CHAPTER 5 #3
“I suppose it was too much to hope you had the physical resilience of a man like Bayard,” Stroud added with a disgruntled huff after another minute of running her resonance intrusively through Helena’s organs.
She pressed her fingers against Helena’s head, pushing a little frisson of energy into her mind, making Helena wince. Her mind still felt raw. “This degree of inflammation after seven days is worrying.”
She sucked her teeth and glared at Mandl. “A pity you didn’t report her at the time. This would all be so much easier.”
Mandl bobbed her head stiffly, which was not enough penitence for Stroud.
“You should be grateful that I haven’t pointed out to His Eminence that if we’d learned about her sooner, we might have retained Boyle’s corpse and had an animancer for one of the Undying to use.”
“I said I was sorry,” Mandl said. “I don’t know what else you want me to do, or why you dragged me here.”
“You were gifted ascendance on my recommendation. If I am going to be inconvenienced by this, then so will you,” Stroud said. “And if this costs me anything, I will see that it costs you more.”
Stroud turned back to Helena, examining her again with an increasingly sour expression. “We’ll need to delay the next procedure until she’s stronger. If she dies prematurely, we’ll lose the information.”
She turned to the other necrothrall in the room. “High Reeve!”
The servant turned her head, cloudy eyes focusing on Stroud.
“I will speak with you. Privately.”
The necrothrall servant nodded and gestured towards the door.
Of all the uses of necromancy that Helena had witnessed, the creation of the Ferrons’ servants seemed a particularly vile choice. In a war, she could see the horrific rationale leading to the act, but the servants in Spirefell were all civilians, murdered for the sake of cheap convenience.
With every minute she spent in the house, her hatred of Ferron deepened, because she knew his history—the luxury and privilege of his family. His easy life. The Ferrons would have been nothing without the Holdfasts and the Alchemy Institute; their wealth would never have existed.
They should have been grateful, loyal to Luc for what his family had enabled them to become, but they’d turned traitor and chosen Morrough.
Perhaps that ouroboros dragon was not merely a pretentious decoration but something the Ferrons prided themselves on. An omen of a destructive, insatiable hunger which left nothing but ruin in its wake.
F ERRON STRODE INTO HER ROOM the next day. Helena’s body went rigid, dread sweeping through her like a tide. The physical pain of transference twinged inside her psyche like an aftershock.
He stopped at the door, and his pale eyes slid over her, flickering as they paused on her fingers, which spasmed uncontrollably when she was startled. She hid them behind her skirts.
“Stroud wants you going outside,” he said. “She believes fresh air will improve your constitution.” He tossed a bundle towards her. “Put it on.”
Helena unfolded it and found it was a thick cloak, dyed crimson. She grimaced.
“Something wrong?”
She looked over. “Is red the only dye you have in this house?”
“It’ll make you easy for the thralls to spot. Come!” Ferron stalked into the hallway.
She followed tentatively. The sconces in the hallways were lit, driving back the shadows as he headed to the far end of the wing, descending a new flight of stairs to a set of doors that opened onto a veranda in the courtyard.
It was raining, and a gust of wind swirled along the house, whipping across her face. She gave a startled gasp.
Ferron turned sharply. “What?”
“I—” Her voice cracked, and she swallowed. “I’d forgotten what wind feels like.”
He turned away. “The courtyard’s enclosed. You may wander as you wish.”
She looked around, taking in the details of the house and the other buildings.
The veranda they stood on continued past the end of the wing and became a cloister walkway, connecting the main house to the other buildings, walling them in.
A person could travel all the way to the gate without stepping into the rain, the house and buildings forming an iron ring.
“Go.” Ferron waved her off and then seated himself at a nearby table with two small chairs, pulling a newspaper out of his overcoat.
Helena’s eyes instantly locked onto the headlines.
ETERNAL FLAME TERRORIST SEIZED! screamed the words at the top of the fold in all-capitals.
She stepped closer without thinking.
Who had they found?
Grace said they were all dead. But here was proof of survivors. Ferron hadn’t killed them all.
He looked up. She froze in her tracks, unable to tear her eyes away from the paper, looking desperately for a name.
“Care to see?” he asked in a slow drawl that made her skin prickle.
He snapped the paper open, and Helena stared dumbfounded at a photograph of herself, drugged and sedated in Central. Her face was gaunt, her expression contorted, strained from the withdrawal of the interrogation drug, her hair tangled around her face.
It was clearly intended to make her look like a dirty, feral extremist.
The last fugitive of the Eternal Flame terrorists has been apprehended and taken for interrogation, proclaimed the lede just above the fold.
“You’re finally famous, and look—I’m included, too.” Ferron’s eyes glittered with malice as he indicated a photo of himself farther down the column, in that very courtyard, the spires of the house silhouetted behind him. “Just in case anyone wants to know where you are. Or who’s keeping you.”
Helena looked at him in confusion. Why would they want to publicise her capture and location? And why now? She’d been in Central for weeks. Her apprehension was old news.
“I thought it was a rather obvious trap,” Ferron said with a sigh, flipping past the front page.
“Then again, your Resistance was never known for its intelligence. Anything more subtle would elude them. The High Necromancer hopes that if there’s anyone left, they’ll feel morally obligated to rush in and save the Flame’s last ember.
” He glanced sidelong at her. “I have my doubts, but no harm in trying, I suppose.”
He leaned back, idly returning his attention to the next column.
Helena staggered back.
Was that why they’d sent her to Spirefell rather than keeping her in Central? To be used as bait?
A strangled sound tore from her throat. She turned and stumbled down the steps out into the rain. There was nowhere to go, but she had to go somewhere.
The cloak, clasped at her throat, choked her, dragging her back. Her fingers tore at it until it came loose, setting her free. She ran across the courtyard.
The icy rain soaked through the thin, fashionable fabric of her dress, but she scarcely felt it.
She could see the towers from the city, rising beyond Spirefell.
She looked for the beacon, the light that had always shone from the top of the Alchemy Tower, the Eternal Flame which had been kept burning since the day of Paladia’s founding, but it was not there. It was gone.
Still she went towards them, but as she neared the far side of the courtyard, all the towers vanished behind the wall. She moved back and forth, looking for some way out, finally going to the gate, knowing it would be futile but unable to help herself.
It was locked tight, made of wrought iron too ornate to squeeze through. She rattled it so hard, it made her wrists spasm.
She tried to climb it but her slippers shredded, the iron cold enough to burn her skin, and when she tried to pull herself up, the pain inside her wrists left her hands numb.
Across the courtyard, Ferron was reading the paper, unconcerned by Helena’s attempts at escape.
She wanted to scream. She gripped the gate, rattling it again.
What if someone came, not knowing they were being lured into a trap?
Someone who’d managed to survive all this time, captured because of her.
She drew in a gasping breath. Her chest felt as though it might split open. She slumped, shaking the gate again and again, as if the iron might bend for her if she were only persistent enough.
Finally, she turned back to the house in despair.
Everywhere she looked was grey: the dead grass and leafless, skeletal trees, the dark house with its black vines and spires, even the washed-out slope of the mountains, white peaks shrouded by the mist of an overcast sky.
It was as if all colour had been leached from the world. Except her. She stood there in blood red, stark against the monochrome.
The wind drove the rain into her, striking like droplets of ice, making her shudder. She was drenched through. Her hands were turning white, the tips of her fingers aching with every gust of wind. The metal from the manacles sent a chill radiating into her bones.
She pressed her fingers over her eyes, trying to think. What could she do? Surely there was something.
No. Her plan remained the same. Die, by Ferron’s hand or her own.
The rain was streaming through her hair and down her face as she forced herself to walk back towards the house.
There were two necrothralls stationed outside, at the top of the stairs leading to the main wing.
She recognised them from Central. Weathering outside, they were so decrepit that they almost blended in with the stones, but both watched as she neared Ferron.
Ferron glanced up, his eyes hard. “You haven’t been out long enough. Keep walking.”
She slunk back into the courtyard. There were a few trees in the centre that hid her from view as she huddled in the cloistered walkway across the courtyard, trying to warm herself.
She could see her cloak lying in the gravel, soaked with rain.
She wrapped her arms around her chest, trying to conserve body heat.
Gradually the shivering stopped. Another gust of wind tore through her. She felt thin as paper, so tired she could fall asleep out there.
Which might indicate hypothermia …
If she fell asleep, her organs would begin to shut down, and she’d die. She’d read it was a gentle way to go. She let herself sink into the oblivion until everything grew comfortingly vague.
“Creative.” Ferron’s voice was colder than the wind. Fingers gripped her arm, and heat surged through her, her heart suddenly racing, hot blood pulsing through her body.
She gave a startled gasp, wrenching herself away from him, but it was too late.
He glared at her. “Get up.”
She pushed herself awkwardly to her feet, wrists twinging. She was still blue with cold, limbs stiff with chill, but now too warm to die.
“Don’t make me drag you,” he said through clenched teeth as he turned and walked away.
She followed him sullenly. There was a servant waiting at the door. The third she’d seen. Dead like all the rest. This one was younger, uniformed as a housemaid. She was holding a brush and cloth. Helena tried to slink past but found herself trapped in place.
“Aurelia will throw a fit if you track mud into her house. Sit.”
“I can clean myself,” Helena said stiffly.
“I didn’t ask,” Ferron said. His resonance twanged through her nerves, and Helena’s knees gave out, dropping her onto a chair. The maid knelt and began cleaning Helena’s wet slippers while Helena sat rigidly, torn between horrified fascination and shame.
The Faith said that a soul and body remained joined together as one until cremation.
It was only when fire consumed the flesh that the ethereal soul was untethered from the crude earthly form.
A person who had lived devoutly and without vice would release a pure soul that could ascend to the highest of the heavenly realms.
If a body was not burned, the soul was left trapped, unable to ascend and in danger of becoming tainted by the body’s putrefaction.
Left too long, the impurity of the body could metamorphise the soul into maggots and insects, plagues, and other grotesque forms of evil, doomed to sink beneath the surface of the earth to be consumed forever in the dark wet fire of the Abyss.
Reanimation risked that metamorphosis. Tethering both body and soul to a necromancer meant that even the purest souls could become too corrupted to ever ascend unless they were freed with sacred fire.
Helena couldn’t help but peer into the maid’s face, looking for any sign that there might be a soul still inside, slowly decaying, trapped in a state of neither life nor death. The maid’s gaze was empty. If there was any trace of her soul, it was smothered beneath Ferron’s will.
She looked up at him. “You’re a monster.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Noticed that, have you?”