Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

put her off guard, if he was going to give himself and the Saints the best chance of success. So he tried to make his expression and his voice mild and said, “Thank you.”

She tilted her head and raised a sardonic brow. “I might almost believe you mean that.”

“I do mean it.” He tried to soften his voice further, but even he could hear how false it sounded. He barely held back a wince. Although he’d hidden much of himself from the Destroyer over the last two years, he had rarely been openly untruthful with her, preferring instead to stay silent and distance himself. He had little practice with falsehoods.

Elodie snorted and stood up. “You are far too honest to make a good liar, Tal.” She found a long stick—the last of their firewood—and poked at the smoldering embers with it. “Who was he?” she asked abruptly, her back turned to him.

Tal blinked blearily and dragged a hand across his face, trying to wake up more fully so he could focus. He had never had so much trouble concentrating after sleep before; it had to be an effect of the phage. His deterioration had begun already. “Who do you mean?”

“The Destroyer.”

Tal froze.

Elodie kept her back to him, poking the stick into the remnants of their fire, making it hiss and sizzle. She said nothing. He realized belatedly that her silence, her turned back, was an offering. She was giving him the space to think about his answer and whether he wanted to make one. She was not insinuating herself into his privacy, but offering herself as a confidant. And he had no idea what to do with that.

Use it. He should use it. She must have heard him crying out in the midst of his would-be vision, and now she wanted to know what—who—it was that tormented him. She had assumed the Destroyer was a man. Perhaps he ought to let her believe that, mislead her so she wouldn’t accidentally stumble onto her own identity.

You are far too honest to make a good liar, she’d said earlier. Which meant he had to risk the truth.

“The Destroyer is…the Lady I guard,” he answered gruffly.

Elodie’s stick didn’t pause in its scraping through the stones and coals. Outside, the wind whistled, though it wasn’t as wild as it had been a few hours ago. “And you were having nightmares about her?” she asked.

“All my nightmares are of her.”

“Is she the body you asked me to look for earlier?”

Tal was confused for a moment until he recalled describing Nyx to her, asking her if any bodies matched his sister. “No. That was…someone else. Someone I love. Someone who is alive,” he added fiercely, as if he could make it be true.

“Oh,” Elodie said in surprise, turning around. The end of her stick glowed red and traced afterimages through his vision as she gestured with it. “So this ‘someone else,’ she’s your lover, then?”

“No,” Tal said shortly.

Elodie tilted her head again and squinted. Tal waited, and now he was the wary one. The Destroyer had a foxlike mind, canny and calculating, and had always been quick to spot patterns that might remain hidden from others. If she guessed too much of the truth, his plan would be over before it had begun.

“A sister, then. Or perhaps a close friend. She’s the one you hope lives.” Elodie glanced back at Tal and apparently his expression was confirmation enough, because she nodded in satisfaction and dropped her stick on the fire. “But you didn’t ask if I’d seen the Destroyer’s body earlier, which means either you know she’s dead, or you hope she is. Unless she wasn’t on the train with you at all…but you’re her bodyguard, so you won’t have left her side. Which means she was on the train. So which is it: dead, or hopefully dead?”

Tal ground his teeth, searching for an answer that wouldn’t sound dishonest. He eased himself up further to sit braced against the wall and ignored the responding burst of pain from his leg. “She was injured in the wreck,” he said at last. “She will not survive long.”

The angles of Elodie’s expression sharpened. For a moment, the ghost of her old malice settled over her like a veil. “If she was cruel enough to cause you nightmares, then I am glad for her death, and I hope that it hurts.”

Tal had no response to that.

Elodie blinked and one corner of her mouth curved up, rueful. The trace of the Destroyer in her features vanished. “My apologies. I suppose I could have found a kinder way to say that, but, as it turns out, I don’t seem to be a kind person.”

Tal felt wrong-footed, off balance. The Destroyer had just apologized to him: one more impossibility in a day full of them. It didn’t help that he was still recovering from his almost-vision. The urgency of it lingered in his mind, tainting his emotions, making him unsteady. He tried to keep his focus on the conversation before him—it was like a chess match against a master, trying to anticipate what she might ask and how she might corner him, or how he might inadvertently corner himself—but he was distracted by the worry that the vision might have been warning of something dire.

He tried to push the nagging uncertainty from his mind. The Unforged God’s warnings came with strings attached, and Tal was done with trusting him. “We’ve discussed my nightmare. What of yours?” he said to Elodie, trying to put her on the defensive. “You said you’d had one too.”

Her rueful half-smile fell and she bit her lip, an expression that made her seem strangely young. “I’m not sure if mine was a dream or a memory,” she admitted. “There was a man standing over me and my mouth was full of blood and I was screaming.” She lifted one shoulder, clearly uncomfortable.

Tal shifted. He’d never known what her nightmares were about, as she’d never talked about them to anyone,