Chapter 36 Would That I Could #2
I didn’t want to be a hero to my people.
I didn’t care if they never knew my name.
Anything I had done to aid Zilvaren’s rebels had been in secret and in silence.
I’d never needed to draw attention to myself.
I sure as hell didn’t need a clap on the back from anyone in recognition of my “good deeds.” But the idea that the people of the Third, my people, were cursing my name and refusing extra water in protest of me? Fuck me. I was going to throw up.
“I need to go back. I need to set them straight. All my contacts across the city—”
“Don’t bother, Saeris.” Hayden looked at me now, and the cold hard truth I found on his face was a blow I could never have expected. “They don’t want you.”
“But surely, Elroy—”
“Elroy believes you’re innocent. He defends you whenever he hears anyone speak ill of you.”
Well, that was a relief. Of course the old man knew the truth. Him better than anyone. But the others? Many of them had trusted me. Many of them had traded with me, counted on me, and now they thought that I had been informing on them to the guardians?
It was a clever play. Discredit someone the people of the Third thought they could trust. Make them question anyone who claimed to stand against Madra. Make them cease their incendiary activities, for fear of who might whisper their names into the queen’s ear.
“He’s black and blue.” Hayden’s harsh tone cut through my racing thoughts. “Elroy. Every time he stands up for you, someone throws a punch at him. He’s had a lifetime’s worth of split lips and black eyes lately, and he’s not as tough as he thinks he is anymore.”
My head snapped up, something troubling suddenly clicking into place in my head. Elroy believes you’re innocent. That’s what Hayden had said. Elroy believes and not we know.
There wasn’t a single mark on my brother. No cuts, no scrapes, no bruises.
No one had thrown a punch at him lately.
It occurred to me all at once that since I’d entered the room, he hadn’t smiled at me. He hadn’t fucking hugged me. Hadn’t even seemed all that relieved to see me.
Numb to my core, I took a wobbly step back from him, angling my head to one side in the vain hope that I might be able to get a better read on what it was that he was thinking. “You think I did it, don’t you?” I whispered.
Hayden clenched his jaw, looking away.
“You think I betrayed my friends. You think I actually worked for her!”
“I didn’t say that,” he snapped.
“But you’re not denying it! Gods and sinners, you actually think I worked for her, don’t you?”
“I don’t know!” he exploded. “How the hell am I supposed to know? You never included me in any of the things you were working on. You never let me go anywhere with you after reckoning. You were always off to one secret meeting or another. You’d never breathe a word of where you were going, would you? ”
“So that must mean I was in league with the guardians, then? Is that it?”
“Maybe.” He set his jaw, looking imperiously down his nose at me. “You shut me out. Kept me a million miles away from anything that was important. I don’t know anything, Saeris, and that’s because of you. And we always did seem to have more water and more food than everyone el—”
He didn’t finish that thought. He couldn’t, with my fist slamming into his jaw.
Hayden’s head whipped around so fast that I worried for a moment I’d hit him too hard and broken something, but then the rage his comment had elicited flared full force, and I hoped that I had broken something.
I grabbed him by the front of his shirt and shoved him away.
Fuck you, Hayden. More food?” I shoved him again.
“More water?” Again. Harder. Tears blurred my vision.
I stabbed my finger in his face, trying to speak, but only a sound of pure fury came out of me.
I had to start again. “If we had anything, if you didn’t starve and die in the fucking sand, it was because I bled to keep you alive.
I had to crawl on my stomach through sewer lines to reach the royal reserves.
Once a week, I had to do that for you. Do you have any idea how disgusting that was?
And did you ever hear me complain?” I shoved him hard enough that he fell down this time, but just like always, Hayden Fane was given a soft fucking landing.
The tufted chair caught him, saving him from the indignity of landing ass-first on the rug.
My mouth was all bile and copper. Heat rose up my throat from somewhere deep within the basement of my soul.
“I didn’t tell you what I was doing every day because I had to go into tense situations, in fucking horrible places, and do unpleasant things,” I spat.
“I didn’t bring you with me to those places, because I didn’t want life to be hard for you like it was for me.
But I see now that I’ve done you a disservice.
You have this . . . this fucking illusion that life should be easy, that it owes you something, and that’s on me.
” I thumped my own chest, clenching my jaw to the point of pain.
“I broke myself to look after you. I slipped into every other ward in Zilvaren, and I robbed, and I stole, and I bartered and traded, just to make sure that you were comfortable and your belly was full. And then you have the audacity to turn around and accuse me of the most heinous thing I can possibly think of, because I made life too fucking easy for you while everyone around us had to suffer.”
“Saeris—”
“Shut up, Hayden. Just shut the fuck up.”
“No. Your hand,” he whispered. “There’s something wrong with your hand.”
Another rune on fire.
This time, the rune for brimstone.
It swept artfully around the solid quicksilver rune, intertwined with it, connected and yet separate.
If possible, it hurt twice as much as the quicksilver rune had, and the lines of fire trailing up my arm reached all the way to my elbow.
For an hour, I just held my arm, breathing, trying to meditate my way through the pain.
The gods only knew whether the breathing and meditating worked, but eventually the smoldering embers the rune cut into my flesh went out and the symbol glowed a soft red instead.
It was then that I had run to Fisher’s bedroom; the place that had been a prison to me once was now the place I felt safest in all Cahlish. Surrounded by my mate’s scent, I sat on the rug, back resting against the side of the bed, and I took out the book at last.
Not the tome Algat had given me.
Edina’s book.
Dear child, I know you might not be feeling very trusting of me right now.
I misled you with my request to keep this book secret from my son, and I apologize for any ill feelings that may have caused.
I am not a woman given to participating in cruel games, and it brings me no pleasure to trick you.
I can only hope that you will forgive me for the subterfuge and one day understand why it had to be done.
I am afraid, with that trickery still fresh in your memory, that I must ask you for a solemn promise.
I am breaking all the laws of the universe with this gambit, but for it to work, you cannot skip ahead in this book.
You will read things that will prevent you from facing the challenges in front of you for fear of the ones ahead, to the ruin of us all.
I implore you, please. Do not do it.
Each entry in this book had been written in service of a specific moment to come. For any of this to bear fruit, the dominoes must fall in order.
With that said, I must acknowledge that there are many ways to approach what comes next, and nearly all of them will kill you.
Your second rune has awoken. By now, you must know that brimstone is not a plentiful resource in Yvelia, as it once was.
Historically, Alchemists shied away from the second bough of the Tria Prima, not only because it was too powerful and difficult to wield, but because its only purpose seemed to be linked with death and destruction.
Even knowing you must conquer this rune, it pains me to advise that you must do so, as sealing this magic to your soul will come at great cost.
You will have to unlock a door within yourself that will be hard to close thereafter.
I will not—cannot—lie to you. You will change if you choose to walk down this path.
But with the brimstone rune sealed to you, there is a chance you will be able to use it to help save Yvelia from the veil I see descending upon it.
If you decide to reject this rune, there are still other courses of action that can be taken to fend off the darkness, but the odds of those plans working are slight in comparison.
In fairness to you, I will first explain how you can reject your brimstone rune . . .
I read on, skimming over Edina’s elegant handwriting, devouring her words.
She had known everything, then. Seen everything.
It was all here: a map to surviving the chaos and the pain that lay ahead.
It was almost impossible not to flick through the book and go to the end, to see what might tip the scales of victory to our favor .
. . but Edina’s warning rang voiceless in my head.
You will read things that will prevent you from facing the challenges in front of you for fear of the ones ahead, to the ruin of us all.
The warning did not inspire confidence in me.
The book was long, after all. But as I read past Edina’s instructions for rejecting my brimstone rune—I would need to submerge my hand in quicksilver and instruct it to strip the magic from me—she went on to explain that the first half of the book was a guidebook to my powers.
It was the latter half of the book that contained instructions with regard to the rot.
The beginning of her prophecies read thus:
Concerning the Evenlight Ball: turn this page before leaving your chambers.
An appointment awaits.
Hours later, my head was still buried in Edina’s book.
I had learned more from her in the span of an evening than I could have gleaned in a lifetime scouring the libraries of Yvelia for scraps.
And, honestly, I was scared. The Alchemists were often corrupted by their powers.
Their fates were ruled by their strength of will, but also by the heritage of their blood.
If I was born an Alchemist, then I definitely had a Fae relative somewhere in my ancestry.
Knowing nothing about them meant I had no idea whether I had a predisposition to succumb to my magic or not, and that was frightening in and of itself. But there was more.
The Alchemists hadn’t just channeled quicksilver.
In some cases, they had become so intertwined with it that they merged with it altogether to become silver-eyed heralds of the gods.
These were the Alchemists who had spurred Belikon and his ilk to murder the Alchimeran line and eradicate them from this realm and all others—because they had become powerful beyond all measure and threatened the grasp of the Triumvirate’s power.
As I read, the pain in my hand slowly ebbed, until the new rune on the back of my hand was healed.
It was only an outline, not filled in like the quicksilver rune that had preceded it.
Incomplete. A door that went to nowhere.
There was no magic to it yet. I could sense that. But maybe soon there would be.
Fisher found me staring into space, attempting to process all that I had read, just as dusk was bruising the sky and ushering in the night. He carried Onyx in his arms; my mate had taken him along when he’d left Cahlish earlier, and now the little fox was excited to see me.
Chittering loudly, he yelped, slipping out of Fisher’s arms, then collided with my chest, tumbling over himself, hind legs sticking up, tufts of white fluff floating into the air.
“Good gods. You’re ridiculous.” I sniffed as I ruffled his fur, scratching his sides and the base of his skull, behind his ears—his favorite spot.
Fisher smelled like fresh snow, smoke, and the faintest hint of powdered sugar, which told me that he’d stayed at Wendy’s long enough to share a cup of tea and a Bettell biscuit with the female before returning home from Ballard.
I reached for his hand, and he brushed my fingertips with his own as he stepped over me and sank down on the floor next to me, sagging back against the bed.
It was then that I saw how drawn he looked.
Onyx was busy licking my ear. I petted him distractedly, frowning at my mate. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
He rolled his head to the right so that he was looking at me.
“Ren,” he said. “He was supposed to ride along the Darn and then up into the Shallow Mountains to treat with the Gilarian Fae, then down through the forests to Ballard, then on to Inishtar, where I would collect him. I went to Inishtar first, but the satyrs haven’t seen him.
They knew nothing of the rot. I had to tell them of it myself.
I went on to Ballard to see if Ren had stayed there to wait for me, but Wendy hasn’t seen him, either.
I checked in with Royan, king of the Gilarian Fae, next.
Ren did warn them. They’ve already started taking steps to quarantine their cities in the mountains.
Royan said Ren left their stronghold a day and a half ago and hasn’t been seen in the Shallow Mountains since. ”
“What?”
“I visited every small town between Gilaria and Ballard to see if he’d been waylaid, but no one’s seen hide nor hair of him.”
A lead weight, ice-cold, formed in the pit of my stomach. “You don’t think . . . Belikon . . .”
Fisher shook his head, dark waves brushing the tops of his shoulders.
“No. Ren’s smarter than every single one of Belikon’s guards put together.
He moves like a ghost along those forest roads.
There’s no way anyone stumbled across him and knew to command him to return to the Winter Palace on behalf of the king.
No, this is something else. I just can’t put my finger on it. ”
“Do you think he’s in danger?”
Fisher gave me a sidelong look that answered that question in no uncertain terms. “We’re all in danger, Osha. But yes, I think Ren might be in some kind of hot water. And I have no idea how to find him so we can get him out of it.”