Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

That was why he’d been helping her, why he’d promised to protect her yesterday, why he’d rescued her from the frozen lake today. He was bound to her, and here she was, running her fingers over his chest like a lover. It was a violation. She had no right.

She had never, she realized with the same quick and lurid clarity as a moment ago, had any right to Tal at all.

She snatched her hand back, her body going as rigid as his. “Tal, put me down,” she said. Her voice was hoarse and her throat ached like fire. Near-drowning did that to a person, apparently.

He disobeyed, as he always did whenever he could. His hands tightened around her. Despite herself, she felt immediately safer. Or at least, she did until he said in a low tone, “If I put you down, they’ll kill you.”

She could keep her eyes closed no longer. She opened them, and saw who had been screaming.

The Saints had found her.

She was curled on Tal’s lap on the ice of the frozen-over lake. He had no shirt or coat because she was wearing both. Her own clothing lay in a sodden heap a few steps away. A gray dog was curled up against her and Tal, bushy tail covering its nose, calm bluish eyes tilted up to regard her. Draped over all three of them was a fur the size of a cloak. Beyond the cloak, the Saints screamed for the Destroyer’s head.

There were perhaps a dozen of them, and they mostly seemed to be directing their screaming toward each other or toward the figure of a girl who stood between them and Tal, arms crossed, chin lifted. Many of the people Elodie could make out wore the Saints’ traditional mask, a mostly-flat plate of metal with only the barest contours of a nose and cheeks, and empty holes for eyes. Several of the Saints were still hurriedly tying the masks on; they didn’t want the Destroyer to be able to identify them, she realized.

Here, her thoughts stuttered. The Destroyer, she’d thought, as if she were a different person. But it was her head they were shouting for, it was she who they feared might identify them and then find and punish their families in vengeance.

She retreated into herself. She couldn’t face this. Not yet. She would sink back into the darkness of sleep and perhaps, when she woke, she would better understand what it was she was supposed to do now. And who it was she was supposed to be.

She gave herself over to unconsciousness. It stretched up and swallowed her—but just before it did, one last recollection slid into her mind.

Blood. Silver blood on the snow, on the mooncat’s jaws, on her hands as she dragged Tal to safety. He was injured. Worse than he ever had been before in her service. And here they were—with him shirtless and bleeding out on the ice to save her.

She tried to fight her way back to consciousness. Tried to push off the heavy mantle of sleep she’d already started to pull around herself, so she could help him, so she could make him put her down and save himself. But it was too late. Sleep, and her old nightmare, had already claimed her.

The dream started as it always did: with her sister.

They were young. They were in the woods outside the palace. Scorch trees, unfathomably tall, dripped their namesake red moss toward the forest floor. Elodie wanted to stop and weave a fairy dress from it, but Sarai was gripping her hand hard enough to grind her knuckles together, hauling her through the maze of trees at a near-run. It was dark. Elodie tripped.

Sarai turned back and hauled her to her feet, her fingers leaving imprints on Elodie’s skin. Sarai was twelve, older and stronger than Elodie’s six years, and her grip hurt. Elodie didn’t complain, because she knew something was wrong. She could smell it in the dense, humid silence of the air, the way it crowded close around Sarai, as if to protect her.

Something heavy, something inescapable, was crashing through the brush behind them. The moss quivered with it.

Sarai stopped. “We can’t run,” she said, and then she bent down to look Elodie in the eye. “You shouldn’t have to run. You shall never have to run again, I swear it.”

Terror rose up through the nightmare then, coloring everything with its touch, turning the dreamscape surreal and disjointed. The sky was a web of crimson moss on black night, the stars pinpricks too far away to shed any light at all. Elodie was lying on her chest. Something had knocked her to the ground. Something had stabbed her in the back. Her blood was thick in her mouth. She was drowning in it. Wind raged all around her, a keening scream that made her want to cover her ears. A man stood above her. She couldn’t make out his face—but he was more than the blank, looming shadow of her usual nightmares. In fact, she thought distantly, all of this dream was far clearer than it normally was. Then her lucidity faded, and she was wholly her dying child-self again.

She managed to turn her head. Spit out the blood. It speckled bright on the crunchy brown leaves. She tried to scream but it was barely a weak warble of a cry.

All at once, the wind died down. Sarai knelt at her side, picked her up like she used to do when Elodie was a toddler. “It’s okay,” she whispered, carrying her back toward the palace. “No one will know.”

Elodie broke the surface of her dream and came gasping into the real world. The filaments of her nightmare drifted invisibly around her, a spider’s web she had been caught in for over a decade now—because it was not only a dream, but a memory. That day, the night before her seventh birthday, had been the night of the