Alchemised - 71

Julius 1789

H ELENA WAS CORRODING LIKE METAL; DISSOLVING, DECAYING, flecking away into pieces. There was a constant pain in her chest as she felt herself come apart.

There were so many things she wanted to say to Kaine, but she could scarcely think them without her throat beginning to ache and her heart pounding and she would start crying. She’d never been particularly prone to crying before, but the pregnancy seemed to rip it out of her. The countdown to her departure was slowly tearing her apart.

One day, instead of crying, she snapped and raged at him.

His plans were stupid and selfish. It wasn’t fair that he got to die and she was left to live with everything. If he’d let her help rescue Lila, none of this might have happened. If he’d just trusted her and not been so controlling, if he’d let them work together—everything might have been different. It was all his fault.

He let her say it all, until she was gasping for breath, hand clawing at her chest, trying to force her heart to beat evenly, and when he had to do it for her, she tried to tear his hands off.

When his father called him away, she was left to seethe and realised he was doing this intentionally.

He knew the destructive ways her mind tilted. Since the moment she’d arrived at Spirefell, he’d gone out of his way to needle and antagonise, trying to provoke her. He’d given her a target. When she’d hated him, she’d been less self-destructive.

If she was angry now, it would make leaving easier.

He was managing her. She swallowed her anger, but all her emotions sat like poison inside her.

A LORRY BROUGHT A FRESH batch of prisoners to Spirefell, and Kaine was gone again.

Helena couldn’t help but wonder at the relationship between Kaine and his father. They were both unveiled in their contempt for each other. Atreus seemed to find so much in his son to despise, and yet seemed to constantly find reasons to need him. Kaine blamed his father for the tragedy of his mother, and yet Atreus was among the Undying he’d spared, despite seeming an easy target.

Helena was sitting numb with despair when the door opened.

She looked up, blood running cold as one of the uniformed lorry guards stepped into the room.

He tilted back the cap on his head, and it was Ivy.

Helena stared with deadened surprise as Ivy gave a tentative smile.

“You were hard to get to.”

Helena didn’t move. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to rescue you.”

Ivy had no sooner spoken than there was a scream of metal as the iron around the door warped inwards, barring the door. Ivy whirled and tried the door, finding it completely immobile. She turned and started to move towards Helena.

“Don’t,” Helena said sharply, standing up. “The last time someone came and got too close, he broke almost every bone in their body before he arrived.”

Ivy froze, the look of a caged animal filling her eyes. However difficult Helena had been to reach, this was clearly not a well-plotted rescue.

“Why are you here?” Helena said, staring at the girl. She was a girl. She was so young. “You’ve known I was a prisoner here since last year. Why are you here now?”

Ivy drew back and then moved around Helena in a wide arc, making for the window, rattling it forcefully, and trying to break the panes of glass. The girl had lost her touch, or perhaps been too impulsive, too misguided in what she thought the difficulty of the infiltration would be.

“I thought you were here for interrogation,” Ivy said. “I didn’t know the High Reeve would do—” Her eyes flicked to Helena’s stomach. “—that to you.”

Helena scoffed. “They’re doing the same to plenty of girls in Central. Why do you care about me?”

Ivy stilled. “Sofia liked you. Wanted me to be your friend. She was always telling me that I should be more like you. That I should help people. I never listened.”

“I don’t want to be your friend,” Helena said coldly. “Your sister is dead. You betrayed us all for a corpse.”

“I know!” Ivy’s voice rang with grief as she whirled to face Helena, face pale, eyes bright. “I know, but I couldn’t—I couldn’t let her be dead. I thought—” Her face crumpled. “—I told myself she was just hurt, but she would come back. But she doesn’t. She—can’t. Even if she did, she would never forgive me for all this. Would she?”

Helena felt no sympathy. “You cost us everything. Even if we were always going to lose, there were people who could have run, they could have fled if they’d had time. But you made sure they didn’t.”

As she spoke, the doors warped, metal screaming, and Kaine walked in. The wrought iron peeled itself from the floor, elongating into countless points, all aimed at Ivy. A flick of his hand and Ivy would be run through from every side.

She could try to flee, but she would not make it two steps.

Ivy turned to face him, her face strangely resigned.

“What an unexpected traitor,” Kaine said with complete insincerity. “I have to admit I thought you were too smart to fall into a trap this obvious.”

Ivy gave a bitter smile and shook her head almost sadly. “You don’t remember me, do you? I thought eventually you might.”

Kaine studied her. “I can’t say I do.”

“I was different when we first met. Smaller. Screaming.”

Kaine shook his head, as if that could have been countless people.

“I used to wear two braids. With bows.” Ivy gestured along her shoulders with both hands. “After the Undying killed my parents, they used them to drag me across the floor and put them in your hands. You were younger then, too.”

Recognition slowly dawned in Kaine’s eyes.

Ivy pressed her lips together, inhaling. “When you ran away, the other Undying went after you. Forgot all about my sister and me. I tried to cut my mother’s head off with the cake knife to make her stop what she was doing to Sofia. That was when I realised what I could do with my hands.” She looked down at her fingers. “After we got away, Sofia was still alive but she—it was like she was in a dream. She didn’t move unless I moved her or eat unless I fed her. We hid in the slums. When she finally woke up, the last thing she remembered was that it had been my birthday. She didn’t remember any of it. We would have died, if not for you.”

Kaine’s expression grew contemptuous. “Another reason to regret my actions that day.”

Ivy turned confused until Kaine reached into his coat and drew an obsidian dagger. Then her sharp eyes widened, not with fear but surprise, almost joy. “You’re the killer.”

He smiled. “Yes, and you, in particular, I’ve been looking forward to.”

Ivy turned towards Helena. “And you knew?” She looked between them. “Is this all pretend?”

“In a way,” Helena said. She hadn’t thought she’d mind seeing Ivy killed, but it seemed she was doomed to feel some pity for anyone she understood. Crowther had mentioned that Ivy had come from the slums and worked for him in exchange for her sister’s protection. If Sofia had been in a fugue state, it was no wonder Ivy had been able to cling to the fantasy that Sofia was still alive.

“Don’t kill her,” Helena said.

Kaine glanced at her. “You can’t expect me to spare her.”

Helena shook her head. “I don’t think she expects to be spared,” she said, suspecting she was about to make a terrible mistake, but there was so little reason left not to risk everything. She looked towards Ivy. “The Undying are all doomed. You know that, don’t you?”

Ivy nodded. Helena doubted that she had become Undying out of any interest in immortality; more likely it had been a condition of Morrough’s, like Kaine, a leash around a lethal vivimancer’s throat.

“Will you help us?” Helena asked.

Ivy’s sharp eyes jumped between Helena and Kaine, her expression wary and calculating, but she inclined her head.

“No,” Kaine said sharply. “She can’t be trusted.” He turned on Helena, and his resonance hummed ominously, the iron in the room giving a bone-shuddering groan. “She’ll say anything to get out of this room alive, and then she’ll betray you, just like she betrayed everyone else.”

Helena looked at Ivy and back to Kaine. “I think we can. She owes you. She owes you years of her sister’s life. She’ll do this for Sofia.”

“What do you need?” Ivy asked. Her eyes were sharp and curious, that bright look that Helena remembered well.

Helena looked at her. “Kaine’s phylactery. It’s part of the outer bone of Morrough’s right arm.”

Ivy trembled almost imperceptibly. It was clearly more than she’d bargained for. “Why?”

Helena looked at her and then at Kaine. “I need it to save him.”

Ivy nodded slowly. “I’ll try. If there’s a way, I’ll find it.”

“You won’t survive, if you do this,” Helena said, watching Ivy, beginning to doubt herself but unable to stop. Any chance was better than none.

Ivy lifted her chin. “I’m doing this for Sofia. She can’t be hurt anymore. It doesn’t matter what happens to me.” She looked at Kaine. “You were the reason I could save her once. So this will be my thanks for that.”

“I don’t want your thanks,” Kaine said, his lip curling, but Helena clasped his wrist, urging him to lower his arm. He glared at her. “This is not worth it. She’s not even competent.”

Helena rose up and spoke softly so her voice wouldn’t carry. “Tell me, truthfully, would you have been any different if you thought it could save your mother? Say no, and I’ll let you kill her.”

His jaw clenched, and he lowered the knife.

“Get out before I change my mind,” he said.

Ivy hesitated a moment, and Helena nodded, urging her to go. Quick as a flash, she darted across the room, weaving around the iron and out the door. The room slowly reassembled itself, and Kaine stared at Helena, accusation in his eyes.

“After everything, you’ll risk it all on this?” he asked.

“If it saves you, it’s worth it.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

She looked around. She didn’t even feel any sense of hope or trust that this could work; she simply couldn’t sit in idle despair any longer. “Then I’ll die knowing I tried everything, which is more happily than I’ll live if I leave you here. She has nothing to gain from betraying us. She’s already lost everything.”

He shoved the obsidian knife back into its sheath. “Well, I imagine we’ll find out in short order.”

He left and returned with two knives, one the obsidian and the other a part of her old set he’d recovered from the bombing, and a suicide pill. If Ivy betrayed them, and he couldn’t reach her in time, she’d have a chance of a quick escape for herself and the baby.

The day passed with a relentless intensity. Night came, and nothing happened except word that Shiseo’s envoy was crossing into Novis. A few days were all that was left, and time would run out, regardless of what Ivy did.

When the house was dark and silent, Kaine came to her. They took every moment together slowly. There was no time left; they couldn’t waste it by rushing.

She lay in his arms, listening to his heart. When she tried to picture home, this feeling was all she could imagine. She rolled onto her back and found his hand, pressing it against the swell between her hips.

“That’s her,” she said. “I’ll—” Her throat grew tight. “I’ll probably be able to feel her move within the next month. The book says it feels like fluttering at first.”

She had to swallow hard to keep speaking.

“It’s called quickening—when you first feel a baby move.” She drew a deep breath. “If you use your resonance, you’ll be able to feel her now. If you want.”

His hand twitched and he hesitated.

“We can do it together,” she said. “You should meet her.”

T HE NEXT DAY, RATHER THAN walk the hedge maze, Kaine took her back to the courtyard.

She froze, heart in her throat at the smell of old blood and decomposition trapped there in the still summer air. Her stomach threatening to upend.

At least thirty prisoners had been brought to Spirefell since Atreus had returned. Helena didn’t know if it was better or worse if any of them were still alive.

“Do we have to walk here?” she asked.

Kaine looked at her. There was a risk they were being watched, and so his expression was chilly and indifferent, but his voice was soft. “Just this once. It won’t take long.”

She forced a nod.

The courtyard was much more beautiful in summer. The vines that had covered the house like blackened veins in winter had bloomed into climbing roses.

There were still two necrothralls stationed at the front of the house, barely more than bones now, and Helena eyed them warily as Kaine led the way across the courtyard garden.

“You don’t need to worry about them,” he said under his breath. “Morrough is too preoccupied with himself to waste effort on his necrothralls. Their senses are nearly gone, and he hasn’t noticed. Come. There’s a reunion that’s rather overdue.”

It dawned on her then where they were going.

“Amaris …”

Kaine unlocked the stable door. “She had a hard time when you first arrived.”

The door swung open, and in the dim light of the stable, an enormous black shadow unfurled itself from the corner and stood, wings arching and stretching. The chimaera came forward, the heavy chain dragging behind her.

“I was afraid she’d give us away if I let her near you. She has quite the reputation nowadays,” he said. “You were the only other person she’s ever taken to.”

Helena considered that a rather generous description of her relationship with Amaris.

Her mouth went dry. Amaris had grown. She was several hands taller, and her immense yellow eyes glowed in the low light. Helena remembered the chimaera being so careful and gentle around Kaine when he was injured, the way she used to curl against Helena’s back, blocking out the cold, but she had a far starker memory of entering the stable and being nearly bitten in half.

She took a nervous step back. “I’m not sure that she remembers me.”

Kaine held up a hand, and Amaris stopped. “Oh, that. That wasn’t you. That was the necrothralls. She can’t stand them.” Amaris was bobbing her head impatiently. He stepped closer and rumpled her fur. “She tolerates the staff, but any of Morrough’s reanimations that get close—well.”

He glanced at Helena. “She very much remembers you. Howled for half the day when you arrived.”

Helena stepped hesitantly closer and let Amaris sniff and nuzzle at her fingers. When she didn’t lose her hand, she took a step closer.

“You and Shiseo will take her with you when you go,” Kaine said when she hazarded to rest a hand on Amaris’s head. “Fly at night. It’ll take a few days to reach Lila, but you’ll be hard to track down that way.” He rubbed Amaris’s shoulder just beneath an immense wing. “You’ll leave her, when you take the ship.”

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.”