Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

Tal glanced around, rubbing his head with the manner of a person still half-befuddled with sleep. “I am well enough, I suppose. What happened? Where are we?”

“At a Saints outpost. We’re a few days’ journey from the main facility, where we’ll be headed once you’re ready.”

He looked down at himself, examining his clothing—a worn sweater and borrowed pants—and the room, which was a tiny area with barely enough space for the bed, a single dresser, and the washstand. Then, finally, he glanced down at his left wrist, which was connected via manacle and chain to a bedpost. He looked bewildered for a moment and then inhaled sharply, his eyes snapping up to find the sheathed twin swords that Nyx had retrieved and then placed across the room, out of his reach.

“Nyx,” he said urgently, turning back to her, “where is—the Destroyer?” He fumbled her name but recovered quickly. “What did they—”

Nyx bared her teeth. “Don’t worry, little brother, she’s alive and well enough to face her trial. Your oath is satisfied for now. Helenia even insisted on giving her what little of the healing potion supply they didn’t use on you. Personally, I think we should’ve let her bleed all the way to the base.”

Tal reached out to steady himself against the bed and then sank down on it. He covered his face with his hands. The manacle’s chain clanked against the wood. He took in a shuddering breath. “I fear,” he said, his voice muffled, “that I have done something foolish.”

Nyx hesitated, gazing down at him. She considered, not for the first time, the ways in which the past two years might have changed him beyond just the way he looked. She spotted the edge of a scar at the neckline of his shirt, and remembered the Destroyer running a hand over it on the icy lake. A black rage rose up and Nyx waited until it passed before easing down on the bed beside her brother.

“You can tell me anything. I won’t judge you,” she said as gently as she could, trying to channel sweet Helenia. She hesitated again, not sure how to phrase what she needed to ask. “Back on the ice…you’d given her your shirt. She was mostly naked. And she—” Her throat closed up, thick with anger. In her mind, she ran through a few different methods in which she could kill the Destroyer, until at last she felt calm enough to go on. “She acted…familiar…with you. Tal, has she ever used you in any way other than as a guard?”

Tal lifted his head, looking genuinely confused for a moment until his eyes cleared and he huffed a dry, startled-sounding laugh. “Nyx, no. It’s never been like that. I don’t think she’s ever been with anyone that way, in fact. And I would be the one to know. I was at her side every moment of the day and night.”

“I saw her face,” Nyx insisted. “I saw the way she was looking at you.”

His mouth twisted. “That was Elodie. Not…her.”

He’d managed to tell them the barest details of what had happened after the train wreck before succumbing to unconsciousness as they’d packed him on the sled. He’d explained how the Destroyer had forgotten her identity, how her powers had seemingly evaporated, how she’d dared to call herself by a name other than the only one that suited her. Nyx’s face twisted and she desperately wished she could spit on the floor—but Helenia was staying in this room too, and her girlfriend would first kill her and then put her on eternal mopping duty if she dared transgress against its cleanliness. She settled for hissing, “Elodie is the Destroyer. That’s her birth name. She told it to me, when she was torturing me.”

He recoiled, and Nyx immediately felt terrible for reminding him of what she’d been through.

His hands fisted in the sheets. “I had a vision of what you did,” he said quietly. “The poison. Nyx, how could you? How could you do such a thing for me?”

She wanted to shake him. “I did it for you because I love you, dolt. And I would do it again.” Then her mind caught up with his words. “Wait, you had another vision?”

He nodded, looking miserable. “The only one for the last two years. I wanted the Unforged God to show me how to save you. Instead he showed me how to save her.”

Now Nyx did spit on the floor—right in time for the door to creak open and admit Helenia, who immediately slanted an arch look at her girlfriend.

Nyx put up her hands. “We were discussing the bitch. I can’t be blamed.”

“You can and will be blamed,” Helenia said with a smile, “and also, why are you holding a razor?”

From behind Helenia, one of the other rebels leaned past the doorway, probably hoping to get a glimpse of Tal. This outpost was tiny, only big enough to house the dozen rebels stationed here if they all piled together like a heap of kittens on the floor of the common room, and every one of them had either been fascinated with or repulsed by her silver Smith, oath-bound brother. “Off with you,” Nyx snapped at this one, and the man glared at her but turned away.

Nyx allowed herself a moment to worry about how the rest of the Saints would react when they learned of Tal’s magic. Only a handful of people had known his secret before, but there had been no way to hide it today, not with him leaking silver blood everywhere. Now that the Saints knew what he was, they would surely want to use his foresight to help leverage the rebellion in their favor. They didn’t understand, or care about, the complicated relationship he seemed to have with his abilities now. Nyx wasn’t sure if it would make the situation better or worse that the Saints had no formal ranks or leadership, no single