Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

was laughing. “If I were not already convinced you were still Elodie, that needlessly aggressive declaration of love would do the trick.”

She let out a frustrated breath and barely kept herself from shoving him away. “How can you expect me to withstand your death?”

He sighed and leaned his forehead against hers, resting there as if she was an entirely safe spot for him to abide. “Because you are human,” he said softly. “We were made to withstand such things.” He hesitated a moment then, and said, “I am sorry for the pain you must feel at the loss of your sister. I truly did think you could save her.”

It was both honest and kind, but not the whole truth. He was sorry only for her pain and not the actual loss, which he did not mourn at all, because he hated her sister and felt no trace of the love for her that softened his hatred of the Destroyer.

“I do not feel it as Elodie would,” the Destroyer admitted. “Even now. And I am glad.”

Tal was quiet, but she felt him tense against her. “You must promise me something,” he said at last.

“I must do no such thing,” she answered, wary with the knowledge that he could only be asking her to do something she very much did not want to do.

He plowed onward without regard to her reply. “Whatever happens at the trial, you must find a way to give up your mercury.”

She pulled away from him at that. “I will not give up my power.” Her heart turned over at the thought—the wretched emotions that she would once again wholly feel, the defenselessness against her enemies.

“It is not power,” Tal argued. “It is poison. Perhaps you can withstand the mercury now, but the more time that goes by the more it will overtake you, until there is nothing at all left of the girl I loved.”

She noted his use of past tense. Her hands curled into claws in his shirt. “Tal, you will not die. I will not allow it.”

He said nothing. The quality of his silence changed in a way that felt somehow rueful and familiar, and she realized then what had to have happened to bring him back to this place. Her mouth filled with a sour taste. “You’ve had another vision, haven’t you?”

“I have.”

Her whole being filled with an incandescent rage, underlaid by a terrible sorrow that felt inevitable. She warred with it. “So you have come back not for me at last, but for him.”

“I came back for you because he finally made me understand that I love you.”

She gritted her teeth. The anger was so intense; she had forgotten how it blew through her like a windstorm, uprooting sense and logic, leaving only destruction in its wake. It turned out there were some emotions she could still feel strongly after all—but at least these emotions made her feel more powerful, not less. “If he allows you to die, I will raze all of his people to dust.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“Why? Because it’s blasphemy? He betrayed you! Remember—he led you to me, to two years of pain, to the embittering of your very soul because of it, and I will never forgive him that.”

“But I think I might,” Tal said softly, “someday.”

“You cannot forgive him.” The words were final, an order from an empress.

His fingers found her jawline. His thumb smoothed away a tear there. “I will forgive who I wish,” he said, a trace of heavy humor in his tone now. “And you cannot command me otherwise.”

He gently kissed the spot where his thumb had rested, and some of the raging fury within her subsided. Like a retreating tide it left behind the wreckage of its passing. “You cannot forgive me either,” she said quietly.

His fingers paused on her face and then dropped away. She could almost hear him wrestling with his thoughts. “I love you,” he said at last, “and I will forgive you someday, too.”

“But not yet?”

He let out a breath. “Finding the end of a journey satisfactory does not erase the pain of the path that brought you there. It wouldn’t be honest to love you, or to love my god, and not admit to myself that both of you have hurt me too. Someday the pain may be distant enough for me to forget it, to remember only the rightness of the ending. That’s not today. But I have faith,” he said, and she could feel that rueful smile of his in the darkness, “that it may be so eventually. Until then, I will just have to live with it all together: love, and hate, and grief and betrayal and joy.”

At least he was speaking as if he would live past tomorrow now. “How will you bear it?” she asked. “How could anyone bear to have so much inside them?”

“We were made to withstand these things, too.”

“Tal. Tell me your vision.”

The suddenness of her request did not catch him off-guard as she had hoped. He only said steadily, “If I tell it to you, it may not happen.”

“And you want it to happen?” Maybe it was something good that he’d seen, some way out of the corner that she and Albinus and Tal himself had backed her into.

“I’ve said yes to my god, and I will not go back on my word,” he replied, which wasn’t an answer at all. She made a sound of frustration and disgust, and felt his chest shake with laughter again, just a little.

That was when she finally got the courage to say what she had wanted to say ever since she saw him kneeling in front of a contingent of soldiers outside the physicians’ wing. “I want you to forgive me,” she whispered as if it were a sinful thing to confess, which it certainly was. People like her shouldn’t be forgiven.

He said nothing, only wrapped her in his arms and held her together. They stood like that for a long time as