Alchemised - 4

I T TOOK H ELENA MERE MINUTES TO EXPLORE every corner of her room and the adjoining bathroom. She was provided with only the most essential objects: soap, towels, a toothbrush, and a metal cup for water. She squeezed the cup, trying to bend it and work it. If she could break it, she’d have a nice sharp edge to slit her arteries open.

After several minutes of trying, all she had were dents in her thumbs and throbbing pain in both wrists.

Next she tried pulling down the mirror, but it was welded to the wall so firmly she couldn’t even get her fingers under it. It didn’t break when she tried hammering it with the cup, either.

She stepped back, glaring at the glass, and winced at her reflection.

She scarcely recognised the person scowling back. Sallow skin that had seen no light in more than a year, long black hair tangled almost to mats around her face. Her features were all sunken. She’d look like a necrothrall herself if not for her furious dark eyes.

She went back to the bedroom and was disappointed to find that there weren’t any drape cords for her to try to hang herself with. She checked behind all the curtains, in case one had been missed.

Just live, Helena, a voice in her mind begged.

She paused, fingers tracing the pattern on the curtain, trying to stifle it.

Luc … oh, Luc. Of course he would haunt her, refusing to accept a pragmatic choice. If he were there, he’d be telling her that her plan was terrible. He’d hated that kind of thing. People sacrificing themselves because of him or his family. He always felt responsible, convinced that if he was better, he could save everyone.

She could hear him now, telling her stubbornly that she wasn’t going to die. She could come up with a better plan if she’d just stop fixating on this one.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Luc. This is the best I can do.”

She went to the door leading to the hallway.

The instructions to stay out of sight implied she could leave her room. Her body trembled in anticipation, heartbeat quickening.

She gripped the knob, and it turned easily. The heavy door swung open, revealing a long corridor spilling into darkness, but rather than exhilaration at this freedom, Helena’s heart stopped.

The sconces along the wall were no longer illuminated. She hadn’t noticed how ominous the corridor was, thin and winding, full of creeping shadows like teeth that gave way to a mouthlike darkness.

She was used to constant light in Central.

She stood frozen. It was irrational. It was a house. She’d seen too many real, awful things to be afraid of shadows and hallways, but her legs wouldn’t move. The doorknob rattled in her hand.

The darkness was like a pulsing oesophagus, the long shadows swaying with the wind, threatening to swallow her. If she stepped out, she’d fall into the cold, awful, unending dark again.

She would never be found.

Terror coursed through her as the shadows stirred again, crawling towards her.

Her chest spasmed, sending a shock of pain through her lungs. She shrank back into the room and shut the door, her body pressed close against the reassuring surface of it, lungs and heart pulsing. She couldn’t breathe.

She knew the terror of the stasis tank would haunt her, but she had not realised the way it had rooted itself inside her, grown through her nerves and organs to paralyse her.

She stayed crouched, without sense of time, until there was a rap at the door, the soft clatter of dishes, and retreating footsteps.

She cracked the door open and found a cloth bundle and a tray of food. Pulling them inside quickly, she tried not to see the vanishing darkness again.

The door safely closed, she stared in revulsion. The meal was pig slop, as if someone had taken kitchen scraps and the day’s leftovers, put them in a pot, and boiled them. She’d sooner starve.

She shoved the tray aside.

Untying the bundle, she found sets of underclothes, wool stockings, and one dress, red as blood.

There were stitch marks along the hems and the neck and bodice from where the details and lace had been carelessly ripped off to make it as plain as possible.

Helena wished bitterly she hadn’t flinched at the sight of those roses.

She looked over at the food again. She’d have to be careful around Aurelia.

At the bottom of the bundle were three sets of slippers. Dancing slippers by the look of them, impractically thin-soled and delicate shoes with ribbon laces, cast off because the fabric on the toes was wearing thin and they’d lost their satiny sheen.

Aside from the stockings, Helena put it all into the wardrobe, preferring to remain in the thin scratchy dress from Central.

Another tray arrived the next morning, somehow worse. Helena was hungry enough by then to pick out the few bites that hadn’t been so boiled that the colour had leached out.

She wanted to try leaving her room again, but the thought made her stomach twist into a vicious knot.

Instead, she preoccupied herself with exercise, performing callisthenics. She needed to at least be able to climb a flight of stairs without having her legs threaten to give out. Her arms were weak, too, but anything that required her to put weight on her wrists was out of the question.

She stared bitterly at the manacles. She’d always been so proud of her hands—all the things she could do with them.

The longer she spent preoccupying herself with excuses not to leave the room, the guiltier she grew.

Anyone else in the Resistance would have already mapped the house, identified potential weapons, and murdered both the Ferrons.

Lila would never allow herself to be so weak. It wouldn’t matter what she was scared of. But Helena had never been much like Lila. She had to do things her way. Better to wait, let Ferron come to her.

He was sure to turn up soon.

She could only guess at what transference would entail.

She thought of Crowther’s corpse in Central with the lich inside it. Perhaps that would be her soon, except still alive, aware of what was happening to her as Ferron took over, possessing her mind and body.

At least if she had to see Ferron frequently, she’d have opportunities to figure out what made him tick. To find a weakness.

She racked her memory for what she knew of the family. The Ferrons were entwined with the alchemical industrialisation of the last century.

They had formed the very first iron guild shortly after Paladia’s founding. Iron was one of the eight traditional metals associated with the eight planets: lead for Saturn, tin for Jupiter, iron for Mars, copper for Venus, quicksilver for Mercury, silver for Luna, lumithium for Lumithia, and gold for Sol.

Being intractable and highly prone to corrosion, iron was regarded as lowly and ignoble, especially when compared with incorruptible substances like silver, lumithium, and gold. The Ferrons themselves had also been common. Blacksmiths and ironworkers making ploughs and farm tools more often than holding illustrious jobs like forging steel weapons for the Eternal Flame the way other iron alchemists had.

As time passed and new metals were discovered, iron remained a stubborn and base fixture until the Ferrons developed a method of efficient alchemical steel manufacturing. With the precision of their iron resonance, they could assure quality at an industrial scale that no one else could match. It had changed the world, and it had changed the Ferrons. They’d transformed from trade workers to a new and incredibly wealthy working class, the world transforming with them.

It didn’t matter whether theologically iron was classified as celestially inferior; the modern world was built with Ferron steel. Factories, railway lines, motorcars, even Paladia itself as its architecture shot skywards, climbing with the industrial boom.

Spirefell, deteriorated as it now was, had clearly been built as a monument to that growing influence and wealth, and the family’s immense pride in it.

Helena’s first memory of Kaine Ferron was during Year Two, not as a person but merely a name on a list. Helena had ranked first on the National Alchemy Exam for their year, beating out Ferron, who’d taken the spot the year before.

Luc had been so proud of her, loudly proclaiming that Year One barely counted, because it had been Helena’s first year ever studying alchemy, and she was doing it in her second language.

Helena had almost fainted with relief. Her scholarship at the Institute depended on her academic performance, and the exam was a significant part of her evaluation. Her father had given up everything in Etras to bring her to Paladia; they would have been ruined if she’d lost her scholarship.

During the six occasions Helena took the national exam, top rank had swung like a pendulum. Helena Marino. Kaine Ferron.

A rivalry, albeit an indirect one, never openly acknowledged.

He was guild. Guild students didn’t speak to “the Holdfast pet.”

She couldn’t imagine how he’d become High Reeve.

He’d been academic track like her. Not a specialised combat alchemist like Lila, or double track, the way Luc had been. Why would a guild heir be hunting down and killing all the surviving Resistance members?

The more time she had to think about it, the more a seething sense of hatred filled her at knowing, even distantly, someone so evil.

In a way, it was strangely poetic that it was Helena who’d been brought as a captive to Spirefell.

She’d beaten Ferron before. If she was careful, and clever, she would do it again.

W HEN F ERRON DIDN’T APPEAR ON the second day, Helena forced herself into the hallway, ignoring the way her organs shrivelled and her throat closed. She hugged the wall, letting her fingers trace the wainscotting, not caring that the dust crept into the grooves of her fingerprints, blackening them like an infection.

You can do this, she told herself as she edged slowly towards the darkness, trying to evade the sharpest shadows. She tried the nearest door along the hallway and found it locked. She kept going, just a little farther.

The wind moaned through the halls, twisting into a scream, windows rattling. The house creaked like shifting bones.

Helena tried to breathe but she couldn’t, not in the hallway with the shadows crawling up her like fingers.

After the third door, she couldn’t go any farther. She turned back, the hallway swaying, the dark moving closer.

Before she reached the open door, her legs gave out. Everything blurred, blackening around her.

Lila Bayard emerged from the darkness.

It was not the Lila that Helena remembered. Not the beautiful, statuesque girl in armour who wore her pale-blond hair plaited in a crown around her head like the statues of Lumithia.

Lila’s hair was cropped short as a boy’s. She looked shrunken, despite her unusual height.

She stared at Helena. The right side of her face and neck was mottled with scarring, a long cruel gouge across her cheek that ran down her throat. Her eyes were red.

“Lila. Lila, what’s wrong. What happened?”

Helena felt herself growing cold, fingers numb as she reached out.

Lila opened her mouth to answer but then faded away.

“Lila …”

When Helena opened her eyes, she was lying on the floor in her room, head throbbing.

Something niggled in the corner of her mind, dangling just past the edge of recollection.

She tried to focus, but sharp red pain splintered her mind. Whatever it was vanished like water through sand.

The windows rattled, and the house groaned, sending a vibration through the floor as though it were coming alive. She pushed herself up, favouring her hands, and went to the window.

The mountains were white, but snow hadn’t reached the river basin yet. The winter solstice to mark the new year must be at least a few weeks away.

Fourteen months. She tried to remember the last date she could recall during the war. It would have been late summer when the final battle occurred, but she couldn’t remember the month or lunar phases at the time. The hospital ward did not change with the seasons.

As she was peering out, the door behind her opened. Her spine prickled as she turned, anticipating Ferron.

Instead it was Aurelia, who entered in a swirl of blue fabric, gilded in metal once more as if she were a filigreed exoskeleton. If the Ferrons were short on money, it was likely because Aurelia’s skirts required a dozen yards of imported silk.

Aurelia might have an unusual resonance for iron, but she seemed new to money. Not that Helena had ever had any herself, but it was unavoidable knowledge when among the noble families that served the Holdfasts and the Eternal Flame.

Country dress was supposed to be less formal. Luc used to always tell her about his family’s country home in the mountains, how much more comfortable the clothes were. Every year after the summer solstice parades that celebrated the Principate’s birthday, he’d invited her to come, to escape the city’s heat and the river sicknesses that came with the warm season.

She’d always chosen to stay with her father.

Years later, she did see the country home, but she’d gone there alone. Luc had been right. It had been beautiful, the clothes comfortable, but she’d hated every minute of it.

Aurelia stood staring at Helena in disgust. “Why are you still wearing that? Haven’t you washed since you got here?”

Helena hadn’t. It felt safer to be dirty.

“I knew you were foreign, but I assumed there was basic hygiene in whatever hovel the Holdfasts found you in.”

Helena’s jaw clenched.

“Stroud called. That procedure is to happen tonight. Be washed and do something with that awful hair of yours before I come back, or I’ll have the thralls strip you and do it instead. We have some nice stinking ones now, and I’ll call them in if I ever see you looking like this again.”

She turned, skirts swishing as she walked out.

Helena went to the bathroom, tearing off the slip dress and quickly twisting the taps for the shower. The pipes spat several times before water finally emerged with a hissing whine. She scrubbed herself from head to toe with a cloth as quickly as possible and tried to work her fingers through her hair. There was no comb anywhere.

Did Ferron think she could somehow slit her throat with it?

Not a bad idea, actually.

When she was suitably clean, she dressed in the clean, scratchy undergarments and then forced herself to pull on the dress, trying not to look at the red.

Then she sat, wrestling the remaining knots out of her hair. Her hands and wrists were aching, but she didn’t want to find out if Aurelia meant her threat.

Paladians had always found Helena’s hair disorderly. Northern hair was generally fine and extremely straight; curls were only acceptable when forged with a heated iron bar that singed the hair into the shape of a corkscrew.

When Helena had been a healer, she’d learned to keep it in two tight braids coiled at the base of her neck. She tried to plait her hair now, but her wrists couldn’t manage the twisting motion.

The door swung open with an abrupt bang, and Aurelia stood in the doorway, her sharp blue eyes flicking up and down with overt disdain. Helena sat tense, bracing for the verdict.

Aurelia gave a sniff, lips tightening. “Come.”

Helena followed Aurelia, silently, trying to focus on the intricate metal filigree of her clothing and not on the shadows around her.

Her escort did not appear to enjoy the silence. “Kaine says all that’s valuable about you is your brain.” She looked over at Helena as if expecting the pronouncement to be hurtful in some way. “I figure that means I can do whatever I want with all the rest of you.”

She transmuted her iron-ringed fingers as she said this.

For all the power of her iron resonance, Aurelia’s movements were all for show. The weapons she’d transmuted would break half her fingers if she tried to use them.

Helena doubted she had any formal training. In general, the guilds only sent sons to the Institute; daughters were for marriage. They might be taught alchemical parlour tricks, but they were rarely certified.

Still, Helena pretended to flinch back, her eyes carefully averted so they wouldn’t betray her critical appraisal.

Aurelia’s corseted chest swelled as the rings transformed again. “I bet you wish you hadn’t joined the Holdfasts now. The guilds were always going to win. You all tried to hold us back, and look at what that got you.”

She tossed her head and continued on.

The foyer was empty. Aurelia ascended the steps quickly, hurrying down the second-floor corridor before stopping short outside the first door to the left, touching a panel on the door above the knob. There was a click of the lock unfastening.

“Here. Go in and wait,” Aurelia said, her eyes darting around, and it dawned on Helena far too late that she was walking into a trap.

“Kaine will be along shortly. Don’t come out until he arrives,” Aurelia added.

With that, Aurelia hurried on towards the far end of the hallway, leaving Helena in the corridor with the overwhelming sense that she was not supposed to go into this room.

She glanced around. Should she try to go back? Or was there a chance that this would get her in enough trouble that Ferron would kill her?

Before she could weigh her options, the corridor began to stretch, ballooning until every surface started to slide out of reach. The doorknob was shrinking away from her, leaving her in the open amid the gaping shadows.

She lunged forward and caught the knob, managing to twist it and drag herself into the room.

Inside, it was smaller than the corridor.

She leaned against the door, palms and fingers tracing the grain of the wood as the enclosed space settled around her.

Helena was surprised to find the room like hers. Two windows. A bed and wardrobe, but a desk and chair rather than an armchair. It could have belonged to an ascetic.

She went to the desk by the window. There was a neat stack of paper.

She lifted the top sheet of paper, holding it up in the dim light to see if Ferron’s correspondence might have pressed through to the lower page, but the paper was thick and pristine. She ran her fingers across the surface of the desk; there was delicate silverwork across it, intricate leaves and vines set in the wood with perfect alignment. Undoubtedly the work of a talented silver alchemist.

The desk was perfectly maintained. A stark contrast with the cobwebs coating the iron filigree throughout the rest of the house.

She turned away, tense and trapped inside a room she was nearly certain she was not supposed to be in. She doubted she could make it back to her own room, and if Aurelia caught her disobeying, she was sure to do something nasty.

But what might Ferron do when he found her? Would intruding into a locked room merit lethal punishment? She doubted he was that impulsive, and if Stroud knew so many vivimancy punishments that weren’t technically torture, Ferron undoubtedly did, too.

Her mouth went dry.

She still didn’t know what transference would entail. Despite the frequent references made to it, no one had explained to her what Ferron would be doing. Helena could only guess based on the comments Shiseo had made, even though they made no sense because Helena had been the one who’d healed General Bayard when he was first injured. She’d tested the limits of her knowledge and abilities trying to save him, painstakingly regenerating the damaged brain tissue. When he’d survived, people had called it a miracle, declaring Helena’s hands to be blessed by Sol.

That praise had ended when General Bayard woke. He was like a child. A huge, powerful general with the emotions of a toddler. A once brilliant tactician who couldn’t find his way through a door without help.

Helena had saved his body and learned the bitter lesson that a mind was a thing apart and she had not saved it. She’d tried and failed for years to fix what she’d done. Somewhere in the hidden spaces of her memory, Elain Boyle had materialised, a cure in hand, a procedure then used on Helena as well. Now the Undying had learned of it.

The door clicked, breaking Helena from her thoughts. She turned as Ferron strode in. His hand was at his throat, pulling the collar loose.

He stopped short at the sight of her.

“Well,” he said, “this is a surprise.”