Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

be dead before death was irrevocable? She could not keep fighting with herself. Some part of her must win: the Destroyer, or the girl from the Skyteeth who’d lost her memories but found her own soul.

Tal’s words came to her then: You were right when I said I loved Elodie. But you were wrong when you said you weren’t her.

The fire around her, which had been raging as if driven by gales, went still. So did the fire within her. There was no duality in her, no distinctly different personalities harbored in her being. There was only a girl. She was small, and scared, and lashed out with whatever weapon she had at hand—her words, her magic, her anger—when she felt threatened. The poison within her had only amplified those natural instincts.

It was not power and Tal that she had to choose between. It was not the Destroyer and Elodie. It wasn’t even strength and vulnerability.

It was fear, and love.

Nyx had one arm locked around Albinus’s neck and the other drawn back, about to plunge the thin throwing dagger deep into his chest, when a hand wrapped around her wrist to stop her. She looked up. The Destroyer stood before her. The tracks of tears still shone on her cheeks, but only resolution showed in her eyes.

“I can save him,” the Destroyer said.

Nyx stared at her. Her mind worked through the possibilities: this was a trap, the opening salvo to the Destroyer’s revenge for the death of her favorite toy, or an attempt to capture Nyx alive for interrogation. But none of that mattered, because the Destroyer had just said the single phrase that could make Nyx do whatever she wanted no matter how impossible it seemed.

She dropped the dagger. “What do you need?”

“I need Albinus,” the Destroyer said steadily. “I need a copper Smith to channel magic from my crown.”

Albinus gave an ugly laugh, the effect of which was dampened by the fact that he was currently choking to death. “I will do no such thing,” he gurgled, or at least that was what Nyx was pretty sure he was probably saying.

Nyx picked the dagger back up and gave him a shallow slice across the ear, knowing a cut in such a sensitive spot would sting like hell. He howled and snarled and she bared her teeth in a smile. “Go ahead, Al,” she said, drawing the dagger back. “Turn her down again and let me mar your face further. It’s not that pretty to start with—you should probably be more interested in conserving what traces of palatability it still has.”

Albinus gritted his teeth, glared at her, and then reluctantly nodded.

Sorry, Helenia, Nyx said mentally. Apparently violence is sometimes a good answer.

She dragged him to the spot where Tal was lying. When she saw her brother’s lifeless body, a shudder of grief and denial wrenched through her so powerfully that she nearly lost her hold on Albinus, who immediately tensed to make a run for it. Nyx got control of herself—she said she could save him, it might be true, she told herself fiercely even though she knew she shouldn’t believe it—and firmed her grasp on the Lord of Copper.

The Destroyer took off her crown. Her hair was braided around it and strands of it tore as she yanked the crown away, but she paid no mind. She held it out above Tal’s body. Her jaw was clenched—with the effort it was taking to hold her power back, or perhaps with the same grief and fear that was raging through Nyx.

“I am going to burn this,” the Destroyer told Albinus.

He went still and then jerked. He gurgled something. Nyx eased her grip a bit so he could speak. He sucked down great lungfuls of air and then managed, “You can’t! The high courts will lose our advantage, the crown holds the power of the whole empire—”

“Then it will be a good trade for Tal’s life,” the Destroyer said icily. “When I destroy it, you will channel the copper magic from it into Tal. You will use it to restore him. Fully. No poison, no rust phage.”

Nyx’s heart sped with hope. It was like a drug, loosening her muscles, making her feel almost delirious with it.

Albinus licked his lips, his gaze flitting from Tal’s body to the Destroyer’s face. “I’m…I’m not sure I’d be able to restore him fully, even with as much magic as the crown is rumored to hold.”

The Destroyer lifted her eyes to Nyx, her features dark with the promise of violence—a violence that, for once, Nyx understood and was fully on board with.

Nyx twirled the dagger in front of Albinus’s face. His eyes followed it as if hypnotized. She stopped its spinning and touched it to his cheek, making him shiver. Then she motioned at the Destroyer and the walls of fire around them. “If my brother dies, so do you,” she told him, conviction clear as daylight in her tone. “By knife or by fire or by my own bare hands.”

“Or my own bare hands,” the Destroyer added. The curtains of fire around them leapt higher and crackled with her barely-restrained fury.

Albinus hesitated a moment longer and then gave in. “Very well. We—we must hurry, though, his heart will have been stopped for too long to restart it soon.” His eyes darted around as if he were looking for backup. The few guards who were still in the courtyard were a sensible distance away, though, and didn’t look like they were about to charge through the flames to rescue the royal physician from their empress.

The Destroyer lifted her chin, bracing herself. “I will have to focus,” she warned Nyx. “Keep an eye on Albinus. If I lose concentration, the release of so much magic of so many different kinds could blow up half the palace.”

“I’m okay with that,” Nyx assured her.

The Destroyer turned her focus to the crown and the boy beneath it. The walls of fire began to contract around