Quicksilver (Fae & Alchemy, #1)

by Callie Hart

This bastard would shit himself if he realized he had the Saeris Fane in his grasp.

I gave everything I had, sacrificed every last thing I held dear, but this city is a beast that feeds on misery, and pain, and death, and it’s never full. We can throw ourselves down its throat until there’s none of us left, and we won’t have made the slightest lick of difference, Saeris. The people will suffer. The people will die. Madra’s reigned over this city for a thousand years. She will live as she has ever lived, and the beast will still feed and demand more. The cycle will go on forever until the sand swallows this cursed place and there’s nothing left of us but ghosts and dust.

“What if they track you down and realize what you can do? The way you can affect metal—” “It’s a parlor trick, Elroy. Nothing more. It doesn’t mean anything.” Even as I spoke, I knew I was lying. It did mean something. Sometimes, objects shook around me. Objects made of iron, tin, or gold.

She used to call him her summer child. She’d never seen snow, but that’s what I had been to her: her ice storm. Distant. Cold. Sharp.

“You say our ward’s locked down so tight because we’re quarantined. You say we’re afflicted with a sickness. That we’re contagious. But we aren’t, Captain. We’re being slowly and methodically poisoned because we don’t matter. Because we ask questions. Because we say no. Because Madra sees us as a burden on the city. She feeds us foul, dirty water, and we die in droves because of it. Meanwhile, you and yours turn the handle, and fresh, clean water flows into your canisters. No one standing over you, looking over your shoulder, beating you and telling you enough. Have you ever asked yourself why—”

“No, of course not. Like I said. Ask a question, and you’ll get sent to the Third. It isn’t disease that’s contagious in my ward, Captain. It’s dissent. Anarchy and rebellion spread like a wildfire. And what do you do with a fire? You blockade it. Trap it behind a wall. Give it nowhere else to go until it burns itself out and dies a quiet death. That’s what Madra’s doing with my people.

Do you know much about metalwork, Captain? I do. It’s under the most unbearable conditions that the sharpest, most dangerous weapons are forged. And we are dangerous, Captain. She’s turned us all into weapons. That is why she won’t suffer my people to live.”

Amongst them, the only two I recognized were Balea and Min, the physical embodiment of Zilvaren’s suns—twin sisters, identical in appearance, beautiful and cruel.

“The Fae were warmongers. Cannibals. Beastly creatures with no temperance, sense of morality, nor any notion of mercy. The eldest Immortals visited their wrath upon the land with an iron fist, leaving a path of chaos and destruction in their wake. The seven cities rejoiced when I cast them out. And now they have sent you to try and kill me?”

Emerging from the silver, the huge figure rose up from the pool as if ascending from the very depths of hell itself. Broad shoulders. Wet, shoulder-length black hair. Tall. Taller than any other man I’d ever seen. His eyes shone an iridescent, shimmering green, the pupil of the right eye rimmed by the same shining metallic silver that ran in ribbons from the black leather armor that covered his chest and arms. He towered over me, his lips pulled back into a snarl, revealing gleaming white teeth and sharp canines. In his hand, he held a monstrous sword forged out of a black metal that vibrated with a tempestuous energy that sang in the marrow of my bones.

Of course Death was beautiful. How else would anyone choose to go with him without putting up a fight? Even though he scowled at me, his dark brows tugging together to form a dark, unhappy line, he was still the most savagely beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

“You have beautiful hair,” she said, running a wide-toothed comb through the strands. I winced as she swept it back over my shoulders. “It’ll grow well here. Long hair is a sign of high-born status for Fae women. Others will be jealous of your dark coloring, too. Dark hair is a royal trait amongst the Yvelian Fae.”

“Styx, god of shadows.” She moved along the line, inclining her head and touching her brow to each of her gods before she named them. “Kurin, god of secrets. Nicinnai, goddess of masks. Maleus, god of dawn and new beginnings.

Everlayne said, gesturing to the two beautiful females who stood arm in arm atop the same marble plinth. “Balmithin. Twin sisters. Goddesses of the sky. Legend says that they once were one god, but a mighty storm came, and Balmithin refused to take shelter as it raged across the land. The powerful spirit within the storm was furious that Balmithin didn’t cower before him, and so he lashed her with forks of lightning. Again and again, the lightning struck Balmithin, but she didn’t die. Instead, she cracked and split in two, becoming Bal and Mithin. Bal is the goddess of the sun, but goddess of the day in a looser sense. Mithin is the goddess of the moon, but again, she presides over all of the night.” Bal. Mithin. Balea. Min. The Twins.

“To look upon Zareth’s face is to draw his focus. And very few people enjoy Zareth’s attention being focused on them. We respect and revere him, but we’d all rather he was paying attention to what other people were doing instead of us. We touch him on the foot to guide him away from us.” She patted his boot, stepping back. “We pray to each member of the Corcoran that they’ll return to Yvelia someday. But in secret, a lot of us pray that Zareth gets a little lost on his journey home.”

The individual who brought you to my court”—Belikon ran his tongue over his teeth like he was trying to sweep away a foul taste—“told my guards that you were the one who reopened the portal. It seems highly unlikely that a human woke the quicksilver.”

“Even in times of peace, the Fae are always at war. There are those among our ranks that might pretend to be your friend, but often they’re hiding knives behind their smiles, ready to sink them into your back. You’d do well to remember that.”

“Oh! So… so, this one’s an Alchemist, then?” “Shh!” Everlayne flinched. “We don’t know what she is just yet. Kingfisher felt Solace calling, and he answered. He found it in Saeris’s hands.” His lips parted slightly. “She was holding Solace?”

“Our ancestors were cursed millennia ago. As a result, we ended up with these,” he said, gesturing to his canines. “We used them to drink your kind dry. We drained you by the millions before the blood curse was lifted. This was long before our time, of course, but the Fae line still bears the marks of its past. We might not need blood to maintain our immortality anymore, but by the gods, do we still have the teeth for it.

“The quicksilver itself is volatile. Some of our elders believe it possesses a low level of sentience. Whether this is true or not doesn’t really matter. The stuff is dangerous. If the quicksilver comes into contact with bare skin…”

I was forced to travel a pathway without it once. The quicksilver took me, just as it takes everyone. A healer managed to draw most of it from me once I made it back to the Winter Palace, but I was left with a few...lasting reminders. Most Fae only wore their relics when they traveled from one realm to the next. But wearing mine is the only thing that calms the noise in my head. Without it, the line between what’s real and what isn’t blurs very quickly.” His eye. That was his lasting reminder? It had to be. The filaments that marked his jade iris were actually remnants of quicksilver. Gods. It was inside him, always there, always whispering in his ear, pushing him toward madness. The relic really was the only thing keeping him sane.

Alchemy, it turned out, was a form of magic. Forgotten, long-dead, old magic that was as much a myth to the Fae of Yvelia as they were to the people of Zilvaren. There had once been three branches of Alchemists—Fae who sought to discover the path to immortality, Fae who sought to create and invent by transmuting various metals and ores, and lastly, Fae who sought to cure illness and disease.

But you don’t need to be Fae or possess any special gift in order to close the doors between our realms. The sword will do it for you. As far as we know, when one pool of quicksilver is activated, all quicksilver everywhere is activated. It’s joined by some kind of…” She frowned, searching for a way to explain. “A ribbon of energy, I suppose. If you take a sword like Solace and plunge it into the quicksilver, it severs that energy in a way that paralyzes it. Until Solace was removed, every entrance to the pathway became frozen.

“It’s always confounded me. Humans aren’t restricted by the same laws as the Oath Bound Fae. You creatures can lie whenever you want. You do it all of the time. And yet you’re all so fucking bad at it.”

“For centuries, our kind has tried to understand how the relics that allow us to travel through the quicksilver were made. There have been many theories over the years, but that’s all they’ve ever been. Theories. With the quicksilver sleeping, we haven’t been able to experiment or put any of those theories to the test. But now that you’re here…” “You want me to wake the quicksilver so you can try and bind things to it and see if you can make a relic out of it.”

Gods, he was a sight to behold. Every line of him was art. With his full mouth, and the faint shadow of stubble marking his jaw, his fascinating eyes, and all of his midnight-black hair, it was hard not to look at him and ache. I had grown up in a pit of misery, where people died more often than they lived. I hadn’t seen many beautiful things in my short life. But, of all the beautiful things I had seen, Fisher was the most beautiful of all.

“Our Fae hearts rarely betray us. We’re calm creatures. But you, Osha? You’re a ball of chaos. Your heart betrays you at every turn.” Quickly, he placed his hand on my chest, right between my breasts. I didn’t have time to react to the contact; he began tapping out the rhythm of my heart against my sternum. “Thrum, thrum, thrum, thrum, thrum. Fast. Erratic, like a hummingbird. I hear it bouncing around all over the place when you look at me. Did you know that?”

Fisher shook his head. “My father and Belikon had a long history. He saw what Belikon was planning long before he murdered the royal family and stole the crown for himself. He took precautions and warded his lands so that neither Belikon nor any of his supporters could cross into them. He was powerful, and his wards were strong. They remain as solid as ever. Belikon can travel to the borders of Cahlish, but he can’t enter. As long as I live and carry on my father’s line, he never will.”

The first time Belikon forced him to travel without a relic, the silver infected him so badly that I thought we’d lost him altogether. His mind was so fractured. Let’s just say, it took a long time for him to recover. The healers did their best, but the piece that remains in his eye torments him night and day. His mother’s relic doesn’t seem to be as effective anymore. And now he’s been exposed to the quicksilver twice without it again. I… I just don’t know what to expect from him anymore.”

“We are nothing alike,” he said quietly. “You nearly died from a scratch that would have been a mild irritation to me. You are soft. You are fragile. You are vulnerable. You are a newborn fawn, stumbling around in the dark, surrounded by predators with very sharp teeth. I am the thing that exists on the other side of the dark. I’m the thing that puts the fear of the gods into the monsters who would eat you bones and all.”

All we know is that when the god swords went silent and abandoned the rest of the Fae who carried them, Nimerelle stayed. At a cost. The blade used to shine brilliant silver. As the centuries have passed, it’s blackened and tarnished. But Nimerelle has stayed. The spirit of that sword or the magic inside it, whatever you choose to believe it is, has stayed. No matter what, it’s never left him.”

He shook his head emphatically, his eyes begging me not to speak. Quickly, he took hold of my hand and placed it onto his chest, right in the center. Thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum.… His heart was racing, the space between beats negligible. Nothing like the slow, steady beat he’d shown me back in the forge at the palace.

Danya righted herself, slowly pivoting toward me—the first time she’d actually paid me any heed since I’d entered with Renfis. She looked like her head was going to explode. “We have a fucking Alchemist?” “She’s mine,” Fisher said.

“Malcolm’s a high Fae vampire. The very first. We were cursed thousands of years ago, and the Fae turned into something very like Malcolm. When a cure was found, my great-grandfather and most of the other Yvelian Fae took it. They were horrified by the monsters they’d become and wanted to return to their old lives. But there were those who liked the dark magic the curse afforded them. They liked the power and the promise of immortality.”

Malcolm is the strongest of them. Their king. Of all the Fae who chose to remain vampires, he alone is strong enough to fully turn someone and ensure they remain themselves. What makes them who they are. Their personality and their character traits. When his princes bite and turn someone, their victims die and return without their souls, nothing more than mindless, hungry shells. They obey their masters, and they feed.”

“So… back in Zilvaren? It was never the iron, or the copper, or the gold that reacted to me? It was…” Kingfisher nodded. “It’s always been quicksilver. It was bound to many different alloys and metals before, back when there were plenty of Alchemists and the pathways were still open between our worlds. It made weapons more powerful. Turned them into conduits that could channel vast quantities of magic.”

“That makes you the most powerful Alchemist ever recorded,” Lorreth supplied. “Capable of changing how we’ve been fighting this war in ways even we can’t imagine. Most of us were infants when the paths between realms closed and the Alchemists became extinct. Some of us hadn’t even been born yet. We have no idea what battlefields used to look like, with an Alchemist in camp, ready to forge new weapons that draw magic—”

“When we turn twenty-one, we kneel before the Firinn Stone and make our decision. Every one of us. We have a choice. Bleed on the stone and make our vow. To always be truthful. To always be bound by our word, no matter what it costs us.” “Or?” “Or we choose the Lawless path. A Lawless Fae may lie. They may cheat. They may steal. Useful tools in many situations, I’ll admit. But they come with a price that Kingfisher—and the rest of us, I might add—was not willing to pay.”

“How do you age here? Your children? You all live for so long, but… are you born, and then you stay a child for a hundred years, or…?” He shook his head. “A child is vulnerable. Weaker than an adult. Too liable to be picked off by predators. Our offspring actually age twice as fast as human children. We’re fully grown by twenty-one or twenty-two. That’s when the aging process slows down dramatically.”

The sound of Fisher’s genuine laughter was rarer than water had ever been back in Zilvaren; it almost brought tears to my eyes to hear it.

This was just one more thing balancing precariously at the top of a very long and bewildering list that I would have to work through at some point. For now, all I knew was that I’d wanted it. I’d asked for it, and, sidenote, Fisher and I were now randomly capable of speaking into each other’s minds.

“Don’t you dare die on my watch, Saeris Fane! Fisher will never forgive me if his sole reason for living is torn to pieces on her first fucking battlefield.”

Fisher quietly came forward and knelt at my feet. His halo of dark hair was all over the place, his skin pale in the flickering torchlight. His eyes were steady, though. They ran me through as he withdrew Nimerelle and closed his fist around her edge. When he placed his hand against my chest, he tapped his index finger and middle finger against my sternum, in time with my racing heart. Giving me a very tired, very sad smile, he said, “I give you my blood in thanks, Saeris Fane.”

“Once upon a time, that was the case. Back when true mating bonds existed. Unions between true mates were blessed with marks from the Fates. That’s where the tradition of inking our hands originated from. But there’s no such thing as true mates anymore. When the gods left Yvelia, certain elements of our magic either died or waned over time. The god swords, for example. They were very slowly cut off from the source of the magic they channeled. Our ability to form mating bonds also died out over thousands of years, until it disappeared altogether.”

I’ve known for centuries that you were coming. That you were just going to show up one day and change everything. You’re the chink in my armor, Saeris. The soft spot where the knife slides in.

The Oshellith mate and lay their eggs, but once that’s done, they fill the air, and they dance. Protecting them while they live is considered a sacred rite that many die in order to perform. That’s what Oshellith means in Old Fae, Saeris. Most Sacred.”

“She said, when I needed you most, you’d come blazing into my life like a meteorite, riding on a wave of chaos that would turn my whole world upside down. That you’d shine so brilliantly that you’d light up hell itself and guide me out of the darkness. She had no idea what your name would be. Just that you’d have dark hair, and a beautiful smile. And that I’d love you with a fierceness despite myself.”

“My mother never said anything about a mating bond. They haven’t existed for so long. The thought never even crossed my mind. But when I found you lying in that pool of blood, I felt it, like a band snapping into place. I smelled it on you, too. And I… I was so fucking angry.” He clenched his jaw. “Angry that the fates had sealed us that way, when no one else in living memory had been affected by a bond. Angry that it had happened before either of us had even had a chance to get to know each other. I had no idea the marks would show up like that. Without any fucking warning. Without us being married, or even… even… deciding for ourselves that we wanted to be together.

Make me forget that I’ve ever suffered, I commanded. Make me forget that I will again.

“My name is Carrion Swift. But there was a time when I was known as Carrion Daianthus. Firstborn son to Rurik and Amelia Daianthus.”