Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

from a mere fox, failed to start a fire, failed to even remember more about herself than her first name. They would both die here and it would be her fault.

“You’re starting too big,” Tal said.

She took a deep, shaky breath, trying again to force her tears to cease through sheer willpower. “What?”

“The wood. The pieces you’re trying to start a fire with, they’re too big. You need to break one up into kindling—much smaller pieces, about the size of twigs.”

If she listened very carefully to his voice, she could almost hear a kernel of kindness in it. She didn’t want to need his kindness but it warmed her nevertheless, which irritated her further. But at least it also managed to stop her crying. “Oh, now you have useful advice,” she muttered, but did as he said. The wood had already been cracked and splintered by the explosion and broke apart easily, and the bits from the inside of it were dry, untouched by the snow. Soon a pile of wood slivers sat before her.

“Fire needs oxygen,” Tal told her next. “Arrange the kindling so that air can circulate through it.”

She leaned the pieces up against each other, building a small, flattened cone-line structure. She sat back. “Now w-what?” she asked, her teeth clattering together as she shivered. The temperature was beginning to drop sharply.

“Take one of the longer sticks and put it between your hands—no, flatten your hands out—there. Now rub your hands back and forth to make the stick spin.”

She followed his instructions, her brow crinkling as she concentrated. She put the stick against a slightly larger piece of wood, which was in turn placed next to the pile of kindling. Then she repeated the rubbing motion. By the time the wood started to smoke, her palms were full of splinters and her already-injured hand was bleeding once again, but she only hunched her shoulders and bore down harder. She had not been defeated by snow, and she would not be defeated by wood. She would start a fire or die trying.

Then, miraculously, a tiny flame leapt up from the shallow hole she’d drilled in the wood. “Quickly,” Tal told her. “Use one of the twig-sized pieces to move the flame over to the kindling.”

Not daring to breathe, she snatched up a splinter and touched it to the flame. The little fire withered down to a barely-visible blue core as she watched, but then caught to the splinter just before it went out. Moving slowly, she slid the now-burning bit of kindling beneath the stack she’d built—and the fire began to spread.

She raised both hands in the air and shouted in victory. She was not useless. She had proven it.

A sharp intake of breath sounded from across the cave. “Your hand,” Tal said. His voice sounded strange, faraway. Elodie looked up with a frown.

“What?” She glanced at her hands and winced. She’d have plenty of splinters to pick out, and she really ought to rebandage her injury too. Blood was streaked across her palms and down her wrist and had already soaked through one sleeve.

“You’re…you’re bleeding,” Tal said, staring at her hands as if he’d never seen blood before. Perhaps he was squeamish after all. This time, she determined, she wouldn’t make fun of him for it. He had just helped her learn how to build a fire, and as she saw it, that could be the start of a fragile truce between them. She was loath to ruin that.

“I am, but not nearly as badly as you were,” she said, motioning at his crimson-stained trousers. He didn’t respond. He was staring at her bloody hands, shock paling his features, one hand clenched tight around the hilt of his sword as if it was his anchor. “Tal?” she inquired, finally lowering her hands. “Are you well?”

His gaze jerked back to hers and he shook himself. The shock fell away, his features schooled into blankness. “Fine,” he said abruptly. “You should rest. I’ll keep watch and build the fire up.”

“You need to rest too.”

“I wouldn’t be able to sleep right now,” he said, his tone tight.

She shrugged. She was very tired—still recovering from whatever had happened on the train, she supposed, and the trauma of losing her memories—and unwilling to argue further. She curled up on the rocky ground and slept.

THE DESTROYER WAS HAVING A NIGHTMARE. This time, Tal let her stay in it.

Instead of waking her, he occupied himself with carefully unwinding the bandage wrapped around his broken leg. It was too tight and crusted with the dried hare’s blood he’d smeared it with; he’d been in a hurry to hide the silver bloodstains before the Destroyer saw them. But over the last hour or so—while he stared motionlessly at the sleeping “Elodie” over the fire that he had taught her how to build—the injury beneath the makeshift bandage had begun to take on a new and foreboding type of ache. It felt like grains of sand were caught just beneath his skin, gritting against one another every time he moved. He’d known what it had to mean but had delayed checking because he wasn’t sure whether he wanted his suspicions to be confirmed, or to be found unmerited.

The bandage peeled away. His injury wasn’t overly dramatic, merely a gash the length of his hand. Viscous silver blood leaked slowly from the torn flesh and muscle. The broken bone wasn’t visible. But what was visible was far worse: tiny dark-orange flakes peppered throughout the wound, each one producing a lacy, crystalline vein structure that dusted his skin like snowflakes.

Rust phage.

Grimly, he rewrapped the bandage. Such was his luck. Nearly eighteen years of successfully avoiding injuries that would expose his blood to either infection or the metallurgy class, all to be ruined in a single morning.

His choices were few now. He would not heal naturally from this. It was fatal to anyone with metal in their blood in a matter of days. He would