Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

puppeteer his actions, but nevertheless he moved quickly to strip off her wet and freezing clothing. He had seen her naked before, but never vulnerable, and the difference now seemed immeasurable. It was the Destroyer lying with her head in his lap, her body bare and bleeding against the ice, but it was also a girl. Someone helpless, and God help him, someone he wanted to protect.

He cradled her head as he pulled his own shirt over her, and then his coat over that. Both were large on her petite frame. She pulled up her knees, curling herself into the new warmth. He drew her onto his lap and she curled into him too, ducking her head tightly against his breastbone, her panting breaths warm on his chest, her shivering wracking his own body. Her weight drove sharp points of pain into his injured legs but he didn’t have the strength to shift her, and he doubted there was any way he could hold her that wouldn’t hurt him.

There was nothing else he could do. He was still losing blood, and she was still half-frozen and unable to maintain consciousness. Death was coming for them both. He held the Destroyer and waited for it.

Minutes ran and blurred like a painting in the rain. The sun crept higher in the sky. Its light felt liquid, but not in a pleasant way. It poured too brightly over the ice, thick and cold and biting like liquor gone bad. A thin glaze of ice began to form back over the hole in the lake. Tal wasn’t sure how long had passed before he realized, with a dangerous sort of slowness, that he no longer felt the cold.

Elodie’s frozen hair was plastered against his chest. Her whole self was tucked into him as if he were the only safe place in the world. Her breathing had slowed and her own shivering had stopped; a bad sign. Just an hour ago he would have considered it a good one. He no longer knew what he wanted. He no longer understood how he felt. His god had betrayed him, which had been devastating, but now he had betrayed himself and he was still doing it—sitting here cradling a murderess as if she were a thing that could be broken, a thing that could be loved.

Except she wasn’t a thing. She was a person. He hadn’t thought that of her for years and had expected never to think it again, and yet here she was: Elodie, murderess and Destroyer, person. Deadly and then dead, and now, somehow, neither.

His thoughts spun slowly into one another, putting down roots, spreading web-like branches that stretched one into another until he couldn’t make sense of any of them. He bowed slowly forward, head dipping toward the ice, vision blurring.

His last thought was of Nyx. She dropped to her knees before him, grasped his face in her hands, leaned her forehead against his. Her sobs shook him. He laid his head on her shoulder and let himself close his eyes. Hers was a good face to carry with him into the darkness.

Nyx slapped him. “Stop dying immediately, Tal, or I swear I will kill you myself.”

His head snapped back with the force of the blow and his eyes opened. He blinked. His vision went from dream-blurry to painfully sharp. Nyx still knelt before him but now he registered the details of her: short braids with burnt ends, expression set in furious lines wet with her tears, a heavy fur coat draped over her shoulders. Her clothing still had spots of melted metal on it from her hair beads.

“Nyx?” Tal dared to ask. His voice came out as a croak. The sound of it made Nyx’s expression twist. She swept the coat off her shoulders and wrapped it around his. Something furry and gray and vaguely familiar wiggled underneath it with him, panting against his side. Pinpricks of warmth began to spread over him.

He was not dead. He was not hallucinating. His sister was here. Alive. And recovered, somehow, from her torture.

Her torture at the hands of the Destroyer.

Involuntarily, Tal’s gaze fell to the girl in his arms, his breath hitching as he registered the new danger of this situation. Nyx followed his gaze. He saw the moment she recognized who he was holding. Her expression turned to something flat and hard and utterly emotionless. He realized, with a jolt, that it was the same expression he himself had worn so often over the last two years. The grief of seeing it now, here, on the face of his sister, was enough to pull him fully from his shock just in time to clap a hand over the Destroyer’s neck, where Nyx’s dagger was already slicing toward skin.

The blade that had been meant to open Elodie’s throat slid over his knuckles instead. The pain was dull compared to everything else. He scrambled for the right words, the words to make Nyx stop, to make her understand something that even he couldn’t yet understand.

His sister made a choked sound when she saw her dagger wet with silver, but she barely paused before she grabbed a handful of Elodie’s hair and wrenched her head backwards to expose more of her neck. Her movements were quick, vicious, fluid, the way she had taught Tal. He knew her thoughts. She believed him to be acting under his oath to protect the Destroyer. She thought if she moved quickly enough, she could kill her before he could stop her, and then he would be free.

He couldn’t tell her he was already free. He couldn’t tell her—if she didn’t already know—that part of her own metal oath no longer bound her, either. If he explained that the Destroyer had already died, he would have to explain why she was alive now, and that was something he was not at all prepared to do.

So he lied.

“Stop,” he said, blocking Nyx’s blow, latching his hand over her wrist. The fur slid