Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

higher. She would have to run if she wanted to reach someone who could stop it in time. She looked back to Tal and lifted her free hand toward him in a helpless gesture, trying to think of what else she could possibly say that might change his mind—but he flinched away and his own hand raised slightly as if to shield himself. An old habit, one that he would never be rid of no matter how long she was magicless.

She let her hand drop. She took a long step backwards, river reeds brushing against her calves. She raised the crown and set it on her brow. “Goodbye, Tal,” she answered at last, and then she turned and ran.

TAL STOOD IN THE REEDS, THE SKY BLEEDING SUNSET ACROSS THE HORIZON, river mist hanging over the shore like a funeral shroud, and counted to one hundred. Beyond the bridge, a line of sailboats and small merchant steamships bobbed at the royal docks. By the time he reached a count of twenty Elodie had disappeared behind them. At the count of fifty, the sound of shouts and distant running feet drifted over the water. She had been spotted. He finished his count. When he reached one hundred—when he was certain that all the patrolling soldiers within earshot had run to her, eager to assist the unexpectedly returned Lady of Mercury—he drew his twin swords and started over the bridge.

He had lied to Elodie. There was something that could make him return to the palace. Not a way to live, but a way to spend the coin of his death on something that might begin to make up for his choices.

He avoided the route Elodie had taken. He didn’t want her to see him. He didn’t want her to try to stop him. There was too high a possibility that, given one more chance, she might succeed. He had seen the bloom of realization in her eyes—a bloom not like a flower, but like the plume of smoke that rises up from a catastrophe—and had felt the pull of it in his own soul. He knew what she had realized, but he also could not afford to know it, so as he walked, he let himself drift away from his own mind. Free of worry and choice, he watched himself walk over the bridge. The cobbled roads here twinkled and blinked with bronze flecks like a carpet of stars unrolled beneath his feet. To his left were the palace docks: long lines of jetties and wharfs where ships flew under the Alloyed Empire flag as well as the colorful pennants of several neighboring countries. Ambassadors and courtiers, flocking to the scent of weakness. They would flee soon. Likely the moment the Destroyer got her magic back.

Silver eyes beneath an iron crown. Such a simple vision to have such an effect on him. He had known all along that the Destroyer would eventually return to herself, would swallow up the strange girl he’d met in the Skyteeth. Elodie had been a mirage. A deception, even if it was one that had briefly fooled her as well as him. And now the deception was over. He should not grieve what was not a true loss.

He turned left. The starry flecks in the road vanished. No one who walked this lane needed the travel-smoothing enchantment that was Smithed into the cobblestones of the main streets. To his left, a smaller branch of the Entengre vanished into the dark maw of a tunnel, where it would be carried into the aquifers below the city. There it would sink through the silt and be filtered and cleansed before it flowed back into the main Entengre downstream. The reason it needed to be cleansed first was because this was the spot where the palace dumped its sewage, and also its dead bodies.

There was a door just in front of the tunnel. It was set into the side of the plated metal palace, although here the man-sized scales were all dull tin, Smithed sensibly for defense rather than beauty and intimidation. On the other side of this door were the dungeons. Thanks to the tin’s enchantments, the cells beyond could not be breached by cannonballs or fire, nor by any enemy army. They could, however, be breached by a lone soldier, if he was foolish enough to set himself against an entire regiment of the Iron Empress’s guards.

The two men stationed at the door stood up quickly when they spotted Tal. One of them kicked the dice they’d been playing with behind the steps, out of his line of vision, and then relaxed when Tal stepped out of the evening shadows and revealed himself to be no one important. Neither of them took any action to conceal the two dead women whose bodies slouched against the wall. One of the bodies had a blue and purple complexion from the blood that had pooled beneath her skin when her heart was no longer beating to circulate it. The arms of the other twisted across her body at a stiff angle. They had been dead for a while, carried to this door and then stacked like firewood to await the completion of the guards’ dice game, when they would be carried to the river and disposed of.

Tal recognized one of the bodies. She had pale porcelain skin, even paler now in death, and red hair that she had always kept in a frizzy braid. She’d been a friend of Saasha’s. She used to watch over Tal and Nyx when they were young, right after their father’s execution, when Saasha was mired too deep in grief to see to the needs of her daughter and newly-acquired stepson.

Tal wondered which of the two dead women had given up the location of the Saints base to the empress, and how much torture they’d undergone before that. These two would have been among the number who’d volunteered themselves for Nyx’s mission,