Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

not allow the sight of Elodie as a child to change the truth of Elodie as the Destroyer—of Elodie the soon-to-be Empress, if his final vision was correct.

He spun around, found the temple’s entrance. Not much time had passed since he’d come in here. It was sunset now, the air outside the entrance stained purple and red, still peaceful. “The moon,” he said aloud, and sprinted for the clearing.

Helenia hurried after him. “Tal! What in the name of the Unforged—”

He was already outside. He spun around, scanning the sky, ignoring the floating mote seeds and the quiet, distant shushing of the streams. He found the moon. It was waxed nearly full, only a sliver of a crescent missing. “Two nights,” he said aloud. “The moon was full in the vision, bright enough to create rainbows in the mist. She will attack in two nights.”

Helenia was at his side. Her hand clamped onto his shoulder, surprisingly strong. It anchored him—he had not realized until this moment that he felt like one of those mote seeds, spun about by the wind until no one could know where he might land.

“You had a vision?” Helenia asked.

He raised a hand to rake it through his hair, then remembered that his wrists were still bound together by the manacle. “Yes. Of the empress, attacking the Saints base.”

The lines of Helenia’s body went taut all at once, and her expression turned fearsome. “Then we must tell Nyx and the others immediately.”

Yes. Of course. That was what they needed to do. His mind wouldn’t clear, wouldn’t quite process the present moment. It kept curving back to six-year-old Elodie in bed, mouse eyes and rabbit heart, a line of scabs marching up her forearm like army ants. The fear and helplessness she’d felt when she’d realized her father would kill her. The weight of his shadow on her back as her mouth filled with blood. Red blood. The blood she had been born with, the blood that hadn’t changed to mercury until her sister and cousin had injected it into her veins without her knowledge or consent.

Helenia was pulling him toward the campfire. The Saints stood around it, empty bowls in their hands, waiting impatiently as the pot of stew began to simmer above the flames. Someone had dragged Elodie off her sled and dumped her next to the fire to keep her warm, but they had placed her too close—her forehead wrinkled in her sleep and the muscles in her neck twitched as she tried to turn her face away. The brown glass bottle of laudanum sat next to her, unstoppered. They must have just dosed her, or perhaps been about to dose her when it was announced that dinner was nearly ready.

He wondered what she would say if she were awake. Did she know what had been done to her? No, he realized, Sarai had given her a memory tonic. Which meant as far as Elodie knew, her blood had at last quickened naturally on the eve of her seventh birthday, perhaps due to the adrenaline of her attempted murder.

But the girl she had been, Tal reminded himself, hurrying his steps toward the Saints, did not excuse the young woman she had become. The memory tonic had not forced her to burn villages, to incinerate the families of suspected seditionists, to torture Tal’s own sister.

But…but the mercury. Poison, Albinus had called it. It induced madness. Paranoia. Acts of violence. Only a Smith could withstand the toxic effects of metal in their blood and Elodie, as it turned out, was no Smith. She would not have become what she had become, would not have done the terrible things she had done, without the imbalance created by that toxicity.

Sarai had not simply given mercury to the Destroyer. Mercury had made the Destroyer.

Helenia had tugged him into the circle of Saints who were waiting with their bowls. The group had begun to line up now, jostling and laughing, completely unaware that they were slated to die in two days’ time when they reached the Saints base.

“Nyx, everyone. Tal has had a vision,” Helenia said loudly, cutting through the chatter. The man who’d been stirring the stew dropped the ladle in surprise and one of the nearby dogs whined, trying to sneak close enough lick the bit of spilled soup. Nyx, who had been sitting on a downed log and staring unrelentingly at the Destroyer from across the fire, jerked her head up.

“What?” said his sister, rising. “Another one?”

He swallowed, uncomfortable beneath their sudden scrutiny, uncomfortable in his own mind. Every bit of him could sense the presence of Elodie at his back, the outline of her clear as if it were carved on his own skin. She was still too close to the fire. Someone should move her before she burned. He caught that thought, held it immobile and looked at it and laughed aloud at it, the sound harsh and biting as if it had been scraped from his throat. A mere week ago, he would have wished nothing more fondly than for her to burn. Did he not still? He didn’t know what he wanted. He only knew that he had seen her young and small and vulnerable and wished he could protect her, and he had seen her grown and vulnerable then, too, and it was all too much for him to quite fathom.

“Yes,” he said, facing the Saints, forcing his attention away from Elodie. “It was of the Empress. She will attack the Saints base in two nights’ time.”

He explained his last vision in full—or at least, almost in full. He left out the part about Elodie being crowned, because he knew if he told them that there was no way they wouldn’t immediately kill her and he at least needed to explain everything else before they decided whether to do that. With each sentence, the rebels gathered closer, empty bowls hanging forgotten from their fingers, the air growing smothering with the heat and the