Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

He stopped right in front of her. “Destroyer.”

She set her jaw. “Don’t call me that, either.”

“It is what you are.”

She couldn’t deny that, so she only turned her head away. Tal was silent for the space of a few breaths, then he asked, “Do you truly remember, then?”

She remembered too much. She could not recover from it. His words were a weapon, and she hated being helpless before them. “I remember you swearing to me on the palace docks. I remember you saying your god wanted you to defend me,” she said, because she knew it was her own sort of weapon. “I remember your hand on mine when you saved Nyx from my fire. I remember where you got every one of your scars.”

He was close to her now, too close. He leaned in. Her breath hitched in fear and something flickered in his eyes in response: pleasure. He was glad for her to be afraid of him. “Do you think I need that razor to kill you?” he asked softly.

“The only thing you need,” she said, leaning in a little herself, hating the fear that flashed briefly in his own eyes but glad, so glad, for the scrap of power it returned to her, “is the will to do it. But you don’t have that. Do you?”

“I could bind you,” he said. “I could wait for Nyx to wake, and give her razor back. She would do it.”

“Would you let her?” Elodie didn’t mean for her voice to waver. She cursed the fact that she seemed to have less control of herself now. She was less certain, less powerful in every way. Had it only ever been the mercury in her veins that had made her everything she was? What was she now, without it?

Tal held her gaze for a long, dangerous moment. She sensed the way the air prickled around him, the way the night seemed to fade as his attention on her grew sharper. Then, all at once, he stepped back. “You are impossible,” he said, and all of the hate and anger had drained out of him, leaving him ragged. He tipped his head back and closed his eyes. “This is impossible.”

In such a position, with his eyes closed and his head stretched back, his neck was exposed. He held no weapon. He was allowing himself to be vulnerable before her, the person who had been his greatest enemy. How could he bear it? She couldn’t fathom it, nor could she understand her own envy of such a thing.

The danger had gone out of the night, and with it had gone the energy of the panic that had been keeping her going. She sat down heavily on a nearby fallen log. Her hands felt empty and useless. She busied them with wiping the specks of blood from her face, a job at which she was as unskilled as anything else, and only succeeded in smearing half-dried blood over herself. “I couldn’t agree more,” she said, her voice shaking with the aftereffects of it all.

He opened his eyes and looked at her. “How long have you been able to remember? Did you know who you were this whole time? Were you only pretending to be Elodie?”

She held up her hand, which was still oozing red blood. “Why would I pretend to be this?”

He hesitated. “You helped me,” he said at last, the words sounding as if they were being dragged from him. “After the explosion. You got me to the cave before the blizzard struck. And then with the mooncat, you…”

“Died saving you?” she snapped, unwilling to linger on that awful memory: the cold, the dark, the blur of him through the ice. “Yes. You’re welcome, I suppose.”

His eyes narrowed and his voice went taut. “Do you think I owe you something now? Do you know how many lives I have taken for your sake? Giving your own life is nowhere near enough to tip the balance. Nothing could be.”

“I am aware,” she said, angry again—mostly at herself this time—but refusing to be baited into another standoff. She gave up on her attempts to wipe the blood away. “The question we should be discussing is: what do we do now?”

“There is no we.”

She stilled. Of course. She kept forgetting he was no longer bound to her. The thought was a thing with spikes and barbs that burrowed into her every time she recalled it, but she refused to allow her dismay and grief to show. She had bigger things to consider. She needed to think of some way to persuade him to help her evade the people who were currently set on killing her, and to help her get somewhere safe. If there was any such place for her now.

“What—what do you want?” she asked clumsily. If she could ferret out some need of his, perhaps she could find a way to use it to bargain with him.

He laughed, a sharp, humorless bark. “If I had any idea what I wanted, Elodie, I wouldn’t be standing here.”

Elodie. He’d called her Elodie. He’d said it like it was some sort of curse, but it was still many measures better than my lady. “Do you want money?” she went on, fumbling to think of what he might desire now that he had his freedom. “Clemency for your sister? A…a job?”

He stared at her, incredulous. “A job? What would you do, give me a reference? Would I note my experience with murdering in the application?”

“You weren’t murdering, you were protecting,” she protested, hating that he would see himself in such a negative light. She was only now beginning to realize that he had come to hate himself nearly as much as he hated her. He shouldn’t do that. He was the only good person she had ever known.

He shook his head. “Stop it. Just…stop. I don’t want you to defend me.”

“Then what do you want? Tell me what it is, anything, and I’ll give it