Chapter 24
TRIA PRIMA
SAERIS
At the first stages of ascension, equilibrium must be found. Every acolyte has an affinity toward a certain path. Without the appropriate guidance and training, the path will claim the acolyte. They must marry the Tria Prima into one within themselves if they are to truly master their power.
The enlightened Alchemist walks all three paths.
—Elemental Runes and Their Purposes:
A Comprehensive Guide to Alchemy.
THE FORGE WAS unlike any other I’d ever found myself in. For starters, there was no fire. The Blood Court, it seemed, was firm in its view that fire had no place within the walls of Ammontraíeth and hadn’t made an exception even here.
Evenlight flickered in the hearth where hungry flames should have been.
Not long ago, on the side of the mountain above Irrín, I had handed a sword over to Lorreth, and the sky had exploded with dancing light.
The aurora, Fisher had called it. The evenlight bore more than a passing resemblance to that aurora as it writhed and danced in the grate.
Vivid green and tinged with pink, it was hypnotizing to watch.
It gave off no heat. I could run my fingers through it, even, and I didn’t feel a thing.
Yet I knew, deep down, that this was more than just light.
That when I thrust the crucible I had prepared into the flow of it, a change would come about.
There was a token amount of quicksilver inside the crucible. Very little was required for this purpose. I felt the moment that it entered the evenlight, as if a chord had been struck, a note plucked, and the sustained hum of a note was ringing all around me.
I reached out with my mind, searching for the quicksilver, and found it almost instantly. According to the book, I should have been able to “connect” with it at this point. I was still trying to figure out what that meant when the quicksilver spoke.
She sees us. She hears us. She sees us . . .
I clenched my jaw, angling my head, trying to focus.
She doesn’t speak to us. Why does she not speak?
I filled my lungs until I could inhale no more. It was right there, an intangible buzzing source of energy, at the periphery of my mind. It felt as though I should have been able to close a hand around it, but whenever I tried, it evaded my grasp, slippery, like a piece of soap.
“Gods damn it,” I spat, opening my eyes.
Filthy mouth. The quicksilver chuckled. So ill-tempered. Bad, bad, bad.
“Oh, shut up, you.” I willed the quicksilver to change.
It did so without complaint, but I couldn’t escape the wrongness of the sensation that shivered down my back as the flat, matte bead of quicksilver became molten and rolled around the bottom of the crucible.
Much as I disliked admitting it, Foley’s words had stuck with me.
Willing the quicksilver to do anything was not forming a partnership with it.
There was another way. A better way . . .
Quickly, I plucked a ring from the tray I had set out on the bench when I’d arrived and dropped it into the crucible.
The ring was made of silver, but it was impure enough that I needed to add a little more to help the process along.
The quicksilver formed a snake-like thread, winding around the ring’s band, mimicking the tiny vines that were engraved into the piece of jewelry.
Pretty, it hissed. A pretty one. Yes.
“Will you bind with it? Will you make it a relic?” I half expected it to say no, but I felt the quicksilver’s attention prick up at the request.
A memory, it purred. We will become a relic in exchange for a memory.
“Any memory?” I asked.
The tiny thread of quicksilver thought about this for a second. Any memory will do, it concluded.
Any memory. Without thinking, I reached for the most painful one.
My mother, on her knees.
The blade, slicing her throat open.
Her blood spilling into the sand . . .
The quicksilver probed around it, encircling that awful moment in my mind. I felt it tighten around it. Felt the memory work loose . . .
“Stop!” the cry bounced around the windowless forge.
“Wait.” I panted, my heart suddenly beating too fast. Swallowing, I shook my head.
“Not that one.” I used to wake in the night, covered in sweat, that scene playing out on repeat in my head.
It haunted me. It had been the very last time I’d seen my mother alive.
Horrific as it was, I needed that memory.
Without it, I didn’t know who I would be.
The quicksilver laughed softly, relinquishing its hold on the memory. The vision of my mother dying in the sand became all too real once more.
“Take this one,” I whispered, drawing forth a different memory. A morning, one much like any other, sitting in the loft of the Mirage. I had been counting money. I had been telling Hayden . . .
Been telling Hayden . . .
I gasped, a sudden, sharp, shooting pain at my temple. It was there and then gone again.
Wait.
What had I just been thinking about?
A relic, the quicksilver purred at the bottom of the crucible. A pretty one. We are made. Seal us now. Give us the blood.
It was a disconcerting thing, staring down at the ring. The quicksilver was gone, bound into it. The tiny scrap of normal silver, too. I had traded a memory, but for the life of me I had no idea what kernel of my past I had given up to facilitate the exchange.
The blood, the quicksilver chanted. The blood. The blood.
I pricked myself with the end of the dagger Fisher gave me and let the crimson bead at the end of my finger, still reeling from the void that the deal had left behind in my mind.
It was a strange feeling, like probing at the space in your mouth where a tooth used to be, knowing what it should feel like but finding an empty space instead.
My blood hissed when it hit the bottom of the crucible.
That was new.
The quicksilver hummed, singing quietly to itself as it absorbed the blood.
I held my breath. Waited.
It’s done. Done. Done.
I exhaled, relief washing over me as—
“You are surprised.”
I spun around, dropping the crucible and the set of tongs I was holding it in. The metal clanged heavily when it struck the ground. “Fucking saints! What the f-f-f-f . . .”
It was the Hazrax.
I’d only seen it once and from a distance. The coronation had only been a few days ago, and yet it felt like a lifetime had passed since then. The creature was bigger than I remembered. Taller. It had to bow its head to fit through the doorframe as it slowly entered the forge.
Its skin was a sickly pale color, translucent in places. A network of black veins pulsed below the surface of its skin. Its eyes were solid black and featureless. Its mouth . . . gods, it had so many teeth.
I took a step back, fumbling to steady myself against the bench.
The Hazrax’s features remained expressionless as it took another floating step into the forge, though I got the creeping sense that it was smiling.
Oh, gods.
It was getting closer.
“You do not need to be afraid, child queen.”
I gripped the edge of the bench until it began to hurt. “I’m not afraid. I’m . . . surprised.”
The creature tilted its head to an unnatural angle, and I caught a flash of its gills.
“Surprised that the quicksilver still accepted your blood?” it said, its tone quizzical.
I would have expected its voice to be strange.
Alien, even. But the Hazrax’s voice was normal.
It could have belonged to any member of the Fae—except for the fact that I couldn’t quite tell if it sounded male or female.
“Yes,” I answered. “That surprised me.”
“Because you are no longer human. This is the first deal you have struck with the quicksilver in your new form?”
My heart was in my throat. “No. I made relics for my friend. For my brother. This one just felt . . . reluctant.”
The Hazrax seemed to think about this. It stooped down where I had dropped the crucible and the tongs, its long fingers carefully plucking up the ring that had also fallen to the floor.
It held it up, its jet-black eyes studying the piece of jewelry.
While it did so, I noticed the thick-banded golden ring that it wore on its left hand—a bulky thing with large, blood-red ruby at its center.
The ring of office that marked the Hazrax as a Lord of Midnight.
Slowly, a stream of smoke began to rise from the creator’s bony fingers.
The relic I’d just created was burning it.
The Hazrax almost seemed chagrined as it placed the relic down on the table.
“Mm. You’re also surprised by my presence here,” it said, turning to me. “You’ve heard that I do not leave the Hall of Tears.”
“Yes.”
Its eyelids closed vertically, snapping closed and open again, the action startling me. “You’re surprised by the fact that I’m speaking to you like this, as well. You’re surprised by my appearance. You are surprised by many things.”
“Yes.” The word was out of my mouth before I could stop it. “Are you inside my head?” I had felt Algat when she’d rifled through my thoughts. If this creature was doing the same now, it had a far lighter touch.
But the Hazrax shook its head. “One as old as I does not need to steal information. The power of deduction proves sufficient.”
“Why are you here?” It seemed pointless to beat around the bush.
The Hazrax splayed its fingers, displaying the diaphanous webbing between each of its digits.
“In some cultures, it is considered rude to talk business without first observing the rules of etiquette. Some small and meaningless exchange between strangers that . . . helps them know each other better.”