Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

But if she went back to being the Destroyer…she wouldn’t be any of those things. She would no longer be the weapon of her sister, either, but would instead belong wholly to herself. No one would crack the defenses of her body or her heart ever again. She wouldn’t feel everything so much. Her mind could be cold and clear again like ice, the way it used to be.

Before, she had wondered what future there could be for her. She understood now that this was the only future there had ever been.

Wordlessly, she held out her arm.

Sarai fetched the necessary contraption, a series of glass-and-copper tubes and tiny clever pumps. She slipped the needle at one end into Elodie’s arm, and the tube at the other end into the jar. Then she laid down at her sister’s side, her breathing labored, her crown on the bed between them, and held Elodie’s hand.

The mercury hit Elodie’s blood like a drug. A heavy sleepiness drew itself over her—a calming potion that had been mixed in to ease the transition from misfire to Lady of Mercury. She turned her head to look at her sister, wanting someone she loved to be the last thing that she saw.

And then she fell asleep, knowing that the Elodie she had been would never wake again.

MORE THAN TWENTY GUARDS HAD PASSED TAL’S CELL IN THE LAST HOUR. None of them had spotted him, or at least, none of them had realized he was someone who wasn’t supposed to be there. He’d tucked himself against the wall, hidden his swords behind the chamber pot, and relied on the fact that they were searching for people escaping the prison, not people trapped within it. If they did discover him—bleeding undeniably silver blood, with the multi-colored blood of the slain guards spattered atop that—he would be executed. Of course, things wouldn’t be much better if they didn’t discover him.

None of the Saints had been recaptured, at least. They might all have been killed in the pursuit, but Tal chose to hope that at least some of them would make it. He wondered if Saasha had. He hoped that whatever plans she might have that had led her to lock him in here, they didn’t involve Nyx. Either way, though, there was absolutely nothing he could do about it now.

He leaned his head back, tired to his very marrow. When he closed his eyes, eerie spots swayed behind his eyelids, afterimages from the floor’s glow. They coalesced into figures. Dipping and spinning, they danced across his vision until they became a memory.

A dance hall. The illusion of a glass-calm ocean as the ballroom floor. Men wearing suits in brash colors and exquisitely detailed patterns slipping in and out of the complicated group dance. Most of the women wore ball gowns in shades of red that flared like sunspots when they twirled. Tal had stood against the wall and watched it all and tried not to be sick.

Earlier that same day, he had sworn his oath to the Destroyer and then stabbed the soldier who had—on her own order—attacked her. Take him to the physicians, she’d said afterwards. He may live.

He hadn’t lived. Tal had walked to the physicians’ wing, getting lost several times in the endless corridors paved with extravagance before he stumbled upon the morgue. That wasn’t where he’d meant to go, but it was where he found his answer. The soldier was laid out atop a ceremonial gold-gilded gurney. An attendant was clutching a pair of tongs that held a cup of steaming molten lead over the stab wound in the soldier’s torso. Tal watched, frozen, as the woman poured the lead into the injury until it was filled, and then pried the dead man’s mouth open and filled that, too. The stench of burning flesh and hot metal drifted down the hall. It was a ceremony of honor for a person who’d died in the course of duty, Tal learned later, but then it had only seemed obscene. He had thrown up right there in the hallway. The attendants had been amused and annoyed in equal measure.

It had been the first person he’d ever killed.

An hour after that, the Destroyer summoned him to attend her at the ball. He’d refused to dress in finery, keeping his practical, blood-flecked peasant clothing on as both a memorial and a protest. He had hoped the Destroyer would ask about his choice of evening wear and then he could confront her, perhaps shock her with the knowledge that she had effectively killed her own soldier, but she’d only raised an eyebrow when she saw him.

We make a matched pair, she’d said, glancing down at her own slender red dress. Though the color of blood on your outfit is a bit more authentic.

She hadn’t danced. She had stood near him, a full glass of untouched wine dangling elegantly from one gloved hand, watching the ball with her usual untouchable, distant amusement.

Then, he had thought she seemed like a queen passionlessly surveying her subjects, or a well-fed lioness content to watch the antics of her prey. But now, in his cell with nothing left to lose and nowhere to hide from the truth, he remembered how lonely she had looked. How the amusement on her face turned brittle around the edges when a giggling group of her nieces had asked why she had no dance partner. He remembered how she’d raised an eyebrow and turned to him, giving him a moment to save her, to ask her to dance in front of the people who weren’t even trying to hide their mockery. But that had been the beginning of the death of his idealism, because every time he looked at her now he saw a dead man’s mouth filled with lead and felt the jarring impact of ribs breaking beneath his sword.

He would defend her if one of these chittering peacocks attacked her. He would have to. But