Alchemised - 69

Junius 1789

A GIRL.

Helena had not even considered seeking out the gender. She remembered Lila trying to figure it out, but there were so many other things to worry over, it hadn’t occurred to her.

The pregnancy was suddenly so real, it was jarring. Before, the baby was a concept, little more than an ephemeral possibility. Now it was a girl.

Stroud pushed more firmly against Helena’s lower pelvis, the lines in her face darkening.

“Well, this is disappointing. We wanted a male,” she said, glaring down at Helena as if she’d purposely conceived the wrong gender. Helena kept her face blank, staring dully up at the canopy, as if she were too weak to have an opinion.

Stroud turned to Kaine. “The High Necromancer will not be pleased. A female is—out of the question. Practically unthinkable.”

“It was always a fifty percent chance,” Kaine said, appearing unconcerned. “I was under the impression that any animancer child would do at this point.”

“Yes, but a female. ” Stroud sounded as if she were referring to some kind of rodent. “He will not be pleased.”

She pressed a hand against her forehead, exhaling loudly. “Too late now, though. There’s no time to start over. And with the state of her, she might not survive a second attempt. We’ll have to proceed. Once we have the process perfected, I’m sure we can manage a boy. This will be temporary. You are keeping a close eye on her? Keeping her calm?”

“Yes,” Kaine said through gritted teeth, gesturing towards the door. “So let’s talk elsewhere, why don’t we?”

“Yes, yes,” Stroud said impatiently, packing her bag and heading out, followed closely by Kaine. Helena sat up as the door closed.

She looked down at her stomach, pressing her hand against the bump between her hips. Without resonance she could only feel stillness; it was too early for movement.

A girl.

Kaine still barely acknowledged the pregnancy beyond how it related to Helena’s health. It was her pregnancy. Her baby. He refused to treat it as having anything to do with him.

Still, she couldn’t help but wonder: Would he mind that it was a girl? It was sons who carried the name and inherited within the guilds. A girl child with talent for alchemy was often considered a waste, only good for a marriage alliance. Not that it mattered either way with an illegitimate child.

Her stomach twisted into a tight knot.

When Kaine returned, his expression was wary. He came over, his hand resting on her shoulder. She could feel his resonance through her nerves and knew that he was looking for something.

“I’m fine,” she said. “The baby’s not doing anything to me, if that’s what you’re worrying about.”

He studied her face carefully. “It could get worse later. And you—”

He touched the side of her head with his fingertips. She could see him estimating her years in the hospital, the number of patients, how it added up, how much time she might have left.

She shook her head, catching his hand in hers. “You said vitality doesn’t get taken like that. With your mother, the vivimancer said it was because she didn’t realise she was doing it. Lila’s a vivimancer and Rhea never had any trouble.”

Kaine still looked as if he were watching her slip away before his eyes.

“Besides, you did something to me, didn’t you?” She studied him. “I thought it was a dream, but you used the Stone somehow.”

“I don’t know how much it did, though,” he said, “you were so far gone, and then you slipped into that coma. I won’t be there at the end if—”

“I’ll be careful,” she said. “I’ll be able to feel it. The Toll has signs. It’s not like it happens suddenly.”

He nodded slowly, but she knew any risk was too much to him.

“It’s a girl,” she finally said, trying to draw his focus elsewhere.

He just nodded absently.

Her heart sank. She’d spent so much time worrying about this baby when it hardly existed, because it was all she’d had to care about. Kaine had been right when he’d called her desperate to love someone. It seemed to be her fatal flaw.

Now there was so much to care about, she’d stopped worrying about the pregnancy at all, thinking it could wait. But it couldn’t. It had been there all this time, and now it was a girl that no one wanted, except her.

Faced with indifference, Helena felt herself grow reactively possessive. She slipped her hand away from Kaine and went to the wardrobe, getting dressed slowly.

“What are you doing?” Kaine said as she buttoned her dress.

“I’m going to go for a walk,” she said without looking at him. “It’s good for the baby.”

“I’ll go with you.”

She wasn’t sure she wanted him to if he was just going to brood and scrutinise her, but she nodded.

He removed the nullium from her manacles, and then instead of going into the courtyard, he took her to the rear of the house, with the hedge maze and the overgrown gardens. There was a pathway canopied with climbing roses.

Helena hesitated. “Won’t Morrough notice?”

“He only watches the courtyard.”

They walked in silence until they reached a gnarled apple tree, blossoms all faded, covered in fresh green leaves. Kaine stopped short and stood staring at it.

“I used to climb this tree when I was a boy,” he said. “It’s bigger in my memory.”

He’d never spoken of his past without prodding before. All she knew of his childhood was the loneliness of it. An absent father, a sick mother, and the servants whose ghostly memories still lingered around him.

“I got stuck right here once,” he said, reaching out and touching a large branch that barely reached Helena’s waist. “I was sure I’d fall and break my head if I moved. I stayed there half the day, shouting for my mother. She wasn’t supposed to get out of bed, but I wouldn’t listen, I wanted her to come for me. Wanted her to see how high I’d climbed. Eventually she did.” His hand dropped. “When I was older, I felt so guilty about it. All those stupid things you do when you’re young and don’t understand.”

Helena could scarcely imagine Kaine that young.

He pointed to a break in the hedges. “If we go that way, there’s a pond. Used to be all kinds of frogs and newts there. I used to think I could tame them, teach them to do tricks.”

He said all of this without any emotion, a flat recitation. He looked around.

“I should take you up to the spires,” he said at last. “I’d remember more from up there, I think. It’s strange … I don’t know why I have so much trouble remembering moments.”

He started to walk back, his eyes wandering as if he was searching for something there in the gardens. He paused, his lips moving several times before he finally spoke.

“My mother’s name was Enid.”

Helena nodded. She remembered that.

He looked towards the garden, fingers curling into a fist. “I always liked that name.”

Slowly Helena realised what he was doing.

This was his attempt at giving her what she wanted. For him, ac knowledging that he would have a child, a daughter, meant acknowledging that he wouldn’t live to meet her. He was telling the stories so Helena could tell their daughter about him, about what he’d been like, before the Institute and the war.

He stared towards the city where it rose above the trees. “I’m not sure what will happen to the estate and inheritance. I’ve transferred as much as I can to a foreign account, but if you did ever come back, I’m not sure if she’d be able to claim it. I can look into it, if you want.”

Helena’s throat closed and her shoulders started to shake, and she couldn’t make herself breathe.

Kaine looked over. “I’ve brought you too far.”

She shook her head but couldn’t move. There were so many things she wanted to say, but she didn’t know how to without having them break her open.

He stepped closer. “Can you walk back?”

She managed to shake her head.

Moving slowly, he slipped his arm around her waist and lifted her into his arms.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder.

“Enid is a good name,” she finally managed to say, her voice hoarse. “I like it, too.”

K AINE LAY ON THE BED beside her, her head resting on his chest as she watched the hands on the clock. She was running out of time. Always. She never had enough. The Abeyance was less than a month away.

Kaine was awake, too, fingers tracing patterns along her arm.

She sat up, leaning forward, and kissed him slowly, memorising the sensation of their lips meeting, the tip of his nose tracing against her cheek.

She slid her fingers through his hair, deepening the kiss, wanting to lose herself in the familiarity of it. She had felt this before.

Kaine’s hand rose up to curve around her neck, sending a shudder of heat through her, her blood alight in her veins. She’d buried the memories of this in the deepest recesses of her mind.

She leaned closer, her hand sliding down his chest.

His hand closed instantly around her wrist, stilling it. “What are you doing?”

She sat up, drawing a deep breath. “I want to have sex with you.”

The tips of her ears burned at saying it so baldly, but she watched him as she spoke. Searching for his reaction.

There was a hard, flintlike look to his eyes, visible even in the dimming moonlight.

“No.”

She tugged at her wrist again, and he let go. She pulled her knees up against her chest, wrapping her arms around them. Her heart was pounding a hard, unsteady tempo.

“I don’t want the last time to be when you were—” She swallowed. “—when we were being forced.”

“No,” was all he said.

Her fingers spasmed, but she nodded, and sat, staring at the deepening shadows across the room.

“Why?” he finally asked.

“I just told you.”

“There’s never only one reason with you,” he said.

She didn’t answer for a long time. “I can’t remember what it was like. Before. I know it happened, but when—when I try to remember any details, I’m always here. If it never comes back—that’ll be all I’ll remember.”

She paused then, thinking of all the ways it could go wrong. There was no going back. What they’d had was gone. It wasn’t something they could just re-create. Attempting it might destroy the fragile safe haven they still had in each other.

“Never mind.” She shook her head. “You’re right, it’s a bad idea.”

He said nothing, but the next day, when he kissed her, it was different.

Hungrier.

After he was gone for several days, he came back and his touch was like fire, his teeth grazing her neck, his face buried against her skin, breathing her in. Heat rushed through her, and she gave a shivering moan, body turning liquid against him.

“Tell me to stop,” he said, his mouth over her throat. “Tell me to stop.”

She pulled him closer. “Don’t stop. I don’t want you to stop.”

His teeth dragged across her skin, and she drew his hands to the buttons on her dress, helping to unfasten them. His fingers slid over her bare skin as she shuddered into his touch, aching for him.

It used to be like this. Feeling it again, she could remember it, the way he used to touch her, hold her, consume her.

He kissed her neck until her head dropped back and she was gasping. Her hands trailed along the curve of his jaw, down over his shoulders, as the physical memory of him awakened beneath her skin.

She brought his face back to hers. “I love you,” she said, kissing him. “I wish I’d told you a thousand times.”

She found the buttons on his shirt and began unfastening, pushing his clothes away, running her hands across his skin, fingers craving the warmth of his body.

“Tell me to stop, and I’ll stop,” he said, his voice ragged.

“Don’t stop,” she said, fingers trembling as they grazed the familiar patterns carved into his back. Her clothes were slipping off, and want pulled at her from within.

She was pushed back on the bed, her body under his as he kissed across her breasts, but then everything inverted; she was lying there, trying to hold still and stay quiet, frozen with fear of what might happen if she didn’t, the bed canopy above her, and the body over her, every sensation a wretched betrayal.

Her hands froze and her eyes went wide as her ribs clamped down around her lungs, suffocating her.

“Stop.” The word was ripped out of her, so painful that it took her lungs with it.

Kaine froze, jerking back, but she caught him, pulling him to her, not letting him go, burying her face against his shoulders, and breathing in and remembering that it was him. And he was hers, she could not let him go.

Her body shook, as she choked back a sob.

Kaine was not even breathing.

“It was just for a moment,” she said, her chest hitching. “It was just too much for a moment. It’ll be better now that I know I can say stop. It was good.” She wouldn’t let go. “It was good. It was just for a moment that I—It was good.”

But he pulled away until she finally let go. He sat up slowly, his face drawn, pupils contracted so that his eyes resembled cracked ice. He looked so fragile.

He was covered in scars. Her hand shook as she reached out and touched one that ran nearly the length of his torso. “What has he done to you?”

He looked away. “Anything he wants.”

She rested her head on his shoulder, entwining her arm with his as they sat there in the lengthening dark, amid the ruins of all they’d once been. They just needed more time.

H ELENA HAD READ THROUGH ALL the works ever attributed to Cetus, organising them in order of likely legitimacy. She felt that she was beginning to grasp what Cetus’s fundamental ideas were regarding alchemy, but she was in desperate need of a more recent glimpse at his methods, and she knew exactly where she might find one.

When Kaine was gone, she left her room, moving slowly, avoiding the shadows, using the walls as a touchstone.

She knew which rooms Morrough might be watching from, and she was careful to avoid as many as possible.

Davies materialised as Helena reached the foyer, but Helena passed through the main wing, moving onwards.

She finally stopped, looking over. “Can Morrough see me here?”

Davies shook her head slowly.

Helena went over to the far door. The frame was warped to lock it in place. Without iron resonance, a person would never get through. Helena’s resonance hummed in her fingers as she placed her hands on the frame and pushed the iron back as if it were a curtain. She gripped the knob; it was a simple lock mechanism.

She glanced back at Davies, who had a look of terror on her face, the only emotion she seemed to still express.

“I’m sorry,” Helena said. “I need to see it.”

“No …” Davies said; her voice came out warped, hollow and gasping. She didn’t know if it was Kaine or the remaining shadow of the woman protesting.

Helena shook her head. “I have to know how it was done.”

Davies did not follow but hovered near the door, stricken, uttering her ghastly pleading No s as Helena turned on the light and went towards the array.

The lights flickered unsteadily overhead. Looking at that too-small cage, knowing who had lived inside it for months, Helena felt sick. Her heart was beginning to pound. She forced her eyes past, focusing.

She stood at the edge of the array, surveying all the careful work to obscure what had been there, trying to superimpose the sketch that Wagner had provided and the drafts in Bennet’s folio. Somewhere amid those three was the complete array.

Her fingers moved slowly, trying to feel out potential patterns, but it had been so long since she’d done more than simple vivimancy.

She got on her knees and began to trace her fingers across every shape and pattern. It was incomprehensible the first several times she crawled across the floor following the lines, trying to visualise the patterns of the energy. It was the third time that it finally began to make sense.

It was an animancy array. She recognised the feeling of the energy, the patterns it would follow.

Her resonance trailed through her fingers as she swept them along one line of the array. Yes, she knew that feeling. Another line. False. The energy would never twist that way.

She crawled across the floor again, more slowly, tracing every line again and again, ignoring the splinters catching in her fingertips.

Her heart began to pound with relief. She could solve this. She could figure it out. An ache spread through her chest at the unsteady tempo of her heartbeat, but she ignored it, trying to finish. It began to race faster and faster, until her lungs began to hurt. Just a little more. She needed to have the whole array complete in her mind so she could etch it.

The floor blurred. She blinked hard, trying to focus.

Her fingers were bleeding as she reached up to press them against her heart, her body going cold. Her heart was racing uncontrollably. She tried to slow it, but it was like trying to catch a running horse.

The room swayed. The iron cage and the door gracefully swung to the side, upended as her shoulder hit the ground.

The room dimmed, the lights’ flickering click fading away.

S HE WOKE, DAZED, LYING IN bed in her room, her chest aching as if there were a lead weight crushing it. Kaine was sitting beside her, her hand in his.

She couldn’t remember how she’d gotten there. Her wrists throbbed, and she could feel the dead sensation of nullium inside them.

“The doctor just left,” he said without looking at her. “It seems you developed an irregular heartbeat from the strain and distress of your imprisonment and pregnancy. They detected it during your coma, but I was told that if I could keep you calm, it might resolve itself. Seems unlikely now, though.”

Helena didn’t know what to say.

His jaw worked several times. “Do you have any idea what it was like, finding you collapsed in the middle of that damned array inside that torture chamber?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want to make you go back in.”

He exhaled, his head dropping. He’d seemed furious except he was clutching her hand in his.

“It wasn’t a panic attack,” she said. “I think I know how Morrough used the array—how the design works. I’ve figured out how he did it. I was just relieved. My heart lost control.”

He looked at her, his eyes burning. “Do you think that makes it bet ter? Your heart could fail, and if I’m not here, you’ll be gone. Just like—” He went silent. “Don’t do this to me.”

Her mouth went dry. “But I have to save you.”

“No.” The word was sharp. “You don’t. And you can’t. You are the only person who has never understood that.”

She opened her mouth, but he cut her off.

“We made a deal to tell the truth to each other, and that is the truth. You cannot save me. I cannot be saved.”

She struggled to sit up, her chest aching as if her sternum had split again. “You don’t know that. Let me try.”

He wrenched away from her and stood. She thought he’d storm out. She slipped from the bed, reaching after him.

“Kaine.”

He stilled at the foot of the bed. “You don’t get to have everything, Helena,” he said at last. “There’s a point when you have to realise that you aren’t going to get everything you want. You have to choose and let it be enough for you. You have other people. You promised Holdfast you’d take care of Lila and her son. You have a baby who needs you, and you know that.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to choose. I always have to choose, and I never get to choose you. I’m so tired of not getting to choose you.”

He looked back at her. “You’re not choosing. You promised me anything I wanted. I want you to stop breaking yourself trying to save me. Go. Live. Tell our daughter I saved you both. That—is what I want.”

“But I’m so close. I can figure this out.”

He came back towards her then. “You promised me that if the research was having an impact on your health, you’d stop.”

“I know, but—”

He gave a gasping laugh, almost more of a sob. “Did you know, you are the worst promise keeper I have ever met?”

Her throat tightened. “I keep the ones that matter.”

“No.” He shook his head. “What you do is make so many conflicting promises that you can pick and choose depending on what you want. I’ve devoted some thought to your methodology.” He looked down. “That’s why you never seem to keep any of the promises that I care about.”

He reached towards her, his fingers brushing her hip. “You care about this baby. You worried about her so constantly, you wrecked your heart with fear over what would happen to her. Now you’re so preoccupied trying to save me that you’re letting yourself forget that she is dependent on you. I can’t protect her from you. Endangering yourself trying to save me risks her.”

Helena’s throat closed. She tried to back away, but he caught hold of her, gripping her by the shoulders, forcing her to look at him. “You have to let me go now.”

“I can’t.” She shook her head. “You think I’ll be calm if I stop? If I have nothing to do but to sit in this room and wait to lose you? You wouldn’t. You never would.”

They compromised in the end.

Kaine took her back to the room and let her spend hours crawling around the floor, copying down every detail of the array onto etching plates. When he had time, he went with her to the library, and let her use her animancy on him, studying the talisman inside his chest, but she did not set foot outside her room without him anymore.

One evening he came back after more than a day’s absence, his expression stony. “You’ll have to stay in tomorrow. There’s to be a dinner party. Aurelia is returning for it, and the remaining Undying.”

“What’s it for?”

He gave a thin smile. “I’m supposed to convince them that there’s nothing wrong.”