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“Well, you—you have a natural talent for it. In another life, you could be a healer.”
“Ready for what?” “Enrolment in my repopulation program.”
Stroud straightened imperiously. “It’s time you had children. I know your family’s concern is with iron, but you have a wife for that. As our other animancer, the High Necromancer has chosen you to be the first to make an attempt with Marino here. If she becomes pregnant, we’ll look for signs of animancy. Your father was a great help in detailing your mother’s condition, so we know just what symptoms to look for. However, given how tight our timeline has become, the High Necromancer considers it best to keep alternatives under consideration. You’ll have two months to produce results, or she’ll
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He was gone so suddenly, it was as if he’d evaporated. Helena opened her eyes and couldn’t see him anywhere. The violent sound of retching emerged from the bathroom.
The world was not supposed to be beautiful any longer. It was supposed to be dead and cold, forever mirroring the misery of Helena’s life. Instead it had moved on, tilting into a new season, and she could not. She was trapped forever in winter, in the season of death.
“There.” Stroud let go, letting Helena topple sideways on the bed. “You’ll enjoy it much more now.” Helena lay paralysed, unable to resist or scream as Stroud arranged her on the bed, flat on her back, legs parted. No. No. No. “I’ll tell the High Reeve you’re ready for him on my way out,” Stroud said as she left.
Two months, and then she’d go to Central, to Stroud, and— She was going insane. She couldn’t do this. A choice like this—it wasn’t fair to make her choose between things like this. No good choices, just worse and worse, which way to hate herself forever. This was the cruellest thing Stroud could have done.
She kept thinking about his hesitation when she asked him to kill her. He had considered it. Why? If she was a necessary part of his plan, how could killing her possibly be an option? But if she wasn’t, why all the effort?
When it was over, he left without a word. She didn’t look at his face.
As she stood in the doorway, the air in the room shifted. She turned sharply towards the desk. It was mostly in shadows, the edge covered in bottles. Then a shadow moved, and the moonlight fell across Ferron’s face, catching his pale hair and skin so that he seemed to glow. “Helena,” he said softly.
“Oh, Marino.” His thumb trailed along her neck, following the scar below her jaw. “If I’d known what pain you’d cause me, I never would have taken you.” He sighed, and she could smell the liquor on his breath as his head dipped closer. She had no idea what he meant, if she was supposed to apologise. “But at this point I suppose I deserve to burn. I wonder if you’ll burn, too.” His face was so close the words brushed against her lips, and his mouth crashed against hers.
The sound shattered the quiet. They both froze. Ferron wrenched himself away.
She wanted to be done. She couldn’t betray everyone. Luc. Lila. Soren. Matron Pace. Her father…
She stared across the room to the bloodstained window. “I would rather spend the rest of my life being raped in Central than spend a minute of it having feelings for you.” The air in the room seemed to freeze.
His hand rose, resting on her shoulder, and that was all it took. She crumpled, huddling closer. She could barely feel his fingers on her arm, but breathing no longer felt like a rope burn dragged through her lungs. She dropped her head against his chest. She was so tired of the space around her always being cold and empty and endless.
He crouched in front of her, and she had never seen his face this vicious. There was a raw malice in his eyes. “No, the thing eating you alive isn’t surviving or some subconscious instinct to appease me. What you can’t bear is the isolation. The Eternal Flame’s lonely little healer, with no one left to save. No one needs you, and no one wants you.”
Helena shrank away, but Ferron wasn’t done. “Let me be very clear, then. I don’t want you. I never wanted you. I am not your friend. There is nothing I want more than the moment I’m finally done with you.” He turned and left.
Stroud’s eyebrows furrowed her face into rows of wrinkles as her resonance prodded deeper. A look of surprise swept across her face. “You’re pregnant.”
Ferron gripped his temples as though he had a migraine. “No one is going to steal your book,” he said as if he was trying very hard to be patient. He gestured around. “Who even would? If they do, I will buy you a new one. Leave it.”
“No one is going to hurt your baby,” he said, meeting her eyes. She gave a small gasp of relief. It was what she’d so desperately wanted him to say.
She felt like an hourglass, the final grains of sand finally running down. It was almost over. She could feel herself slipping away. The room flipped as she was dragged up and crushed tight. “Stay…please…stay.”
“I have warned you, if something happens to you, I will personally raze the Eternal Flame. That isn’t a threat. It is a promise. Consider your survival as much a necessity to the Resistance as Holdfast’s. If you die, I will kill every single one of them.” It was like falling. The past broke free, surging through her mind and swallowing her.
“You know,” he said, “when she took the vows, I thought, at least if she was always there to protect me, it meant I’d be there to protect her, too.” He rubbed the ignition ring on his thumb against the rim of the mug. “But I’m not—not always. She acts like that’s the job, getting chopped into bits in front of me. She’s already saved my life more times than I can count, and that’s supposed to be fine”—his eyebrows furrowed together—“because I’ll win the war, so it’ll all even out in the end. Just like Orion. Except I don’t know how to do that. And she just keeps getting hit and I’m supposed to
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“I know—it is hard to consider, but I believe we should offer Resistance members the choice of donating their bodies to the cause in the event that they’re killed in combat,” she said. “Rather than burning the bodies, we could—” She hesitated a moment, knowing she could never take back what she was about to say. “—reanimate them and use them as an infantry in order to protect our living combatants. This would be done only with their written permission—”
Soren gave a heavy sigh. “I’m guessing no one told you, but this battle was actually quite the victory for us.” She should have felt something at this news, but she was empty. “Whether you win a battle or lose it, all I see is the cost.” “Just figured you’d want to know, because Luc thinks it’s a sign that things are finally taking a turn.”
“He wants you, Marino,” Crowther said. “Both now and after the war.”
Becoming a healer would slowly carve away Helena’s life span, like a candle being burned at both ends. Someday, she didn’t know when, her resonance would begin to wither and fade, and Helena would go with it. She felt it sometimes while healing, a sensation like sand in an hourglass being diverted, flowing from her fingertips and into her patients. She never knew how much was left, just that she was spending it.
“I mean that time has allowed this country to begin questioning what is divine, and whether it matters. Our Principate can alchemise gold and wield holy fire. Two gifts of exceptional rarity. Once, that was miracle enough. But the world has changed, and the Principate has not. Morrough can raise the dead and grant immortality. The Ferrons have found a way to turn their lowly iron into seemingly infinite mountains of wealth. In a world like that, what purpose is there in fire or endless gold?”
Crowther only scoffed. “I’m sure Ilva has filled your head with pretty stories about your importance, but you’re easily replaced. We already have several candidates under consideration.”
Helena knew from years of healing that most people couldn’t tell when resonance was being used on them unless the manipulation was overt. That was part of what made people so afraid of vivimancers: the idea that something could be done without their knowledge.
She stood gaping at him until he finally moved, holding the door slightly wider in invitation, creating just enough space for her to squeeze by if she brushed against him.
Helena didn’t let herself react. After years in the hospital, she’d learned to ignore her feelings and do her job. “Yes,” she said, without emotion. “I’m yours.” Ferron might own her in body, but her mind and feelings were her own. If he wanted them, he’d have to work harder than that.
She didn’t let herself pause or think, just pressed a hand over her heart. “I swear it, on the spirits of the five gods and my own soul, Kaine Ferron, I’m yours as long as I live.”
So she gave him a slow, sweet kiss, the way she could imagine herself kissing someone she was keen on. She didn’t try to make it enticing or seductive. She let it be tentative. A first kiss, because it was her first kiss.
Helena wasn’t sure what to say to that, so she just said the first thing that popped into her head. “Do you say that to every girl?” He huffed a laugh and ran his hand through his hair to brush it off his face. “No, I can’t say I do.”
“A symbol of our relationship,” Ferron said, and when she looked up sharply, he raised his right hand to indicate a matching band on his index finger. “There’s a mirrored entanglement in them. If I do anything to mine, you’ll feel it. I’ll transmute it to warm briefly if I need to meet. Twice if it’s urgent. I’d advise coming very quickly if it ever burns twice.”
She tried slipping it on the forefinger of her left hand since it was her non-dominant transmutation hand but found it too small. She resigned herself, sliding it down her left ring finger.
“Think about it. Choose something. If I’m looking for information about the Eternal Flame or Holdfast, what can you give up that would seem like the biggest secret you have? Using resonance on the mind like that is like setting someone’s house on fire. Minds instinctively bolt to protect what’s most important to hide. You have to train yourself to do the reverse. Focus on what doesn’t matter. And remember, whatever you think they saw, unless you draw attention to it or they’re being extremely thorough, they only glimpsed. Don’t focus on it.”
“Was that—before you killed Principate Apollo?” Ferron stared at her, his mouth twisting. “Are you wanting a confession? Shall I tell you everything I’ve done?” She stared into his mocking eyes. “Do you want to?” There was a flash of surprise that softened his features for an instant. He was lonely.
Instead, he stood. “They used to torture me while Bennet did it. Called it practice—in case I got caught.” His mouth twisted into a sneer. “But it was an excuse. He enjoys it, how it feels to be inside a mind when it’s screaming. If you’re ever caught, that’s what he’ll do to you.”
However, she’d realised that she could supplement her focus with her resonance, pushing away her thoughts, rerouting her mind down preferred paths.
“Tell us how to kill them, then,” she said sharply. “We’re not going to give up food and medicine because you psychopaths decided to set monsters loose everywhere.”
Why not? After all, he didn’t care about the Eternal Flame. So what held him back? It wasn’t as if Ferron was above violence. He’d ripped out a man’s heart with his bare hands.
For so long, all she’d seen was his pride and anger. Now she couldn’t help but feel that there was something terribly tragic about him, straining beneath the surface.
“No,” Helena said. “I don’t need to talk. There’s—no point in talking, and as I have now been reminded publicly, I’m not a fighter. I don’t know anything about what war really is. So—what would I even have to say?”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said. She gave a brittle laugh. “Well, I always expected you would.” Anger flashed in his eyes as he looked up at her.
Attempts to treat them fell to Helena. The surgeons were at a loss, and the trainees couldn’t take it. There was nothing Helena could do, either. No matter what she tried, they all died.
There were no bandages underneath. His entire back was a rotting wound, lacerated surgically from his shoulders down past his ribs.
She touched his temple, leaning closer, searching his face. “Why are you doing this?”
As he was regaining consciousness, she took his nearest hand, careful not to shift his shoulder as she started massaging the palm and worked slowly to his fingertips, knuckle by knuckle, her resonance seeking out every bit of tension and knotted muscles.
