Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

been so sure it would kill her. She could still taste the despair and fury at the back of her throat, could still remember her vow to curse the Destroyer with her dying breath.

“I know that look,” came a wry voice from behind her. “You’re thinking violent and poetic thoughts again, aren’t you?”

An involuntary smile crept over Nyx’s mouth. She twisted in her nest of blankets to look up at Helenia, who stood at her back on the runners of the dogsled. The other girl was swaddled in furs—nearly as many as she’d piled atop Nyx—leaving only her bright, kind brown eyes showing above her thick foxtail scarf. Her dark brown skin was spangled with freckles, and her hair was tucked neatly into her hood. Nyx wished it was warm enough for her to let it down. She loved the way Helenia’s hair looked when it was loose: a gorgeous, bouncy cascade of tight black ringlets.

Nyx answered her question. “I’m always thinking violent and poetic thoughts.”

Helenia quirked a brow. “Except when you’re thinking about me.”

Nyx battled her smile, and lost. “Only poetic, then,” she agreed, and laid her head against the rail where Helenia’s hands gripped the wood.

It felt like a miracle that she was here. Here, with the girl she loved, covered by warm blankets that smelled of home while she recovered from her injuries. Helenia had found her last night, had dug her nearly-frozen body out of the snow with the pocked aluminum shovel she’d brought along just in case it might come in handy. It might have been more romantic if she’d clawed Nyx from the snow with her bare hands, perhaps weeping over her prone body in the process, but Helenia was far too practical for such things. Nyx had found that trait exasperating in the past. Now, though, she was pathetically grateful—especially because Helenia had also thought to steal a small vat of the Saints’ carefully-guarded healing tincture supply. She had probably charmed it right out of the guards’ hands, with her shimmering, tearful gaze and her quavering voice full of faith and hope and goodness. Nyx had fallen under its sway herself too many times to count.

The most admirable—if somewhat insulting—part of Helenia’s singlehanded rescue mission, though, was that it had been preemptive. To have reached Nyx as quickly as she did, Helenia would have had to already be following her. Which meant their tearful goodbye in the township had been a sham, since she must have already had her own sled packed and her hauler dogs primed to go. Nyx was both annoyed by and more attracted than ever to her scheming girlfriend.

Only one part of the rescue had bothered Nyx: Helenia had used every last drop of the stolen healing tincture on her, saving none for Tal or any other survivors they might yet find.

You are here, Helenia had said last night, and they are not, and you are my beloved, and they are not, and so you are going to drink every last ounce of this medicine and if you complain I will bash you over the head with the carafe and then you will drink it.

It was an unwise person who said no to Helenia. Nyx was not unwise, and so she had meekly obeyed. And now she was recovered, and heading home to recoup and report the Saints’ losses before they set out to find any more rebels who had survived the explosion.

Well. The other Saints would be searching for rebels. Nyx would be looking for her mother and for Tal and them alone. Tal, she knew, had to be alive, because the Destroyer was alive. Nyx felt the latter truth deep in the hidden recesses of her soul, thanks to the oath she’d sworn on the iron bars of her cell. No part of her oath was yet fulfilled; no part of it had yet released her. The Destroyer had not perished in the explosion.

Nyx fingered her dagger—her own silver dagger, the one that had been a gift from her brother. Helenia had happened upon it in the burned mining town and recovered it for her. Nyx was glad, because whenever she’d dreamed of driving a blade into the Destroyer’s heart over the last two years, it was always this particular blade that she’d pictured.

A yelp from ahead broke Nyx from her contemplations. The lead dog, a bushy blue-gray hauler named Kenna, was limping. Red flecks of blood gleamed on the snow, and on the edge of a twisted piece of metal that stabbed up from it.

“Ease!” Helenia called, shifting her weight to brake the sled. The five-dog team slowed reluctantly, pink tongues lolling from grinning mouths. Kenna, who sat down and held her hurt paw in the air, looked apologetic as Helenia approached to check her over.

While Helenia crooned to her hauler, Nyx leaned over to peer at the metal poking out of the snow. A charred wooden plank was attached to one side of it with a thick bolt. It was a piece of a train track—one that had been snapped off and warped by some unimaginable force.

A feeling like electricity swept over Nyx. She threw off her furs and stood. She whirled in a circle, searching, and found what she’d been looking for. The peak across from them sported a crater, freshly-fallen snow gathering in the bottom of it, with train tracks running along either side.

“This is where it happened,” she whispered.

She had only dim recollections of the explosion. Her mind had been drenched in too much pain to fully hold the moment. She remembered Tal leaving, carrying the Destroyer, and then some sort of odd bluish enchantment had begun rattling the whole of the train. Then came the fire. It had bellowed like a wounded animal, carving a gaping hole through the front half of the prison car and knocking Nyx unconscious in the process. At some point she must have been thrown through the hole and onto the mountainside some distance further down