Alchemised, page 97
Helena’s hand stilled. “Leave her?”
“She’ll be fine,” he said, but his voice was gruff. “She can hunt for herself, and she doesn’t like most humans, so she’ll avoid populated areas. With luck, she’ll head back to Paladia looking for me. End up in the mountains.”
“But doesn’t she need someone to—the transmutations on her have to be maintained if she’s still growing.”
His jaw ticced. “There’s only one surviving chimaera from the war, and everyone knows who it belongs to. If she’s sighted, that will be enough to give an ambitious Aspirant a direction to hunt you down. You have to leave her.”
He rested his head against Amaris, and her wings fluttered. She turned her neck to nip at him.
“We’ll go out together, won’t we, old girl? Bennet’s last two monsters.”
The air in the stable was burning her eyes. Helena turned and walked out.
The air near the house was fresher, and she drew several forceful gasps, her hand pressed over her heart until she heard quick steps and looked up to see Aurelia storming down the stairs towards her.
Aurelia was pale, her eyes flashing with rage. She was wearing a pale-pink dress splashed with scarlet detailing. As she got closer, Helena noticed that the hem and her shoes were also scarlet.
“Where is Kaine?”
“Aurelia.” Kaine’s voice emerged from the dark interior of the stable. “What did I tell you about speaking to my prisoner?”
Aurelia whirled towards the stable. “I need to talk to you! How am I supposed to stay away from her and ever talk to you when you’re always with her?”
Kaine stepped out of the stable, eyes glittering. “What do you want?”
Aurelia’s throat worked several times. “I need you to talk to your father. He’s ruining the house.”
Kaine raised an eyebrow, looking unconcerned. “I thought you were pleased that he’d come to stay.”
Aurelia’s eyes bulged in her head. “That was before he turned the house into a torture chamber. It was one thing when it stayed in the storehouse, but he’s bringing them inside! There are piles of body parts all over, and I walked into a pool of blood because he flayed someone in the middle of the foyer.”
Helena realised then that Aurelia’s dress was not scarlet-detailed at all.
“I advised that you stay in the city,” Kaine said, appearing indifferent to all this. “But you refused because my father said something about domination livening the blood, and you thought, what?” He leaned towards her, lip curling. “That I might set my sights on you?”
Aurelia had gone white as a sheet with two scarlet blotches staining her cheeks. “I am your wife.”
Kaine cocked his head to one side. “I didn’t ask for you.”
“What’s this?” Atreus had emerged from the storehouse. There was blood up to his elbows, and a long knife used for gutting fish in his hand.
Aurelia started, clutching at her throat with her iron-ringed hands, shrinking towards Kaine, but Kaine drifted away from her, just happening to insert himself between Helena and his father as they faced each other.
“I’m afraid Aurelia doesn’t care much for what we’ve done to the house, Father,” Kaine said. “I believe she finds us rather—uncivilised.”
Atreus stared at Kaine for a moment, Crowther’s narrow nostrils flaring in a way that Helena recognised as suppressed anger. “Does she? I suppose it is rather excessive. I was waiting for you to object. I thought at some point surely you’d feel a sense of ownership. You did grow up here…” His voice trailed off as he turned to stare at the immense house which towered around them. “This was your mother’s house. She planted those roses the summer we wed.”
Atreus’s grip on his knife tightened, and for a moment Helena felt Kaine’s resonance in her teeth.
“I’m afraid the estate has never had much sentimental charm for me,” Kaine said. “Perhaps if you’d come back sooner, you might have made the effort of maintaining it.”
“Yes, you seem intent on destroying everything this family has ever built,” Atreus said, his face contorting so much, it seemed the dead grey skin might tear as he glared at his son. “What sin did your mother ever commit to deserve such a son?”
Kaine leaned forward, a razor-thin smile spreading across his face, pure contempt in his eyes. “I believe it was when she married you.”
Fury seemed to ignite inside Atreus, but Aurelia broke in.
“See? See? I told you. It is all his doing! I have been a perfect wife. You should have seen this hideous mouldering place when he brought me. I’ve done everything to be a proper wife that I have had means to, trying to restore this house, to get rid of all the ugly, fussy old-fashioned things everywhere, and to make it the heart of society. Everything decent in this house is because of me. I’m just like your wife, I—”
Atreus turned sharply. There was a wet snick and a gasping burble as Aurelia stopped speaking.
She reached up towards her neck as a line of blood gushed from a slit across her throat. She blinked once, mouth opening, but no sound came out, only a blood-filled gasp, and then her head toppled backwards, slit throat opening, body following, and she collapsed onto the white gravel. Her pink dress turned redder and redder.
Helena had to cram her hand against her mouth to smother the sound that nearly escaped her.
The side of her neck burned as her heart began pounding, but she couldn’t move as Atreus glared down at his former daughter-in-law, the fish knife dangling once more from his fingertips, a drop of blood on the curved tip.
“Do not ever compare yourself to my wife,” he said, staring down at Aurelia.
Kaine made no move except to step forward and block the sight of Aurelia’s slit throat from Helena’s view.
“I hope you intend to deal with the Ingram family,” he said. “Given that you contracted me into marrying her.”
“What can they do?” Atreus said with a sneer that Helena knew well. It was eerie seeing Kaine’s traits in Crowther’s dead face. “You clearly had no intention of ever putting an heir inside her.”
Atreus leaned down, pulling Aurelia’s body up off the ground by an arm. “I’ll deal with this, but once this matter is resolved, you will give me the name of a woman you will cooperate in marrying and producing a guild heir with. Otherwise, once I’ve found the last member of the Eternal Flame and gifted them to the High Necromancer, I will request that he order your cooperation in producing an heir, and I will choose the bride.”
Atreus turned and disappeared into the house, dragging Aurelia with him. The scent of the roses mixed with the coppery tang of fresh blood.
Helena turned and walked away, heading towards the far wing of the house. Once they were inside, in a hallway where they couldn’t be watched, she stopped. Kaine was only steps behind her. She knew he was about to ask if she was all right, but she spoke first.
“You planned that.”
He froze for an instant. “What makes you say that?” His voice was light.
“Because she’s a loose end. If you’ll let Amaris die, you won’t let Aurelia live.”
His expression hardened. “What did you expect? She tried to gouge out your eyes.”
Helena flinched at the memory of Aurelia’s talons hooking behind her eyeball. Her terror of being blinded, left in the dark forever. “I haven’t forgotten.”
“I would have killed her then, but it diverted suspicion to have a pretty wife in the house. Living here alone with you could have attracted attention. That was the only reason I let her live.”
Helena nodded listlessly. None of that surprised her, but it didn’t change anything, either. “I hate it when you kill people because of me,” she said.
She reached up, pressing her left hand against the scar on her neck, remembering her father’s face and the horrible gash below his jaw. That mockery of his smile as her last memory of him.
There was so much easy, indifferent death. It had bled together. The quantity had grown beyond a tragedy, into a figure so large it was almost abstract. Even for her, after so many years of fighting for every life, pouring herself into preserving them, eventually she had ceased to bleed. There was so much now, it was scarcely comprehensible.
She and Kaine stood in the centre of it.
“There’s so much more to you,” she said, “but sometimes I feel like all I do is bring out the worst. You would never go so far if it weren’t for me. You wouldn’t be like this. I did this to you.”
“You’re right. I don’t imagine I would.”
“I used to have so many dreams for us,” she said, voice thickening. “When I’d worry about you, when I’d do things I didn’t want to, when the war felt so heavy that I was sure I’d break under it, I’d tell myself: Someday you’re going to run away with him. Somewhere quiet. You won’t ask for very much, just you and him, and that will be enough.” A lump welled up in her throat, and she shook her head. “That was all I wanted. It was my whole dream, to see what we could be away from the war. I thought it would all be worth it for that.”
She exhaled, right hand clenching, feeling the scars from the amulet across her palm. “But look at everything we’ve done, and it’s still not enough. I guess in the end, I am like Luc. I thought that we could suffer enough to earn each other.”
He said nothing, and she was so tired of his resignation.
“Why are you always so ready to die?” she said, whirling on him even though she’d sworn to herself that she wouldn’t be angry anymore. “Even at the beginning when you made your offer to Crowther, you were already planning to die, like it didn’t matter to anyone. But why are you still like that now, when it does?”
Kaine sighed, jaw jutting forward. His thumb pressing against the ring on his hand. “I didn’t have anyone, Helena,” he said quietly. “After my mother died, I was alone. My life was blown apart when I went home at sixteen, and everything I did from that point on was to keep from losing the only thing I had left. When she died—it didn’t matter. Revenge was all I could do to make up for it, and dying for that didn’t matter to anyone—not until you came along.”
His voice grew bitter.
“I didn’t make plans past the war because there were never any plans to make. Holdfast, the Eternal Flame, they were never going to win, and I always knew that. Falling for you didn’t change that—it just…it just made knowing worse.”
The lights flickered, and a distant buzzing came from the main wing.
Kaine tensed, his head snapping right. “Something’s wrong. He never uses that to call for me anymore. Go to your room and bar the door.”
He left quickly. She watched from the window as he emerged in uniform, including the helmet that concealed his hair. He led out Amaris, swinging onto her back, and then they were gone, flying towards the city.
Helena waited. In less than an hour, a motorcar came. She watched it pull up, knife in hand. Had Ivy been captured or betrayed them? Was the summons meant to lure Kaine away from the estate?
Instead Atreus emerged in uniform, sliding into the rear. The motorcar pulled away.
What had Ivy done?
It was the middle of the night when she heard the door disbarred from the outside.
Kaine entered, still in uniform, his helmet in his hand.
His expression was unreadable.
“We received word that while the Eastern envoy was passing through Novis, the train was attacked. Everyone on board was killed—including Shiseo.”
Chapter 72
Julius 1789
Shiseo was dead.
His return had hung over Helena like a raised sword, so long a foregone conclusion. He would return and she would go. That fact had felt immutable.
Kaine was shaking his head slowly, as if he could scarcely believe it himself.
“Is it confirmed?”
“They sent his head. Novis is claiming they had no direct part in it, that it’s a surviving faction of the Eternal Flame, but—there isn’t one. Not with those kinds of abilities. This was an experimental salvo. The queen is calculating, and she wants to see if the allying countries will distance themselves if pressured to choose a side, and whether New Paladia has any recourse.” He lowered his head, and the air warped with his resonance, but then he laughed. “The irony is, this is what we orchestrated, this was our plan, except they weren’t supposed to do it until I was gone.”
He threw his helmet against the wall. “Now they’ve given Morrough warning and time to assemble forces and recall the necrothralls from the mines, and I am still here and I can’t refuse orders. Fuck!”
So they were all going to die, then. Kaine was going to die, she would die, their daughter would die. Spirefell was a cage and a tomb.
She reached out to him, her fingers almost numb. “It’s all right, Kaine. You did everything you could.”
I’d rather die in your arms.
His eyebrows knit together for a moment. “You’re still leaving.”
Helena stared at him, not understanding. The escape plan had hinged on Shiseo.
He pulled off his gloves. “There are other ways, they’re just…not as clean. There’s more risk of being tracked down if they move quickly to pursue, which is likely to happen. Morrough will do anything to recover you. If you can reach the coast in time, you’ll disappear into the islands long before they can catch up. But—you’ll have to get to Lila alone. Unless you think you’re strong enough to take Amaris by yourself.”
“How—alone?”
Even before, during the war when she’d been stronger, not prone to fits of panaphobia, flying on Amaris was something she’d endured only out of necessity. The height and speed had always terrified her, and Amaris had known where to go, requiring no guidance from Helena.
Flying at night as Lumithia’s crescent shrank out of sight was almost unimaginable. It would be black as pitch, the world an abyss beneath her. Her head felt light just thinking about it.
“I’ll take you as far as I can, and there will be a ship downriver that will sail to the coast. I’ll show you maps and the route you’ll take inland to find Lila. I can arrange transportation, but it would be safest if you travelled at least part of the way on foot, if you think you’d be able to manage the distance. Just before the Abeyance, you’ll go to the ports; there is passage booked and false identification papers waiting. You’ll take a ship to Etras. I’ve arranged a place there.”
Her heart stuttered, tripping over itself as she tried to think.
“You don’t have to decide now,” Kaine said, his hand on her shoulder. “I’ll arrange for both, and you can choose. I know it’ll be hard, but it will be worth it. Lila’s been waiting for you a long time.”
She nodded shakily.
Everything had to move fast. The Abeyance wouldn’t wait, and if there was a war about to break out between Paladia and the surrounding countries, Kaine did not want her there for it.
After all the years spent hoping that Novis or any of their neighbours might intervene on their behalf, they now acted at the worst possible moment.
“I have to go,” he said after a bit. “I’ll come see you when I can. Try to eat and rest as much as you can. Keep the doors barred. Fortunately, with Aurelia gone, the door is more secure. Crowther had no iron resonance to speak of, despite my father’s efforts to plumb some from the decrepit depths of his corpse. As long as the door’s locked, he can’t open it.”
He was rambling, because he was nervous; things were slipping out of his control. All his carefully laid plans destroyed by the very intervention the Resistance had been waiting for when annihilated.
* * *
She barely saw Kaine after that. For days, he was gone; she didn’t think he slept at all. She tried to do her part, to eat and perform callisthenic exercises inside her room to build up stamina and get a little stronger so that preparations were not so limited by her.
Atreus returned to Spirefell, apparently no worse off for having murdered Aurelia, assuming it had become known. He seemed to have run out of prisoners; instead he prowled around the house. She heard his footsteps in the hallway outside her door and spotted him entering and leaving the chantry several times.
When the windows rattled from the wind of Amaris’s wings, she knew Kaine had returned at least briefly. He was busy with more than merely preparations for her escape. He was the High Reeve; he’d be expected to coordinate the response to the attack.
She was surprised when only a few minutes later, the door opened and he walked in.
His eyes were so bright, they seemed to actually glow. He was the furthest from human he had ever appeared. He walked towards her as if he sensed but did not actually see her.
“Kaine?” she said, her heart in her throat.
He didn’t respond. The wrongness of whatever had happened to him was visceral. Cold swept through her. The instinct to run frayed her every nerve, but she went towards him.
She touched his face. “What happened?”
He blinked, and a little humanness seemed to seep into him. She held his face, tilting it down towards hers.
“Kaine?”
“I’ve never killed so many at once before…” he said softly.
“How many?”
His eyes flickered, darting as if trying to calculate the number. Then he shook his head.
“What happened?”
He was looking through her, as if he still wasn’t quite there.
“I was ordered to make a show of strength. A warning.” He swallowed. “There were rows and rows of prisoners. I don’t know where they got so many.”
As he spoke, his expression slowly thawed, growing younger and younger until he looked painfully boyish, his eyes huge. He was going into shock. He didn’t seem to be talking to Helena so much as trying to explain it to himself.
