CHAPTER 9
A NOTE ARRIVED ON H ELENA’S LUNCH TRAY a few days later.
Transference tonight was written on the card in a brusque script.
Ferron entered the room at eight. He said nothing, he just went and stood next to her chair, waiting.
She could have tried to struggle, but she knew it was futile. She went over, nauseous with dread, the memory of the fevers and the nightmares already gripping her.
As she seated herself, he slid his gloves off and stepped into place behind her.
She kept her eyes straight ahead until he tilted her head back.
He was more careful than he’d been the first time. Apparently febrile seizures were enough to merit a degree of caution.
The pressure from his resonance developed more gradually.
It felt like diving too deep underwater, and when the weight finally began to crush her, it was too late to escape.
His resonance smothered her consciousness until her thoughts fragmented, flattened.
Her vision turned red, and something warm ran from the corners of her eyes and over her temples.
There was a horrible humming pressure, and then Ferron was melded into her consciousness as if they’d coalesced.
For better or worse, she was brutally conscious and coherent this time.
“I hate you,” she rasped out, and let him feel every ounce of her loathing. If there was a time to provoke him, it was surely now. During a procedure this dangerous, he couldn’t afford to make any mistakes, but she couldn’t move.
I hate you. Traitor. Coward. I hate you.
Ferron paid no notice. He was eerily still, as if distracted by the alien plane of existence he had forced himself into. He didn’t do anything this time, didn’t even look around.
After an eternal moment, he untangled himself. He didn’t rip himself free but withdrew slowly. It was worse because it took so long. Like being flayed from the inside out.
The room tunnelled, all red and scraped raw, her mind like flensed skin.
She toppled forward.
A FACE SWAM BEFORE HER eyes. Red then white. She blinked and the red smeared. Her eyes refused to focus. Her hands and feet had gone numb. The right side of her face and body was rigid.
The face in front of her was strangely pale, emotive for an instant and then blank as she managed to focus her eyes on it.
It was a man.
“You’re all right. You had a seizure. It’s over now.”
He touched her jaw, and she felt warmth under her skin where the muscles were so rigid that they might crack, coaxing them to relax.
“Can you speak? You were screaming for several minutes.”
She fought to swallow, head throbbing, a wet membranous pulsing in her skull. Her mouth tasted like copper.
She tried to talk but the muscles on the right side of her jaw were still so tight, she could scarcely part her teeth. She pressed her face into the warmth of the hand, wanting to cry.
She felt so cold, as if something poisonous was spreading through her, freezing her solid. A low, gasping sound emerged from the back of her throat.
She didn’t understand. She didn’t remember—
“Who are you?” she slurred through her teeth.
Myriad emotions flashed across his face. He opened his mouth, then shut it firmly.
“I’m in charge of your care,” he finally said very slowly, saying each word precisely. His hand slid across the side of her neck, making her tremble. His fingertips touched the dip at the base of her skull. “Go to sleep. You’ll remember when you wake.”
Helena wanted answers, not sleep, but the warmth seeped under her skin like water. The room blurred, the edges disappearing. The face softening as it faded away.
“Do I know you?” she asked as her eyes slid closed.
“I suppose you do.”
W HEN SHE WOKE AGAIN, SHE did remember, and she was screaming. Her mind was aflame with fever. She veered in and out of lucidity. Sometimes remembering transference, other times lost and confused.
Run away.
She was supposed to run away, to go somewhere. But she needed—something.
She wouldn’t go without it.
In the middle of the night, she wandered outside into the courtyard, icy rain pouring from the sky, searching. She lay on the ground, trying to make her head cool from the fire raging inside it. If her mind were cool, she’d remember what she was looking for.
“What are you doing? You’re freezing yourself to death, you idiot.” Ferron carried her inside.
Her skin was so cold that even the servants’ dead hands burned as they stripped off her wet clothes.
When they finally left her, she tried to get back out, but the door and windows were locked fast. Eventually they bound her to the bed so she would stop clawing her fingers raw on the door, trying to escape.
She was left, trapped, forced to endure the lurid, blood-drenched nightmares as she burned away.
Every time she closed her eyes she was at the Institute, bright and golden and gleaming as it had once been, hurrying up the Tower steps for a class, her textbooks pressed tight against her chest, Luc ambling beside her.
There was someone else with them, but even her dreams flinched away from the face.
Then Helena would blink or look down to take notes, and when she looked again, the world would be in ruins. All the students slumped over in their seats, cut open, their blood spattered across the room. Helena the lone survivor amid the carnage.
In one dream, Penny was laid out on a medical table, strapped down and screaming as faceless figures vivisected her before the assembly of dead students.
In another, it was Ferron at the front of the room as if called up for a demonstration. He stood there, morphing steadily from a dark-haired boy into a pale silvery nightmare, his colour turning into blood that dripped from his hands.
When the fever broke, Helena’s limbs had atrophied again. She had no idea how much time had passed. She stumbled and trembled like a kitten when she walked. It was as if the synapses in her brain were misaligned.
She was grateful that Ferron did not come and harass her about going outside. She didn’t want to see him again because she had a very clear memory of pressing her face against his hand without any idea of who he was.
In charge of her care? A very generous way of describing himself.
She paused, replaying the interaction. His slow enunciation as he’d answered her question. She’d been speaking in Etrasian.
As she recovered, she kept having dreams about Luc, memories. Not forgotten ones but moments from the past that made her chest ache at their recollection.
“Come on,” Luc whispered after finding her studying in the library, “you’ve been in here for two days. You’re going to start growing mushrooms out of your ears.” He tugged one of them teasingly. “You need sunshine. I need sunshine.”
“I need to finish analysing this array structure,” she hissed, trying to elbow him away as he began stealing her pens. “Go away.”
Luc never went away no matter how she threatened him. He’d mope and sulk, making progressively more and more noise until the librarians ordered Helena to take him outside, as though the next Principate were a recalcitrant pet.
When they were older and she’d started doing lab work, he couldn’t just make noise to disrupt her, so instead he’d threaten to go off and get into trouble, and hadn’t she promised his father to keep him out of trouble?
They would go into the city, and he’d show her all the best places. The prettiest fire chapels and immense perihelion cathedrals, hidden water gardens, little bookstores and cafés.
All the towers and gardens and views of Paladia that she had ever loved, she had known because Luc had shown them to her. She had loved the city through his eyes. She wished she’d given in more often.
When Helena finally managed to leave her room again, her mind played tricks on her. The house seemed wrong somehow, different from what she remembered. The light was from the wrong angles, the windows in the wrong places, doors where they shouldn’t be.
“The brain inflammation is much better this time,” Stroud said when she came to examine Helena. Her resonance was moving beneath the surface of Helena’s skull like a worm. “I don’t like that you had a seizure again, but only one is an improvement. I think a monthly schedule will be about right.”
Stroud was barely gone when Ferron arrived and stood at the foot of her bed, hands clasped behind his back, studying her through languid eyes.
“Did you know it’s nearly solstice?” he said at last.
No. She had no idea of the date. She knew there was a month between transference sessions, but she hadn’t been sure of when she’d arrived.
The winter solstice marked the end of the year in the North. It was one of the most significant events of their calendar. Southern coastal countries, where the days did not ebb and grow so dramatically, tracked the year by Lumithia’s lunar tides.
“You were supposed to be gone by now.” His eyes flicked towards the window. “Seems I’ll be keeping you through the winter.”
There was no emotion in Ferron’s voice or face as he said it. It was one of the things that Helena realised was most strange about him: how little his body and tone communicated at times.
Etras had an animated culture and language, using expressions and hand gestures.
It had been one of the many things that had made Helena a clear outsider.
She’d learned to lace her fingers tightly together under the desk when speaking in class or else risk the room rippling with laughter as her hands started gesticulating.
Paladians valued stillness. Expert alchemists would only move their fingers for precise and controlled use of their resonance.
It was culturally ingrained. Expressions were also valued most when they were subtle; insults often came in the form of sarcastic flattery that didn’t translate easily for a newcomer.
Helena had learned to be still and watch for subtle tells. To understand that when the pupils got small, and the eyes skipped over her face, and the feet pointed away, that the smiling and nice-sounding words didn’t mean that she was liked or her presence wanted.
Ferron was more difficult to read than most Paladians, not because his mouth said one thing and his body another, but because his body sometimes didn’t say anything at all.
He stood there, body still, expression flat, hands concealed. Helena couldn’t work out his mood.
“There are a few things scheduled to arrive tomorrow, to spare myself any additional inconvenience from all this. Please ”—he placed overt emphasis on the word—“do not mistake it for a sign of affection.”
A PAPER PACKAGE WAS LEFT at her door along with the breakfast tray the next morning. Inside was a pair of boots.
She pulled them out, running her fingers over the details.
They were beautiful, gleaming leather, with sturdy soles and a row of buttons to fasten them up. She could see the craftsmanship in all the details.
When Ferron had referred to something sparing himself “additional inconvenience,” she had not expected shoes, although the slippers were in tatters from the wet gravel.
She slipped her feet into them, already looking forward to walking the halls without the ice-cold iron in the floors seeping through her feet.
It was then she realised there was more in the package. A pair of shearling gloves made with an odd design, very long in the wrist. Not formal length, but strangely proportioned, rather like a hawking glove.
She pulled one on curiously and realised the shape and length was to cover the manacles, preventing the metal from growing frigid and burning her skin.
When she went out for her walk, it was the first time her hands and feet didn’t begin immediately aching from the cold.
Still she refused to feel any gratitude towards Ferron. It would only get colder after the solstice passed. If she was there all winter, she’d probably develop nerve damage or frostbite from going outside. It was in his best interest to keep her healthy.
She was not so foolish as to mistake calculation for kindness.