Alchemised, page 103
She couldn’t stop staring. “It’s not what I’m used to,” she said, almost wanting to laugh as she reached out, touching it, remembering when it had first started to lose its colour. “I’m going to miss the silver.”
“It’ll wash out. You’ll still see it sometimes.”
He said that, but she didn’t see Kaine much at all. Helena stayed inside the house; when she stepped out, the open and stillness unsettled her. After spending so much time in danger and on the move, the ordinariness of the cottage felt surreal.
Kaine and Lila seemed to alternate who was inside with her. When Lila was with Helena, he went out and would only reappear when Lila took Pol outside.
Helena assumed he was busy making final arrangements until Lila mentioned that he was in the stable. That he was always in the stable.
Hearing it, Helena immediately hurried outside, pausing only a moment before entering the shadowy interior.
Just as Lila had said, he was sitting on the floor in the stable, and Amaris was lying down, her enormous head resting on his lap.
He didn’t look up when she entered; he was rubbing his hand through Amaris’s fur behind her ears.
“I should put her down,” he said softly. “It would be kindest. She won’t understand if I leave her behind.”
Helena’s chest clenched as she came closer.
“You said she can hunt for herself,” she said.
He nodded. “But the transmutations on her will wear off over time. It’ll kill her eventually, like it did all the rest, assuming someone else doesn’t first. And if she’s seen in this area, it could point to us, where we went.”
“Has there been any word?”
“None that’s reached this far south.”
Helena looked down at Amaris. “She’s done growing, isn’t she? Maybe she won’t need help as much anymore. She might be fine on her own.”
He was silent for a long time. “It’s not worth the risk.”
Helena’s throat tightened. “I don’t think it’s fair not to give her a chance. We wouldn’t be here without her.”
“She’s just an animal.”
Helena said nothing, because he wasn’t saying it to her. She could tell this was an argument he’d been spending days making with himself. Amaris lifted her head and gave a low whine and licked across Kaine’s entire face. He grimaced and pushed her nose away.
He sighed, tilting his head back. “I’ve killed so many people,” he finally said. “I never thought I’d get stuck on an animal of all things.”
The morning they left, Kaine got up silently and went out to the stable while Lila was packing up the last few things she wanted to bring. Helena sat tense as he disappeared inside, her stomach twisting into a sick knot.
A minute later he came back out. He stood there, staring up at the sky for so long that her heart began to pound in her chest. When finally he came back inside, he stopped behind her.
“Someday,” he said softly, resting a hand on her shoulder, “your mercy is going to have consequences.”
She held his hand in place. “There’s blood enough on both our hands without adding hers.”
He squeezed her shoulder.
“Bayard,” he said after a minute. “It’s time to go.”
* * *
The sea was wild and roiling even at its lowest and calmest ebb. The port was crowded with people arriving and departing. There were false identity papers waiting for the group at the postal service in the port town.
Helena had forgotten how different the world could be. There was such consistency in fashion and feature in the North, she’d grown accustomed to it, but a port city during the Abeyance was a melting pot with sailors and travellers from every country across the sea, taking advantage of the annual opportunity to travel between the continents in a week rather than months.
There were enough Northerners that Kaine and Lila blended in, while Helena disappeared among the many Etrasians. She hadn’t seen so much dark, curly hair and olive skin since she’d left Etras. It was shocking to hear Etrasian casually spoken, and to realise that it had been so long, she struggled now to follow it.
They descended the cliffs to the boarding wharf, and Helena clung to Kaine’s hand in a near death grip as their papers were approved and tickets stamped.
The deck of the ship was crowded. Lila was so terrified that Pol would be knocked into the sea that they went inside to look out from the windows rather than standing on the bow.
Helena’s heart hammered inside her chest, bracing for someone to recognise one of them. To hear a raised voice calling their names.
Kaine sat tense and wary. She could feel his resonance tracking her heartbeat as his thumb moved in slow circles across her palm, keeping her grounded. Amid the clamour, a loud Northern voice rose from the table beside them.
“Trying to get as much oil across as I can before the new war starts. The liberators will pay out of the nose for it once they hit Paladia.”
Lila whirled. “What war?”
Kaine’s fingers twitched, tightening around Helena’s wrist. Amid the preparations and attempts at keeping the peace, Helena had avoided mentioning what she and Kaine had left behind when fleeing.
A Northerner with a large moustache and sideburns looked at Lila. “You don’t read the papers? That High Reeve of Paladia is finally gone. Novis and the other countries are expected to be moving in any day. It’s been in all the news lately.”
Lila’s face seemed to drain of colour. “Do you have a paper?”
The man reached into the pocket of his frock coat and pulled a pamphlet out. “See? There’ll be a lot of machinery going in, dealing with all those corpses and whatever else those necromancers have cooked up. They’ll need oil. If I get to Khem and back before the Abeyance, I’ll make a fortune, but even if I take the land route, if I get the first order in, it’ll still pay out. You should’ve seen how much opium was going for a few years back.” His moustache rose. “There’s nothing to rival war for money.”
They were all too distracted clustering around the newspaper to reply. It wasn’t a proper paper with full articles but instead a bulletin, the kind popular among businessmen.
At the very top the first bulletin read in bold, High Reeve Dead, and then in smaller text, The world breathes a sigh of relief at reports that the steel magnate and iron guild heir Kaine Ferron, better known to the world as the High Reeve, was killed in the most recent Resistance attack, crippling the Undying regime.
Helena clutched at Kaine’s hand.
In the next bulletin were the words Eternal Flame Banners Rise Again: As the Countries Unite Against Paladia, Some Do So in Remembrance.
Lila finally spoke. “Did you know this was happening?”
Kaine said nothing.
Helena answered quietly, reaching across to squeeze Lila’s now bare wrist. “We knew that there was an alliance developing, but we didn’t know how fast it would move, or if they’d believe news of the death.”
Lila sat back, clutching Pol in her arms, but she was looking out the window, back towards the mainland as the ship horns sounded, signalling cast-off.
Lila kept shaking her head. “I had no idea.”
* * *
Helena was seasick for most of the journey, the pregnancy making what would have been mild symptoms much worse. She still felt green when they arrived on one of the major trade islands. Kaine offered to get a room at an inn and complete the journey the next day, but Helena knew he wanted to leave as little trace of their journey behind as possible. The fewer places they stopped, the fewer people they spoke to, the harder they’d be to track down. They took a bus across the island. It was so different from the North. The city sprawling rather than climbing vertically as Paladia did. Stonework was a world apart from architecture utilising alchemy. They rode in a cart across a sea road leading to their destination.
The sea road was an immense causeway built up and paved smooth to allow crossing to the island during most of the monthly low tides. With the Abeyance dragging the tides away completely, the seabed lay bare, far below the causeway. There were people wandering across it, gathering whatever treasures the tide had left.
Helena and her father used to go down for the tides, searching for shells and treasures, studying the fish trapped in the tide pools. Treasure hunting was popular during Abeyance. There had been countless cities washed away in the Disaster, and even millennia later, their remnants lingered beneath the waves.
She looked over to see Lila’s and Kaine’s reactions to it all. Kaine was impassive, his eyes scanning the horizon. However, Lila looked more frightened than Helena had ever seen her. It took a moment to remember that the sea was regarded as terrifying in the North. Even the coasts were considered fraught with risk, as if it were a suicidal act of bravery for humanity to persevere in such a place. To those inland, the idea of living with the sea was simply too foreign.
“Don’t worry,” she said to Lila. “I’ll teach Pol to be careful of the sea. But he’ll like it. You both will.”
Lila gave a nervous nod.
The residence they arrived at was high up on a cliff. It was a large stone two-storey house with a stable and a few other buildings. The island, Kaine mentioned off-handedly, was privately owned, and the house had belonged to the previous owner, which was why it was so much larger than those in the village they’d passed through.
It came mostly furnished. A woman in the village had been paid to maintain it and unpack the items that had arrived. There were warm stone floors, and raw beams, and sunlight streaming through all the open windows, carrying the strong scent of the sea.
Kaine entered the house first, walking through quickly. Helena could feel the wariness about him, his resonance tingeing the air. She bit her tongue, wanting to remind him to be careful, but his paranoia was ingrained—object and he’d just revert to deception.
“I need to make sure everything’s in order here,” he said, leaving Helena and Lila in the house.
“Well, this is definitely bigger,” Lila said, cradling a sleeping Pol in her arms and looking around. “Shall we find the bedrooms? My arm’s about to fall off.”
They went upstairs, peeking into the various rooms in search of beds.
The first bedroom they managed to find was very large, but it also looked more like a library with a bed in it. Lila took one look at it and scrunched her nose. “I think this one’s supposed to be yours. You should rest—you still look green. Pol and I will find somewhere else. What do you think the odds are that Ferron will let me have a sword if I promise not to use it on him?”
Lila departed, and Helena stepped into the room.
It was not too large; the ceilings were whitewashed with exposed beams overhead that made the space less overwhelming than the dark rooms in Spirefell. There were windows on the far side of the room, where the bed was, looking out over the sea.
She moved carefully along the wall, tracing her fingers over the shelves, noticing the various titles and collections. Alchemy books but also literature and histories, and travel diaries.
There was a desk and chairs, and a sofa, with a soft rug underfoot. She paused at the desk and found papers and pens, and etching plates and styluses, all arranged in the drawers as if waiting for her.
There was enough in this room to keep her busy for a lifetime.
That was what the room was, a life Kaine had tried to set her up with.
She wanted to appreciate the effort it must have required, but it felt all wrong. Too perfect. As if it were all a trap set specifically to lure her in and lull her with a false sense of safety.
Kaine was so vulnerable now.
Lila wasn’t anywhere near fighting form, and even if she were, her priority would always be Pol’s safety. If Helena let herself believe they were safe, let down her guard for an instant, something would go wrong. She was sure it would.
Her life was a perpetual countdown to disasters that she always failed to see coming. She huddled in the corner, between the bed and wall, her right hand gripping her chest, trying to keep her heart steady.
Calm down. She squeezed her eyes shut. Breathe.
Where was Kaine? Outside of Spirefell, he wouldn’t know that she needed him…
Her eyes popped open, and she grasped at her left hand, finding the ring on her numb ring finger. Gripping it tight, she used her resonance to send a quick flare of heat through the silver.
A moment later, warmth pulsed back in response.
She stayed where she was, eyes closed, hand pressed against her heart, until she heard the door open.
“Helena?”
“Here.” Her voice came out thin, wavering.
In an instant, Kaine was there in front of her. “What’s wrong?”
She swallowed several times before she could speak. “I thought I would be glad to get here, but—what if they catch us? What if someone finds us because we’ve stopped running?”
His eyebrows furrowed as he ran his thumb across her cheek. “Do you want to keep running?”
Her stomach threatened to upend at the thought of more ships and new places and never stopping, always looking over her shoulder. “No, but why does everything feel wrong? Like it’s not even real. This is what we wanted.”
He pulled her into his arms, tucking her head beneath his chin. “I don’t think that an ordinary life will ever feel real for either of us.”
Exhausted despair tore at her as she realised that he was right. “I think I always saw running away as the destination. I never actually thought about what would be left of me by the time I got here.”
She stayed there, numb at the realisation.
“Do you like the house?” he finally asked.
She looked around the room, trying to rally herself. “I do. How did you manage this?”
“It was mostly by correspondence. You talked about the sea, so I started looking before the war was over. I thought it would be easier for you, if you were going somewhere you liked.”
“Just me. In this big house?” She said it lightly, but she was horrified at the idea.
“Lila was part of the arrangement by then. I came here briefly last summer. It was one of my last trips,” he said quietly. “Before that, I’d just sent things along as I thought of something I thought you’d like.”
She looked around again. All this, while he hadn’t even known if she was alive.
“Come on now. You’ll like it better once you’ve rested.”
He closed the shutters, and Helena collapsed in bed. The linens were soft and airy from the sea breeze, and it was like coming home. Kaine sat beside her, their fingers enlaced, his thumb running along the ridges of her knuckles. There was an odd pause each time he reached the last two, and she couldn’t feel the sweep of his fingers.
She was starting to drift off when he set her hand down.
She watched through her lashes as he walked slowly around the room, kneeling and running his fingers along the floor, then going over to the walls, peering appraisingly up into the corners of the room. He started towards the door, footsteps so light that they made no sound.
“Kaine.”
He froze and turned back.
“Are we safe?”
His fingers spasmed, and he clenched them into a fist. “Yes…There’s a few things I’d like to adjust…but we were careful. I doubt anyone looking could have moved fast enough to beat the tides. You don’t need to worry.”
“Do you need to worry?”
He looked baffled by the question. She held out her hand.
“We’re supposed to get to rest now,” she said. “You and me both. I didn’t bring you here so you’d have to keep soldiering on.”
His eyes flicked around the room, and he suddenly looked boyish and uncertain.
She studied him sadly, realising their difference: He didn’t have any dreams about what he’d do or be after the war. He had never even allowed for the possibility. He had no idea how to do anything but be a soldier.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out.
“Stay with me,” she said. “You’re supposed to rest now, too.”
He nodded as if he understood the idea conceptually, but he stayed standing by the door. She went to him, taking him by the hand. She found a surprising number of unusual weapons hidden in his plain-looking clothes, and he was wearing body armour beneath them, which she hadn’t even realised he’d brought.
“Did you bring anything else?” she asked teasingly when she made him sit down on the edge of the bed and found an obsidian gimlet knife hidden in his shoe.
He avoided the question.
They lay facing each other, but his eyes kept flickering over to the weapons she’d taken. She touched his chin with her index finger, drawing his attention back.
“What did you want to do, before the war?” she asked.
“I was the iron guild heir—that was all I was allowed to be,” he said. “The only thing I did that I wanted was staying at the Institute after I was certified. My father didn’t think it was necessary, but my mother had wanted to study longer when she’d been there. Her family couldn’t afford it. I had the ranking to qualify, so she convinced my father to let me. But when I returned, Crowther showed up, wanting to know why someone of my class wanted more than a trade education. My father was furious. I doubt I would have returned the next year if he hadn’t been arrested.”
“We’ll have to figure something out now, then,” she said, and pressed her head against his shoulder. He tangled his hand in her hair, holding her close. “Are we really safe?”
“We are.”
She drew a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Good. I’m so tired.”
When she woke, Kaine was asleep. He did not stir, even when she moved. It was as if years of exhaustion had risen up and swallowed him.
