Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

“Elodie,” Tal said quietly.

She shuddered at the name. It wasn’t hers. Not anymore. But it still seemed to hold some sort of sway over her—or maybe it was just him who had that, no matter what it was he was saying.

“Talk to me,” he said.

“I do not take orders from you,” she replied, keeping her back to him. She tried to make the words cool and detached but they came out flat instead. She took a breath, tried to focus. “Albinus will have his spies watching the exits, but you may be able to hide until it’s safe to go.”

“I don’t want to hide,” he said. A whisper of fabric rustled against her ears as he moved, those familiar footsteps slow but certain as he stepped toward her, circling around until he stood in front of her. “I don’t want to go.”

“You do. You did.”

“I came back.”

“Whatever could possess you to do such a thing?”

He was not far, perhaps an arm’s length away. She could feel the outline of him in the darkness. She wanted so badly to close the distance to him, to be able to see the way he was looking at her now, but she remembered why she had kept the room dark—because she couldn’t bear to see him flinch again when he met her eyes. And even in that darkness, if she reached out to him she would only feel him recoil, because that was the instinctive reaction when one was faced with a predator.

It wasn’t until Tal’s fingers settled against her cheek that she realized she was crying.

The touch was so unexpected, and suddenly so completely and exactly what she needed, that she gasped aloud. She didn’t dare to move, though, only stood quaking as his other hand lifted, slowly, carefully, to graze her other cheek.

“I came back,” Tal said, his voice so low she could barely hear it even though it seemed to reverberate through every part of her, “because I could no longer pretend, even to myself, that I don’t love you.”

She raised her hands then, gripped his wrists, not because she needed to hold him in place but because he was her anchor and she was in the midst of a storm and she knew that if he backed away now, if he flinched, she would be torn apart by it.

He didn’t flinch.

“Elodie is gone,” she said. Her voice was not thick with her tears. She’d had too much practice acting as if she weren’t crying. “It isn’t me who you love.”

“It is,” he said steadily. “I love you, the girl I so foolishly swore a metal oath to two years ago, with the tired smile and the twisted crown. I love you, the girl I hated when I had to kill assassins and Saints for your sake. I love you, who has been used as a weapon by your own sister. And most of all I love you, the girl who saved me from a blizzard and a mooncat and from myself. You were right when I said I loved Elodie. But you were wrong when you said you weren’t her. You have always been Elodie, and as hard as you might try to kill her, I am afraid she is quite a bit tougher than that.”

She closed her eyes. Earlier, he had stripped away her defenses. Now, his words had replaced them with something new and far stronger, something insurmountable, impossible. Something unutterably beautiful.

She took one hand off his wrist and reached tentatively for him. She brushed his face. He turned into her touch as he had earlier, but this time the movement wasn’t small. It was a leaning of his whole self into her; an acceptance, an offering. She stepped closer to him. His breath ghosted over her hair. She paused barely a few inches away, realizing what she had been about to do, the boundary she had been about to cross—and then Tal crossed it for her, leaning in and finding her lips with his own.

The kiss was whisper-soft. It was a knowing that passed between them, spinning out like a blown glass ornament, fragile and precious as it grew. She trembled beneath his touch and he trembled beneath hers. She was helpless, out of control, and drunken with the headiness of it. It reminded her of a sled ride down a steep hill, snow in her hair and a blizzard on the horizon, the world laid out before her as she whooped with joy.

He loved her. He trusted her enough to give himself to her in this way, even though she had quicksilver eyes and mercurial blood and enough fire to level a city, even though she had hurt him, and even though she knew there would always be a part of him that hurt to be with her.

As if his touch were a conduit that connected her to herself—to Elodie, to her own formerly distant emotions—the weight of what she had experienced in the last few hours crashed down on her all at once, and a sob rose up within her. She broke the kiss, wrapped her arms around Tal, and buried her head in his chest. The tears that had refused to fall when she’d found her sister’s body flowed at last. She shook with the grief of it, with the anguish of losing the only family member who’d loved her, and with the agony of the knowledge that she would soon lose Tal too—either to the trial, or to the phage.

She could not endure it. She could not bear to lose him, too.

“Yes, you can,” Tal said to her, which made her realize she had spoken her thoughts aloud.

She stepped back, suddenly furious. She knew that the flash of her changing emotions was mostly due to the mercury and tried to contain it, but only partly succeeded. “I love you too, you idiot,” she hissed, “and no, I cannot bear to lose you.”

She felt his chest shake beneath her hands and realized he