Alchemised, page 53
“I didn’t mean to—” He was still trying to get free. “Just let me go—”
Helena reached out towards him.
“They got Lila,” he said, taking her hand without hesitation.
She squeezed tight, resonance shooting along his arm. Betrayal flashed in his eyes, and then he was unconscious.
The men pinning Luc down let go cautiously. Helena sank to her knees, kneeling over him, her fingers slipping into the occipital dip of his skull to ensure he would not wake.
He was bruised and covered in blood. Half his fingernails were missing.
Soren didn’t get up; he was slumped next to Helena. One of his eyes was black.
“Get him inside and keep him unconscious,” Althorne was saying. “I don’t want that boy awake until we know what’s happened to Bayard. Someone get Crowther to the hospital.”
There was heavy bruising on one side of Althorne’s face, a gouge across his cheek as if he’d been clawed at. Several soldiers picked Luc up gently and started carrying him inside.
Helena was still kneeling on the ground.
Lila had been taken. Whatever happened next, the implications were horrifying.
Lila as a necrothrall, all her proficiency in combat now targeted at the Eternal Flame. At Luc. Or Lila in a laboratory, being used for experimentation.
“May I be dismissed?” Soren said, his voice muted but wavering with emotion. He was looking to Althorne with an expression as if something had been carved out from inside him.
Althorne rested a large hand on Soren’s narrow shoulder. “Until we recover Lila, you’re paladin primary. We can’t lose you, too.”
“They took my twin,” Soren said, looking out towards the rest of the island. “I have to bring her body back.”
“There are three teams in pursuit. If she can be saved or recovered, she will be. We need to debrief and prepare. And you need to protect your Principate. You know where your sister would want you.”
A stretcher arrived for Crowther, and Helena followed it.
In the hospital, Elain was already hovering over Luc, healing his minor injuries, and asking if she could wake him up. She was sternly forbidden.
Helena focused on Crowther. That soft-faced orderly, Purnell, hurried over to assist. He had a gash on his face, but his paralysed arm had taken the brunt of the injury, broken at the elbow.
As Helena began with her habitual block of the nerves, she found why his arm was paralysed. There was an old break of the humerus, and back when it had broken, the radial nerve had been severed. The gap was tiny; any healer could have fixed it.
The injury was old now, and the nerve’s connection to the muscle had died off. Helena wasn’t sure how much dexterity could be recovered, but surely some was better than nothing. If the day had proven anything, it was that the Resistance desperately needed flame alchemists.
She fixed the severed nerve along with the broken elbow.
She’d just finished when she heard shouting.
“They got her! Bayard. They’re bringing her in!”
A combat group practically ran into the hospital with the stretcher. There was a flash of bloodstained blond hair. Pace’s voice rose above the chaos.
Helena barely heard the voices. She moved towards Lila on instinct as the medics transferred her from the stretcher to a hospital bed. One of them was holding gauze firmly against the side of Lila’s neck.
Other injuries.
Priority.
Marino, get her healed. Whatever it takes.
She wasn’t sure who gave that final order. It didn’t really matter. She didn’t need to be told.
Lila was covered in blood, and even before Helena touched her, she could see the broken bones. There were huge punctures all over the right side of her chest, straight through her armour.
The moment Helena’s resonance touched her, she could feel it.
Lila was going to die unless someone cheated death, and fast.
Her right lung had been repeatedly punctured by bites. There was blood pooling in the chest cavity. There was kidney damage, and her liver was punctured. Her ribs were shattered. She’d lost so much blood.
It was a miracle she was alive.
Helena didn’t have time to be delicate with her resonance. It was a cascade of internal failures that she was staunching, but it was all happening too fast and there were too many things that had to be done at once. The medics were cutting off her wrecked armour as quickly as they could, everyone trying to work around one another without getting in the way.
The recovery team had been badly injured.
“It was Blackthorne in command,” someone said. “That fucking psychopath.”
Helena could hear the flurry behind her, but she couldn’t worry about anyone but Lila.
If Lila died, so would Luc. Maybe not immediately; if he never saw combat again, physically he’d live, but every day, bit by bit, the guilt and grief would kill him.
“Don’t you dare die,” she said, shoving her vitality down through her resonance, in a wild attempt to keep Lila from slipping away, forcing the feeble heartbeat to keep going. “Don’t you dare! Elain. I need Elain! And a medic! Where is everyone?”
Elain appeared, her hands bloody. “I’m already—”
“I don’t care,” Helena cut in. “Stand near her head. I need you to keep her breathing, and don’t let her heart stop! Do you understand? I need both hands to heal, and I need to know she’s breathing and her heart is beating while I work.”
She waited until she felt Elain’s tentative resonance assume the rhythm of Lila’s heartbeat, the laborious in and out of her breath, as the last of Lila’s armour was finally out of Helena’s way and she worked easily.
A medic appeared at her elbow. Helena acknowledged her with a jerk of her head.
“I need four vials of that blood-supplementing tonic in the cabinet. You have to administer them without letting her choke.”
“We’re not supposed to—”
“I need more blood! If I can’t regenerate more, this healing will kill her, and if I do it without the tonics, it’s going to make something else fail. I don’t have enough hands. Do it now!”
It was intense, delicate work. Helena’s vision was blurring, and her resonance had singed the inside of her bones as she fought to get Lila stabilised. Elain was saying something about a hand cramp. Helena told her to shut up.
When Lila finally stopped feeling on the verge of death, Helena wanted to cry with relief. It had been so close. She could never tell anyone how close.
She leaned over Lila, her hands covered in blood, and touched her cheek for a moment.
“You can stop,” she finally remembered to say to Elain.
The punctures covering Lila’s chest were roughly transmuted skin. They’d scar, because Lila’s body would be focused on vital recovery, but she would live. Elain disappeared so the nurses and orderlies could take over.
Helena’s fingers trembled uncontrollably as she squeezed Lila’s hand. “Idiot. You know you’re not allowed to die.”
Her knees gave out. She sank to the floor, her head resting against the mattress of the hospital bed. Lila still had at least twenty broken bones, fractures in both legs. Half her fingers were broken, but Helena’s heart was pounding too violently to think straight.
“Marino, can you—” Pace was calling to her from another bed.
She tried to lift her head but couldn’t move. Her whole body was leaden. Why was it so heavy?
“Pace, check Marino.”
Was that Crowther’s voice?
She tried to look up, but instead the world tipped sideways. She could see feet moving under the rows and rows of hospital beds. Bloodstains on the floor.
She was rising upwards.
“Come on, Marino, no napping here,” Pace was saying as she pulled her to her feet. Someone was on the other side as well. Her head lolled, and she saw Crowther watching her from one of the hospital beds.
They passed through a door into the records closet that Pace used as an office.
“Just here, Sofia. Thank you, I can manage from here,” Pace was saying as Helena was lowered onto a camp bed.
Helena knew, dimly, that she’d gone too far.
She was normally careful, but there hadn’t been any choice this time.
She was so cold and tired. Blankets were pulled up and tucked around her. She heard Pace’s voice, calling her a fool girl with no sense.
Helena just wanted to sleep for a few years.
She felt a needle in her arm. It made her skin itch, and when she tried to transmute it out, her hand was smacked away.
“Worst patient I’ve ever had.”
Thick velvet darkness swallowed the world.
Chapter 43
Octobris 1786
The hospital had grown quiet when Helena woke. She felt weak as a kitten. She lay unmoving until Pace entered.
“How’s Lila?” she asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“Recovering,” Pace said in a tart voice. “Quite a miracle that she survived. All thanks to the recovery team’s quick thinking and daring rescue.” She cleared her throat. “They’ll all be medalled for bravery, and there were several Ember Services called, to devote prayers of thanks to Sol for his—grace in saving her.”
Helena stared up at the ceiling. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Three days.” Pace went over to her desk, sorting loudly through a drawer without removing anything. “I said you were quarantined. All that foraging exposes you to the elements too much, I think.”
Helena’s eyes threatened to slide closed again. “Thank you.”
“I do what I can. Crowther wants to see you when you’re up again,” Pace said. She started to leave, but then paused. “Lila Bayard is not the only person that the Resistance would suffer greatly for losing. I’ve told Ilva, Crowther, and Matias as much time and again, though I can’t say they listen, but maybe you will. There are rare talents that shouldn’t be squandered even if they are overlooked.”
When Helena went out, Luc was sitting beside Lila, who lay so still she scarcely seemed to be breathing. Lila was taller than most people, but she looked shrunken without her armour. She was swathed in neat bandages that had been packed with salves to ease the pain and sensitivity from the new tissue. Her breathing was slow and laboured, but Helena had only to brush her fingers against Lila’s hand to feel that her vital signs were stable.
She stood beside the bed, fingers just barely touching Lila’s.
Luc was staring at Lila’s face. His eyes were huge, purple-blue circles bruised under them as he held his paladin’s hand in both of his. Soren was across the hospital, stationed near the doors.
Paladins were as intrinsic as the Holdfasts in the history and tapestry of the nation. The country was named for them, in acknowledgement of their vital role in the first Necromancy War. As the centuries passed, the role had gradually become mostly ceremonial.
Lila had been something altogether new, though, a once-in-a-lifetime talent. Her parents had wanted her to have all the chance for the greatness traditionally limited to sons. Lila was placed solely in the combat track, training to join the crusades to experience real combat when she was only fifteen, while Soren was double-track at the Institute, like Luc. Soren would have been considered an excellent combat alchemist if his twin sister wasn’t his competition, but no one compared to Lila.
There’d been a procession when Lila came back after a year crusading. Helena hadn’t really known Lila then, aside from her being Soren’s sister.
She’d dismounted from a charger, pulled off her helmet, and stood resplendent, like a goddess stepped out of myth. Her pale hair was wrapped around her head like a crown, and she presented her weapons to Luc, who had stood, looking as if he’d been struck by lightning until Soren kicked him in the ankle.
Luc, who’d always been a bit of a larker about combat training and dismissive of the idea of a paladin, developed a passion for it overnight. He’d started constantly disappearing from study sessions and social events to practise with Lila.
His interest had been so painfully obvious that Helena and Soren were embarrassed just witnessing it, but before anything could happen, Principate Apollo was dead.
Lila had spent her whole life training to be a paladin. Soren was not remotely prepared, and Sebastian Bayard, able as he was, had just failed in his own vows by having been absent when Apollo was murdered.
Lila took the vows. To protect Luc with her life, to die for him. Luc had no choice but to accept them. Whatever had or hadn’t briefly existed between them was buried beneath the weight of those vows.
“I’m sorry…” Luc said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “I lost my head when I saw it take her.”
His expression was dazed, and his blue eyes didn’t seem to see the room around them. Helena knew the look. He was back in the moment, reliving it over and over, dissecting it into every instant when he could have done things differently.
“It was after me. The chimaera. I couldn’t get my sword out in time. Should have just used fire.” He shook his head. “Don’t know why I didn’t. It was so fast. Lila threw herself in front of me and I heard the sound when it bit her—”
His voice died.
People were often like this in the hospital; their failures poured out of them.
“There was blood coming from her mouth, but she didn’t scream—she told Soren to hold me back. It ran with her and I—I should have just used fire—” he choked out. “Soren wouldn’t let go and I—”
“She’s going to be all right, Luc,” Helena said. “All her vital signs are stable. No lasting injuries.”
He nodded jerkily, his eyes still fastened on Lila’s face.
“When I was a kid,” he said, his words rough, “I used to think it wasn’t fair that all the real wars were over before I was born. Used to be afraid I’d be one of the Principates everyone forgot, because nothing happened.” He looked down; he was ripping at his nails, all his fingers bleeding. “I’d do anything to have that now. I can’t taste anything now except blood and smoke, and I don’t feel anything except when I’m on fire. The stories made it sound so good. Fighting for a cause. Being a hero.” He shook his head. “Why does everyone pretend it’s anything like that?”
Helena reached out, fingers brushing against his shoulder, not sure what to say, how to comfort him.
“Maybe that’s what they had to tell themselves, to live with it. Maybe it’s all they let themselves remember,” Helena said, but she, too, wondered that anyone who’d seen war’s true face would let it be so gilded.
* * *
The debriefing that occurred once Lila woke and was declared out of danger was tense. It was the first time Luc would leave the hospital.
Matias, Ilva, Althorne, and Crowther all stared down at Luc from the dais while he glared defiantly back at them. All his penitence seemed to have vanished.
“Lucien,” Ilva said after a long silence, “Lila Bayard is your paladin. It is her sworn duty to protect you, be it at the cost of her own life. You endangered your entire unit, injured a dozen of your own men and Council member Jan Crowther, and violated your vows as well as the orders of General Althorne. You have been summoned for censure.”
Luc lifted his chin. “I’m sworn to protect this country and represent the values of the Eternal Flame which my forefathers established. Neither of those vows will be fulfilled if I let people die for me when I can save them.”
“You are the heart of the Resistance. A symbol of hope and light and goodness. You do not get to choose one person’s life over that. You betrayed the people who follow you, and you betrayed your paladins, particularly Lila, who knew her oaths and was prepared to do as she had sworn. Your selfishness nearly rendered her sacrifice worthless.”
“I’m not a symbol,” Luc snapped, “or a heart. I’m Principate. We lead by our actions, not our commands.”
The argument was all theatre. The Council had to censure him, and Luc stood there like a figure of myth, inexorable and resolute.
Ilva sat, gaze like a serpent as she stared down at her great-nephew. “That is not your choice. If you cannot follow orders and protocol in the presence of your friends”—she emphasised the word carefully, the insinuation crystal-clear—“then you will be reassigned to a different unit and provided with new soldiers to act as your paladins. Although, in keeping with tradition, we will allow you to retain Soren Bayard.”
Luc’s mouth snapped shut like a sprung trap, his face losing a shade of colour.
“The choice is yours,” Ilva said, seeming satisfied by his silence. “Choose carefully.”
Luc stood a moment longer, radiating fury. Soren was just behind him, standing to his right, still acting as primary while Lila recovered. There was a new gauntness to his face.
“I will uphold my vows and those which I have accepted.” Luc’s voice was hollow and defeated.
“Good,” Ilva said, but her voice was still cold, disapproving at how long it had taken Luc to choose. “The recovery team managed to kill the chimaera before it escaped the East Island. A wall was found breached. There will be an investigation into how that happened. Given the behaviour of the creature, we must assume that they’re capable of more than we realised. Based on reports, it appears likely they wanted Luc taken alive, and the animal was capable of targeted hunting. Althorne, you have the floor.”
* * *
Helena put off the meeting with Crowther for as long as she could, but eventually she ran out of excuses. In retrospect, her decision to restore the nerves in his arm had been impulsive. It hadn’t been an emergency; she could have waited for him to regain consciousness and asked if he wanted it done.
