Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

The impossible, he thought, but he answered, “Nothing.”

She barked a short laugh, a sound so sudden and violent that it made him flinch. “Everyone wants something,” she said, her tone bitter like the old-coin taste of the river. “You want fame? Infamy, rather? Do you want your family excused from paying taxes?”

“I have no family,” he said. It was only partly true. His parents had been killed in the Silver Coup, but he had a sister. One who was probably cursing his name right now as she read the note he’d left behind for her. His heart twisted at the thought.

“Then why do you want to swear to me?” the Destroyer demanded. Suspicion flickered in her voice like live embers. White-hot sparks began to dance around her fingers, snapping into existence so brightly they burned afterimages into his vision. She could flay him to ash with a gesture if he answered wrong.

Carefully, he phrased his reply. This conversation was outside the bounds of what his visions had shown him. He was in uncharted territory now. But he knew one thing, and that was that no one dared lie to the Destroyer, Lady of Mercury, leveler of cities, and the most volatile weapon the empress possessed. So he answered with complete honesty: “I believe the Unforged God wants me to protect you.”

He’d been bewildered when the visions had first started. He couldn’t understand why his god would ask him to defend one of the people who’d been oppressing the empire for generations—one of the people who would execute him instantly if she learned that the element of silver, which gave him a gift of truth-seeing and foresight and thus was forbidden, flowed through his blood. But he trusted that somehow, eventually, it would make sense.

The Destroyer blinked in surprise, then again in amusement. The sparks dancing around her fingers fizzled away. “Ah. You’re religious.”

The old religion had mostly died out in the last few centuries. Few kept it now beyond the zealot rebels, the men and women with no rank or chain of command who lived in the honeycomb of the old mountain mines. Their rebellion had brought together people from all over the continent: nomads from the desert ward, colonists from the southern valleys, northerners from the great glaciers at the rim of the world. The most committed of the zealots had lately taken to snorting metal powders in the hope that it might bring them closer to the Unforged God. The only thing it had brought them closer to was death, though, as only those born with a Smithing affinity—like the boy, like the girl before him—could withstand the toxic effects of metal in their bloodstream.

“I’m not a Saint,” the boy replied. “But yes.”

“And you have training in protection?”

“I’ve trained with soldiers since I was twelve. I’m one of the best fighters in the mountain ward.” He’d had to be. He couldn’t risk letting his opponents see his blood.

The girl regarded him for a moment longer. “Very well,” she said suddenly, and took off her crown. It was a dainty thing, slender and feminine but made of sharp, twisted edges. It suited her. “Swear on this, then,” she said, holding it out to him.

He looked down at the crown. He struggled for breath. The crown was made of wrought iron. Not the Destroyer’s metal, but that of her elder sister, the empress. The boy couldn’t feel the magic that stirred within it. He didn’t need to. Once he gave this metal his oath, the magic that lived within it—that lived within all metals—would take his promise into itself and compel him to keep it.

Feeling as if he were floating somewhere far away, he reached out a hand and gripped the crown. Its twisted edges dug into his palm. “I swear,” he said, forcing the words out, “to protect you, and to not allow harm to come to you—”

“And to never harm me yourself,” she cut in sharply.

He swallowed. “And to never harm you myself,” he added, his voice sounding choked. He tried to think of what else he should add. A term of some sort? Conditions? His thoughts were a muddle, tangled like a snarl of yarn. Then the girl stepped back and it was too late. The oath had been sworn.

They looked down at the crown in her hands. The boy panicked for a second, thinking that he might’ve gripped it too tightly and drawn his own blood, but no telltale silver dripped down the twisted black edges.

The Destroyer put the crown back on her head. Then she waved at one of the guards behind her and told the man, “Attack me.”

The imperial guards were trained to instantly obey an order from any lord or lady, and from the empress’s family most of all, but this one could only stare back at the Destroyer for a long moment as if struck mute. “My lady?” he said at last.

White flames flickered around her head and shoulders like a halo as her gaze snapped to the man. “Do as I’ve ordered,” she said, anger banked low in her voice.

The boy was backpedaling, confused and afraid, when the guard drew his iron sword—Smithed metal, its edge impossibly sharp—and slashed it out toward the Destroyer.

That was the first time the boy felt the pain of disobeying his oath.

It hit him like a derailed train. Unready for it, he gasped and bent double beneath its weight. Every vein, every muscle, singed as if on fire. He was a red-hot iron in a Smith’s forge and the pain was the anvil and the hammer both: pummeling him, shaping him into what he had promised to be.

In a spasm, his hands gripped his dual short swords. He drew them. In a quick one-two move taught to him by the soldiers, he raised his left sword to block the guard’s weapon inches before it would have speared through the Destroyer’s shoulder, and drove his right sword into the guard’s chest.

The boy’s pain vanished as