as she pushed herself weakly to a sitting position. “What…what do I care about your name?” She panted. “You are nothing but the Destroyer to me and to everyone I care about…and that’s the only name you’ll ever hear from my lips.”

The words should have meant nothing. The Destroyer had heard far worse from the lips of far more powerful people. But somehow, in her weakened state, the declaration sank its roots into her soul and bloomed black with thorns.

She shoved to her feet, snagging her cape on a bolt in the floor in the process. It tore off a frayed shred of wine-colored fabric. The Destroyer barely noticed. Her magic