Chapter Two Nina
Patrick’s eyes had long been a danger to me.
How practiced I had become at avoiding them. One glance, and I was swallowed.
“Sink… it,” he’d begged me. “Please.”
He was slumped in the mud, his shirt painted to his chest with blood. Slow-blinking, arms limp, his teeth chattered with cold. Worse still, the blue in his eyes, not yet deadened by the dark. Still hoping.
A soldier kicked the sole of Patrick’s boot and shouted at him to stand. He barely seemed to notice.
His eyes were drowning me.
Behind us, his town and his people were patching up bullet holes and stitching gashes.
The dead were awaiting their graves. The runaways were likely rising from the tunnels and being greeted by the barrels of more guns, more soldiers.
The Artisans had taken everything they needed from Kenton Hill.
They had the last Alchemist. They had the earth Charmer.
And Patrick had no one but me.
I held him as though he were a sinking raft. I gritted my teeth. “I can’t.”
Blue turned to ice—his one remaining hope, snuffed out. He pivoted sharply out of my grasp.
But not before I saw the agony.
“Then get away from me.”
And a tether between me and him snapped. Perhaps the final one. I felt the ricochet down to my core.
Someone grasped my shoulders and pulled me back, and in the mess of my breaking heart I flung wildly, turning to push them away, to fight and scratch and claw. To me, every one of these navy blue uniforms was Lord Tanner, the leader of the House himself. All this was his doing. His fault.
But the person who handled me spoke softly.
He gripped my wrists to keep me from tearing out his eyes.
“Shhh, Nina! Stop! Stop!” Theo’s face hovered in the gloom, one eye swollen shut, the other pleading.
“They’ll knock you out, Nina. Please.” His eyes flittered to the soldiers standing on every side, grappling for sense in the dark.
“Tie her up!” one shouted. “She’s rabid. Get me some fucking rope!”
Theo gripped the sides of my face harder than he ever had.
He pierced me with a stare so forceful that I had no choice but to focus on the edges of him, expanding and retracting in the glow.
He spoke clearly, an anchor in his voice.
“We’ll figure it all out,” he told me. “I promise you, we’ll find a way. ”
And then we were wrenched apart again, and a sack was pulled over my face, my hands were tied, and several shouts echoed. Shoving. Grunting. The toes of boots glancing my heels.
The walls groaned their reproach. My fingers itched with the urge to pull them inward, to bury all of us.
But especially me.
Yes. Especially me.
The tunnel ended somewhere under Gilmore.
The infantry had dug themselves a crude hole all the way down to reach it, rope ladders dangling freely on every side, and I was permitted my sight to climb to the surface.
“Go on,” said a soldier with an overflowing neck. He smacked my arse before my foot could find the first rung. “Up you go.”
I spat at his boots, and he jumped back in disgust.
I was sure I would slip and fall at every rung. My limbs felt too feeble for climbing. Each time I blinked upward, the surface seemed impossibly far away.
I was dragged out by more unwanted hands, my front hauled over pebble and dirt, and I stumbled to my feet, immediately looking around for Patrick or Theo before someone thought to blindfold me again.
I saw neither among all the navy. Two soldiers gripped either arm, the heavy-necked one and another, and I was frog-marched into the sea of soldiers, some of them trading canisters, others finding damp cigarettes in their pockets and trying to light them in vain.
“She’s a pretty one,” said the toad. I feared from his position he could see down my blouse. “Ain’t she?”
“Shut up, Luderman,” said his comrade, repositioning his grip on my arm. “She’s the earth Charmer. It don’t matter what else she is.”
And yet, the toad’s eyes remained on the split buttons below my neck.
We climbed knolls of no discerning marks until a steam train loomed ahead, on tracks bracketed by hills. The swarm of navy blue cascaded down the slopes toward it.
I was loaded into a carriage with no seats, no benches.
Just rotting wooden walls and floors, a bucket in the corner that smelled strongly of urine.
Theo and Patrick were loaded in after me, the latter dragged, the three of us made to sit at different corners of the carriage, our hands tied by rope and looped through cattle rings.
There was no telling how much blood Patrick had lost or how dire his condition. It had been impossible to gauge in the tunnel. Luderman was blocking my view of Patrick as he fastened my bindings, and I tried desperately to lean around him.
The soldier chuckled knowingly. It sent ripples down his neck. “That your beau, is it?” he asked, one eyebrow raised. “Don’t seem to like you too much.”
Patrick’s eyelids had peeled back, consciousness finding him. And indeed, he groaned at the sight of me.
Luderman barked a laugh at that, then grasped my jaw hard enough to send bolts of warning down my spine. “Perhaps you’re in the market for someone friendlier,” he said. Then, horrifyingly, he descended to mash his mouth against mine.
And I tasted spit and decay. I bit down hard on the soldier’s lip, driven by panic more than bravery, and felt it split. I could hear the clink and rattle of thrown chain bindings, the pounding of my own blood. Beyond that, a roar. I reared my leg back then kicked without particular aim.
Luderman toppled to the floor, clutching his groin. He sprayed a litany of curses through the blood trickling from his lip, eyes bulging. “You fuckin’ bitch!” he yelled, the other soldiers laughing as he rolled onto his back, hands between his legs.
“Not bad for a city girl,” one of them said, grinning and passing a lighter to his comrade.
“Scurry” came a voice. Patrick spoke with eyes so maddened he looked possessed. “She’s from Scurry.”
He did not look at me, or the soldiers, but right at that panting, bleeding Luderman.
The soldiers chuckled and nodded, retreating to the end of the carriage as the train coughed to life.
But Luderman regained his footing, albeit with some difficulty. He spat blood and staggered in my direction, twitching with rage.
“Wait!” Theo called out, pulling at his bindings. “Stop—”
My heart sprinted. Instinctively, I curled up. The soldier’s boots stopped in front of me, and I waited for the blow.
“There’s one hundred pounds in my pocket” came Patrick’s voice, and I looked out from the crevice between my strung arms.
He stared back at me, his jaw tightened, his wrists ghost-white against the ropes. “It’s all yours if you leave the lady be.”
A moment of hesitancy, of silence. I peered up at Luderman to see a slow grin spread over his cheeks.
“Not really in a position to be makin’ deals, are you, Colson?
” he said, and yet the soldier swung his large form in Patrick’s direction, already scanning his clothing.
“But I might as well have me way with both of you, since you offered.”
Luderman looked back at me once, winked. “Won’t be a moment,” he promised, flashing his yellow teeth. He bent down to a waiting Patrick, fossicking through one of his trouser pockets, and then the other. “Ain’t nothin’ there,” he grunted, brow pinched.
Then Patrick threw his forehead so hard into the bridge of the man’s nose, the crack reverberated around the carriage.
The soldier’s head snapped back on his neck, and for a second time, he toppled sideways.
Patrick gave a loud groan. “Fuck,” he said, cinching his eyes shut.
“Patrick?”
He blinked rapidly, only to find the other soldiers converging in front of him, Luderman slumped lifeless at their feet.
“Hello, boys,” Patrick said warily, resting his head with a grimace against the wall. “Don’t suppose any of you want a hundred pounds?”
“Knock him out for the journey,” said the shorter of the two men. He lifted his bayonet until it was level with Patrick’s face, and the barrel shook. “Quickly,” he uttered, eyeing his unconscious comrade.
Patrick looked resigned, but as the taller soldier stalked toward him, I reared upward. “No,” I uttered without thinking. “Wait, please!”
“Gentlemen,” said Theo, his face and clothes as dirty as my own, but his voice far more polished.
“This man is the very last Alchemist on the continent. Think about that for a moment. Far from me to tell you how to do your job.” Here, Theo paused, watching the soldier’s gun wobble dangerously close to Patrick’s eye.
“But if you were to injure Lord Tanner’s most wanted man with any permanence, I doubt they’d let you wear that uniform to the gallows. ”
The soldiers, both tall and short, hesitated. They looked to each other with matched indecision. Then the shorter one cursed and lowered his bayonet. “If you get clever,” he said, jutting a finger at Patrick. “I’ll shoot you.”
“Will you?” Theo asked skeptically.
The soldier grimaced. “I’ll knock you witless, then.”
“Fair,” Theo consented, as though the business were concluded.
The soldiers eyed Patrick wearily, then left Luderman where he lay, retreating back to their far corner, less jovial than before.
I exhaled in a gust, then manically wiped my mouth as best I could on my sleeve, nausea broiling.
“Are you all right?” Theo asked. His brow was creased, the coolness he’d exuded before now gone. He turned his body to better see me in a way that looked painful.
“Fine,” I uttered.
Patrick had closed his eyes again, his pallor gray.
“You’d be wise not to sleep, Colson,” Theo told him. “You’re likely concussed.”
“Leave him be,” I said. It hissed past my teeth unexpectedly. “He’s lost blood. He needs to rest.”
“And slip into a coma?”
“What I need,” Patrick murmured, eyelids sealed tightly, “is for the both of you to shut up.”
And we did. Theo with a shrug, me with my lip between my teeth.