Alchemised: A Novel, page 17
“Ilva Holdfast, Luc’s great-aunt. She advocated for me when my vivimancy was discovered. And—and Matron Pace. She managed the hospital.”
Ferron still seemed to be waiting, and it upset her so much that her anger broke through for an instant.
“Having a vivimancer as part of the Eternal Flame wasn’t something everyone was going to be comfortable with. Especially since I was—foreign. It was too much for some people. I didn’t have the same kinds of connections that others did. If there’d been problems, it could have—it could have undermined Luc.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Well, you seem to have it all very thoroughly rationalised for yourself. Congratulations. It was clearly all worth it in the end.”
He flashed an insincere smile and walked away.
Helena was tempted to fling a marble bust after him and ask exactly who cared about him. His own father wanted to disown him, his wife couldn’t stand him, and he couldn’t even keep living staff on to run his house.
If she hadn’t been drugged, she would have, but she was rational enough to know it was pointless, and her time was limited.
The necrothralls appeared and vanished like ghosts as she resumed her exploration. When she finished with the east wing, she fetched her cloak and gloves, determined to spend her remaining time on the outbuildings.
The sky was unusually clear, a stark winter blue. The reborn sun was a pale golden disc, too feeble for much warmth but a comfort to see.
The garden shed was locked. The next building was a small iron forge. Locked too. Hardly surprising. So were the connecting storehouses. She tried the stable, feeling the eyes of the necrothralls on her as she tested the large sliding doors and found them locked. She tugged at them a few more times, wishing they’d give.
She’d always liked horses. They reminded her of the donkeys in Etras that were always nuzzling into people’s pockets with their velvety noses, looking for treats.
Animals were rare on Paladia’s islands. The city was so dense and multi-levelled, there was no place for them except as pets, and there’d been no pets allowed at the Institute. The highroads became exclusively for motorcars and lorries, and so horses were only brought into the city for ceremonial events and parades.
Luc had the handsomest white destrier named Cobalt, who’d loved carrots but hated the city, and he was always taken back out to the countryside as soon as the summer solstice parade passed. Luc had told her that if she ever visited their country estate, they’d go riding.
Helena tried a smaller stable door around the corner and was surprised when it opened.
She slipped inside. The sweet smell of hay filled the air, and another scent she couldn’t place. She squinted into the dark. All the stalls seemed empty; no stomping or snorting greeted her.
She clicked her tongue and heard shuffling at the far end of the stable. The sound of something very large getting up.
She clicked again and heard a deep, huffed breath, but she couldn’t see anything.
“Hello,” she said tentatively, stepping a little farther in.
The door behind her swung wide open. Bright light spilling in.
She expected Ferron, but it was the two necrothralls from Central shoving their way in.
A snarl—almost a roar—rolled through the darkness. Every hair on Helena’s body rose on end.
There was the sound of a heavy chain being dragged, another snarl, more furious than the first, and Helena saw what was in the shadows. An enormous creature, black as night, lunged towards them.
It was a wolf.
No. Bigger than a wolf. It was larger than a destrier. So immense it seemed to fill the stable.
Grace had said the High Reeve had a monster, but Helena had not taken that literally.
The creature was monstrous. Fangs longer than her fingers flashed in the light. Wind rushed across the room. The smell of blood struck her face as a foaming mouth burst from the shadows, jaws snapping.
There was the sharp sound of a chain reaching its end. Taloned claws scrabbled across the wood floor as the monster lunged again.
The necrothralls grabbed Helena by the hair and dragged her back out into the courtyard, dumping her on the gravel.
Helena scrambled to her feet, heart trying to beat with fear but unable to. She was stunned by what had happened. Her captivity was so rigidly controlled, it was startling to brush with danger.
She couldn’t help but wonder if the stable door being unlocked was also Aurelia’s doing.
The creature was still snarling, and then a low gusting howl emerged, a sound like moaning wind.
She caught her breath and looked back at the necrothralls, who’d both stationed themselves in front of the stable, watching her as the creature inside quieted.
She moved away. The next building was a small, geometric one. Helena tried the door, and it clicked, swinging inwards. As soon as she saw the interior’s five walls, she knew what it was. A chantry.
She stepped inside, letting the door close behind her. Helena had always struggled with the rigidity of Northern religion, but now, at the end of everything, there was a bittersweetness to a place like this.
Paladia had been a culture shock for Helena in many regards. In Etras, gods didn’t require being believed in any more than the mountains did. They existed. A person accommodated them respectfully, and sometimes made little offerings and prayers requesting favour, but the gods represented facets of life on Etras, not purpose itself.
Things were different in Paladia. While the ancient gods were said to have required blood for their sacrifices, Sol required life itself, lived out in service to him. Northerners were expected to devote their every moment in ritual sacrifice so that in death their souls might ascend to the heavens. Everything revolved around what Sol did or did not allow.
Luc had tried everything to earn the favour Sol had extended to his forefathers. He’d possessed the alchemical gifts, sun-blessed like all the rest, but he never received the miracles his ancestors had enjoyed, which had ensured their triumphs in battle and the riches of their rule.
Luc would have given up all his gifts for one miracle, anything to bring the war to an end, but his prayers were never answered, his devotion never acknowledged.
He’d always blamed himself for that.
If he were still alive, he’d pray even now, but the ritual words stuck in Helena’s throat.
Each wall was for one of the five gods of the Quintessence. The radiant, unconquerable Sol, giver of life, was at the centre, flanked by the rest. The altar brazier that should have been burning ceaselessly with a flame from the eternal fire was cold, its amiantos wick dusty and dry.
The Ferrons had probably had a chantry built for their private worship and interments because that was something the upper classes did—although given the number of spires decorating the house, it did seem that the family had been religious at some point. Paladians loved decorating in sets of five even though their venerations and celebrations were primarily for Sol and Lumithia.
Along the walls there were dozens of stones with plaques bearing names and dates. With limited land, Paladians kept the ashes of their dead for generations rather than burying them in cemeteries as some countries did.
Despite the visible neglect, the chantry was not entirely abandoned. One plaque was brighter than the rest, carefully polished. It sat beneath the altar of Luna, the lesser moon goddess.
ENID FERRON. ALWAYS BELOVED. A WIFE AND MOTHER.
Based on the celestial dates, she’d died during the war, 1785, three years into Luc’s reign. She must have been Ferron’s mother.
Helena studied the inscription, finding it ironic. However “beloved” Enid Ferron had been by her husband and son, it had not been enough to be granted the immortality they enjoyed.
Then again, the guilds had always been intensely patriarchal.
Ironically, the one thing the guilds thought the Holdfasts weren’t traditional enough about was women. Girls had been welcomed to study at the Institute for decades. There were female lecturers, instructors, and board members in the school. It had been with Principate Apollo’s blessing that Lila Bayard had trained from childhood to become paladin primary.
The guilds, for all their talk of progress and equality, and freedom from rigid traditionalism, had very specific ideas about precisely who deserved that equality and freedom.
A low view of women was common in the North, especially among those of faith. Prior to the pressure exerted by the Principate, the Faith regarded women as categorically lesser, and even after the official distancing occurred, the belief remained pervasive.
It had been viewed as a fact of nature. Men were of Sol, active, hot and dry, full of vitality, and the source of life’s seed. Women, it followed, were an inferior human form. Wet and cold, passively bound to the monthly cycle of Luna, the lesser moon. While their bodies were the necessary vessels for birth, it was their blood that was the source of all defects. Both vivimancy and necromancy were regarded as a corruption of resonance caused by a “poisonous womb.”
Hence the long-standing obsession with creating homunculi even among the Faith, to erase women’s defective hold on humanity.
However, not all women were doomed to cold passivity. To avoid such categorisation, a girl could devote herself to the cult of Lumithia, goddess of warfare and alchemy, who’d been born from the heart of Sol. Women associated with Lumithia were not expected to be traditional; they could be alchemists, surgeons, paladins, anything.
But there was a price. Were they to marry or bear children, they had to give it all up. Lumithia was a virgin goddess. Mothers and married women were not welcome at her altar.
When Helena was done exploring, she stayed outside despite the cold, watching the winter sun sink behind the mountains. The stars appeared in the night sky, shining briefly before the moons rose. Luna first, a deformed quarter moon in the far horizon with her soft light, ushering in a gentle twilight.
Then Lumithia rose. She was a waning crescent, but still more than double Luna’s size and so bright it hurt to stare directly at her. She ascended into the sky like a white sun, the constellations vanishing behind her light until only the planets and a few stars remained visible in the black abyss of sky. Glimmers fine as diamond dust.
CHAPTER 12
HELENA OPENED THE DOOR, A PIECE OF crystal clutched in one hand, and found Lila sitting on the floor, curled up like a child trying not to be found. She was out of her armour. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her long pale hair cropped short, and when she turned to look at Helena, it brought the right side of her face into view.
A roping scar tore through the side of her face and throat.
“Lila. Lila, what’s wrong? What happened?”
Lila stared at Helena without responding for a long time.
“I made a mistake,” Lila finally said, her voice barely a whisper, “I’ve made such a mistake.”
“It’s—all right. I’m sure it’ll be all right. Whatever you’ve done—I’m sure it can’t be that bad.”
“No.” Lila shook her head. “I’ve been lying to everyone—”
Helena woke abruptly, lurching up as the dream was cut short.
The withdrawal from the tablet hit like a brick wall, and she collapsed again, emotions crushing her. Even breathing hurt.
She tried to ignore it, to focus on the memory.
What had Lila been about to say? And what had happened to her? The injury had looked recent, the scarring reminiscent of what was on Helena’s own chest, no vivimancy used.
Helena couldn’t imagine why. Lila wasn’t someone who’d ever refused healing. As Luc’s paladin primary, there was a tremendous pressure on her to keep him safe, to prove that she deserved her rank.
She would often grow short-tempered when she wasn’t allowed to recover as quickly as she wanted to, brushing off Helena’s warnings about the balance of things, that healing took a much greater toll on the body than natural recovery did; too much and it could kill her. That there was a price that had to be paid, somehow, by someone.
Lila never cared about any of that. Protecting Luc was all that mattered to her.
MOUNTAIN SNOW BLANKETED THE ESTATE a few days later, cutting Spirefell off from the rest of the world, and life fell into a monotonous routine until the third session of transference arrived.
Once again, Helena’s consciousness was crushed down to the brink of oblivion, all the way to that moment of singularity as Ferron enmeshed his mind with hers.
This time, she felt him blink, and her own eyes closed. She was being puppeteered not physically but across her now shared mental landscape. She could feel his mind orienting itself within the patterns of hers, his consciousness attempting to sway her.
With his presence, she could finally feel the strange shape of her thoughts, the unnatural ways they swerved.
Much of it was seamless, smooth channels of evasion that refused to veer from their course, but there was a fault line, as if one part had been constructed separately.
She felt Ferron notice it, and before he could push towards it, she reacted.
A self-destructive wave of desperation exploded from inside her, like a bomb going off in her head.
Ferron vanished. Everything vanished.
When she regained consciousness, she could barely form thoughts. The vibrations of her own breathing hurt like the tongue of a whip lashing through her mind.
She wasn’t particularly feverish, but she also didn’t get better after several days.
In her dreams, there were people crowded around her. Dozens of them. Each time she slept, they’d drag her underwater and drown her. Bloodless hands grasping at her. Icy water filled her lungs. Her arms and legs were twisted and wrenched at. Splintered nails clawing at her skin. Fingers hooking inside her mouth, pulling down on her jaw until it came loose. Fingernails sinking into her eyeballs, and she never died.
She just kept drowning.
She’d wake, choking and gagging as her body tried to expel the phantom water from her lungs. She couldn’t make her mouth work. Her vision was upside down.
She recognised the voice of the stuttering mind specialist, saying things about the mind being complex and not fully understood, that Helena’s condition was unprecedented, and there was little to be done but wait and see what would happen.
When she finally began to recover, she felt as though a part of her had died.
Ferron’s encroachment was inevitable, progressing a little further with each month, the cracks in her mind widening to accommodate him. She had neither the strength nor the will to keep resisting.
The war was lost. Her suffering would not bring anyone back, not any more than Luc’s had saved them.
When she was no longer bedridden, she braved the cold and went out to the stables. The side door was unlocked, and she entered quickly before the thralls could stop her.
It was empty. Death slipping from her fingers again.
The winter deepened, sinking into an oppressive cold that crawled into the recesses of the house, the iron acting like veins, carrying the midwinter frost into every hallway and inner room, leaving the house frigid no matter how much the radiators hissed.
The Ferrons fled to the city, leaving Helena behind. In their absence, the meals were improved by the lack of table scraps, and the bread was less stale, although the inclusion of protein was scarcer.
For several weeks, newspapers became her only glimpse into the world beyond. The repopulation program, which had initially been treated as an economic necessity, was gradually reframed as the new scientific frontier. New Paladia would forge its own future; no longer would alchemical repertoires be left to chance. Parentage in the program was to be selected based on the strength and variety of resonance. Tests were being done to discover the ideal combinations.
The guild families, editorials effused, had the right ideas about marrying into resonance. Without the interference and backwards notions of the superstitious, there would be a new world order. Resonance-based abilities would achieve heights never before seen.
Scientific terminology and the overuse of words like genius and groundbreaking tried to frame the program as if it were an obvious next step. There were never any explanations about where these assets would go, or who’d raise them, or that they were people, just that they would exist and be industrially and economically valuable resources.
New Paladia sounded more like a factory than a city, intended to produce exactly the variety of alchemists the guilds wanted.
The society pages, which Helena had taken only a passing interest in, gradually became the sections that she read most avidly as she noticed a pattern. Over the course of several weeks, several familiar names vanished. Paladian guild society only had so many visible members, which made their abrupt disappearances noticeable, especially when pages usually brimming with gossip were reticent to speculate about their whereabouts.
Helena couldn’t help but wonder if it was a sign of a growing insurrection. Perhaps New Paladia’s cracks were finally beginning to show.
She began having dreams of herself sitting across from Ilva Holdfast, with Crowther beside her. Her eyes darting back and forth between Ilva’s strained expression and Crowther’s appraising stare.
She could feel that they were waiting for her to say something, but she always woke before she’d answered.
As Helena was left to her own devices, Spirefell became her domain. With Aurelia gone, she spent little time in her room, accustomed to ignoring the necrothralls’ constant orbit around her. She avoided the largest rooms and spaces with deep shadows, and it became an ingrained habit to open the doors and pick things up gingerly so that it didn’t agitate the manacles.
Her familiarity was fortunate, because when Aurelia returned from the city, Helena knew every hidden alcove and servants’ passage to hide in.
Aurelia had not come alone. She’d brought a companion, the same broad-shouldered man Helena had glimpsed during the solstice party. The first time Helena encountered them together, Aurelia was entirely naked, splayed out across a bearskin rug, giggling beneath the body of her paramour. Ferron was still in the city, and they seemed to be taking liberal advantage of his absence.
