Brimstone By Callie Hart - 23

THERE THEY WERE.

Two puncture wounds on the inside of my left thigh.

The cottage had been real.

I didn’t remember leaving the dream. I recalled eating the stew, talking some more with Fisher, and curling up in the blankets by the fire with Onyx. Things grew hazy after that. Fisher had said he was going to step outside to get some more wood for the fire. He had opened the cottage door, and stepped out into the night, and . . .

Ahh.

That’s when it had happened. He’d walked through the cottage door, and everything had gone black. I had woken up on the floor, lying on a stack of pillows with a blanket draped over me that hadn’t been there when I’d set my mind to go to sleep. My body had ached deliciously from the night’s adventures, and I had found the two small marks on the inside of my thigh, already half-healed but definitely still there .

It was still early, or late in the day, depending on how you looked at it. The shutters were drawn to keep out the fading afternoon light as I hurried through the halls of Ammontraíeth, still wrestling on my clothes.

I was approaching the foot of the stairs that led up to the library when my name echoed down the hallway after me. “Saeris Fane! Where in all five hells do you think you’re going?”

Lorreth’s shirt was damp with sweat across his chest, his dark hair fully bound back for once as he jogged after me. “I think you’re forgetting something,” he said, when he reached my side.

“I’m sorry, but I think training might have to be postponed today, don’t you? My wildly dangerous magic might just need to take priority. Unless you don’t think anyone will mind if I blow up Ammontraíeth.”

I personally wouldn’t mind.” Lorreth slapped his hands down on top of my shoulders and bodily turned me around. He gave me a shove, pushing me back in the direction I had just come from, away from the library. “The rest of this court is still sleeping, Saeris. No one else is awake, and that includes Foley. He won’t be able to help you for at least a couple of hours, which means—” He sniffed, and immediately took a step back.

I’d been waiting for him to notice. I had my explanation ready. “Something strange happened last night. I went to sleep like Foley told me to, and Fisher was there.”

“Okay.” He looked dubious. “We’ve all had those kinds of dreams before, Saeris. But—” He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone waking up covered in their partner’s scent from a dream .”

“It wasn’t a dream. Well, it was a dream. But it was more than that.”

“How can you tell? Besides the way you, uh . . .” He waved a hand around me, gesturing in my vague direction. “Smell.”

“There’s other . . . physical evidence,” I said, staring straight ahead. Gods, this was fucking awkward.

“Okay, okay. I’m gonna take your word for it. I think I have enough information.” He cocked his head to one side. “Are you sure it was him?”

“What do you mean, am I sure it was him? Yes, it was him. I think I know what my mate looks like, Lorreth.”

A sneaky little smile hovered over his lips. “Wanna hit me yet?” he asked.

“Yes. I do, actually. You know what? Fine. Let’s go train.”

The training room was cold. All of Ammontraíeth was cold, for that matter. When the people of a court were immune to temperature and an open fire might have them going up in flames, it was no great shock most rooms didn’t have fireplaces. It had been enough of a problem in my own personal chambers that I’d had a fireplace constructed—I was the queen, after all—but the vast, windowless obsidian box where Lorreth brought me to train was freezing. There was nothing on the walls. Nothing on the floor. A soft white light glowed from a recessed gap that ran around the perimeter of the ceiling, but other than that, there were no torches of evenlight flickering in the sconces. The room was featureless, the air oddly still, as if it had stagnated here for many years.

Lorreth tossed me a staff, and the sound of the wood hitting my palm made a dead, unnaturally flat sound that quieted as soon as I curled my fingers around the weapon. I considered the length of wood briefly. “No swords today?”

Lorreth shook his head. “A staff has its uses. You may find yourself without your sword one day. In a bar, for instance,” he said, waggling his eyebrows. “Your asshole friend might be having a bad day, and he might start a fight with two knucklehead leeches for no good reason. A tavern will always have a broom, Saeris. A mop. Something with a long handle. It’s smart to know how to utilize the items you have around you, lest you need to come to a grumpy friend’s rescue.”

The context of his comments was loud and clear: He was feeling a mite foolish over what he had done at the Fool’s Paradise, and this was his roundabout way of letting me know he wasn’t feeling so great about it. Who was I to judge, though? I’d caused plenty of scenes at Kala’s whenever I’d had a shitty day, which was most days in the Third.

I spun the staff, rolling it over the back of my hand, giving Lorreth a sideways grin. “There was never enough metal to forge weapons out of back home. In the desert, wood is a scarce commodity, too . . . but it’s easy enough to lay your hands on some if you know who to ask.”

I moved fast, light on my feet, taking the warrior by surprise. He still had hundreds of years’ worth of experience on me, though. I wasn’t too shocked when he swung his staff around his head and brought it around his shoulder, blocking my blow before it could land.

“Faster this morning,” he noted, his dark eyes gleaming. “Great. If this is what a good night’s sleep can do for you, then I’d say you’re going to be in good shape with a staff.”

“Oh, I won’t be in good shape with a staff. I’m going to be in excellent shape.”

The next hour whipped by in a blur. My reactions were stunningly fast. I knew where Lorreth was going to be three seconds before he got there. Not only did my blows land, but they landed hard. I felt stronger than I ever had. The training space filled with the hollow slap of our feet against the obsidian and our muted grunts of exertion, and by the time Lorreth held up a hand and announced that we were done for the day, I wasn’t the only one who was sweating and sore from the blows I had taken. Lorreth was, too.

He pointed the end of his staff at me, eyebrows raised as we headed for the exit. “If you can do what you just did wielding Solace, then your enemies don’t know what’s in store for them. Tomorrow, we’ll go back to the swords.”

“About the sword,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow. “How attached is Fisher to Solace?”

Lorreth pulled up short. “Well, pretty attached, I’d say. It was his father’s weapon. But . . .” He shrugged. “Solace is yours now, Saeris. You can do whatever you want with it. Fisher isn’t going to mind.”

I believed that. I had just wanted confirmation. I’d struggled with the blade and knew how to wield it well enough to take off a feeder’s head, but it was just so big . It had been forged for a full-blooded Fae warrior, and even though I wasn’t human anymore, I hadn’t gotten any taller. My arms were still the same length they’d always been, and carrying a sword around that was two-thirds of my body long was tricky sometimes.

“In that case, I’m going to consider my options. I have relics to make today. After we’re done with Foley, I’ll head to the forge. While I’m there, I might just have a little chat with my sword.”

A flurry of paper stargazers greeted me when I entered the library. Their wings rustled as they flitted around my head, darting this way and that, inspecting the newcomer who had entered their sanctuary. One of them hovered in front of my face, its tiny paper head tilting left and right as it took me in, waiting to see if I posed a threat.

“Good evening,” I told the paper bird. “Are you friendly?” I held out my hand, extending a finger to see if it would land for moment, but an emotionless voice spoke from above, startling the little thing away.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” Foley stood at the top of a small set of stairs over by the window—a window that had not been there yesterday. It was circular, around the same diameter as the hole I’d blasted in the wall, as coincidence would have it. Whoever had come to fix the damage I’d caused had been quick about it and had done an excellent job of the repair.

“The stargazers might seem harmless, but interacting with them can be quite hazardous.” Foley descended the stairs slowly, his pale hand resting lightly on the banister rail. I hadn’t paid too much attention to his attire yesterday. Today, he wore a plain, tailored black shirt and plain black pants, with black boots that laced high over his ankles. He carried no weapons that I could see, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a thin blade secreted away on his person somewhere.

“They like to steal strands of people’s hair for their nests,” he explained, as he reached the bottom step. “But a piece of hair can be used for many nefarious purposes. In the wrong hands, a single strand of hair can be a male’s—or a female’s—undoing.”

“Bargains?” I asked.

Foley shook his head. “Witchcraft. A fell witch would do terrible things to lay their hands on a strand of your hair. There’s no saying what they would be able to accomplish with it. These birds,” Foley said, gesturing to the swarm of stargazers overhead. “They’re pure. Trusting. They have no concept of right or wrong. If a wayward witch were to compel one of them to bring her a strand of your hair, they wouldn’t know to refuse.”

The paper birds wheeled high above, zipping from one end of the library to the other. They were graceful. Beautiful. Silent, apart from the quiet rustle of their wings.

Still staring up at them, I said, “Lorreth is on his way. He just went to get changed.”

“He’s coming here again? Why?”

“Because Lorreth’s supposed be your friend ,” I answered tartly. “He wants to make sure we don’t get into another fight and I don’t kill you. Plus I want him here to make sure you’re not lying about whatever you’ve found in these books.”

There were a lot of books. A lot . The sight of them was cheering. If Foley hadn’t found anything to help me with my conundrum, then surely he wouldn’t have bothered to gather so many of them. I tossed a net over my emotions, caught them on a line, trapping them tight. The vampire had been a member of the Lupo Proelia once. He’d also been Fisher’s friend. There was no denying either of those facts, but I had no reason to trust him.

Plenty had changed during the years Foley had been sequestered away in his high tower. He was a shunned member of the Blood Court, yet he had remained here, reading books for hundreds of years, with no one for company but a Lord of Midnight he resented, a Lord of Midnight who ignored him, and a salty cat made of shadows. Who knew what kind of person he was now, after so much time and torment?

“The chances of you killing me are nil, Your Majesty . And Lorreth won’t be able to tell if I’m lying. He isn’t my maker. Even Tal can’t read me like that anymore.” I had used that same sour tone whenever I’d kowtowed to a guardian back home in Zilvaren. My disdain had been a blunt instrument that had lacked finesse, but Foley’s was a subtle knife. It cut. “He denounced me and rescinded his claim on me. I’m sure he’s proposed the same to you as well by now.”

I ran my fingers lightly over the spines of the first stack of books. “He has,” I confirmed.

“Hm.” Foley processed this. “So Tal doesn’t want you, either. He must see you as the rest of us do. Weak. Vulnerable. Naive . . .”

“Are you trying to hurt my feelings, Foley?” I ran my tongue over my top row of teeth, slowing down my heart; letting it thunder accomplished nothing. “I wouldn’t waste your time if I were you.”

“Oh, but you aren’t me,” he snapped out of nowhere, his control slipping for a second—just one tiny split second—showing me the truth of what lay beneath.

He was afraid.

“You think you’ve known hardship, stealing water and fending off bullies for a quarter of a century? Try eight hundred years , fighting for your right to exist. This place is worse than hell, because no matter how bad things get, there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel. A hope that you might escape—”

“Then why haven’t you?”

Foley’s jaw snapped closed.

“If you hate it here, then why haven’t you left? Why didn’t you just go back to your friends, where you belonged? You’ve been up here throwing yourself a fucking pity party for the better part of a millennium, complaining about how terrible it all is, when you could have left at any time.”

“How?” he whispered. “How could I have gone back to them, when I had become one of the monsters they swore to kill? They would never have accepted me.”

“Lorreth said they wrote to you! They wanted you to leave Sanasroth. Fisher commanded you to come home!” I didn’t need to shout at him, but gods, he was exhausting to be around. Tal might have felt bad about giving Foley this new life. He had let him skulk around up here, feeling sorry for himself, but I had no tolerance for this kind of defeatism. Zilvaren wrung that out of a person pretty quickly. Either that, or it killed you.

Foley turned to look at the pale green evenlight fluttering in the huge hearth by the stairs. I watched the muscles feather in his jaw, his nostrils flaring. “You’re misinformed. There were no letters. They left me to my fate here, and I can’t condemn them for it.”

“Fool. Are you seriously that stupid?”

I was getting better at sensing Lorreth. Over time, my awareness was sharpening, blossoming in the back of my mind. I hadn’t felt him sneaking up on me earlier at dusk, but I had registered him climbing the stairs up to the library this time. Foley had felt his approach, too. Would he look at Lorreth, though? Like hell he would. “There’s no need to pretend, bard. I know how it is,” he said.

Lorreth strode across the room and set Avisiéth down on the reading table with a loud clunk. The vampire flinched, his lips peeling back to reveal those plated golden teeth. He had his fear well under wraps again now, but his discomfort was harder to conceal. Avisiéth had plenty of silver folded into its blade. But it wasn’t just that; Avisiéth was a god sword. The magic of the gods ran through it—magic made to undo the likes of Foley and the other members of the Blood Court.

It seemed unkind of Lorreth to have tossed the blade down so carelessly, considering the effect he knew it would have on his old friend, but then I saw the hard light in his eyes and knew there was more to the action.

“I’m not pretending, and you know I can’t lie. Look at me, Foley,” he said.

Reluctantly, the vampire looked at him.

“We wrote to you. Many times. I did. Ren did. I know for a fact that Fisher sent you many missives during those first five years after that night at Ajun. After that he cut down to one letter a year. Even Danya wrote to you. Her letters were mostly curse words, calling you every name under the sun for ignoring the rest of us for so long, but I know she asked you to come home. All of us have asked. And all of us have told you the same thing: It might be tricky, sure, but we would find a way to make it work. For you to have a place in Cahlish, with your family.”

Foley had set his jaw defiantly as Lorreth had been speaking. “So many letters,” he mused. “And yet none of them reached me.”

“For the love of the gods,” I snapped. “Look, neither of you can lie. So you’re both telling the truth. There are plenty of ways that can be true. The letters could have been intercepted and stolen, for one. In fact, that seems like a reasonable assumption, given that the vampires of this court are nosy as all hell and spiteful to boot. Now, can we please put this—”

“Saeris?”

“—aside and move on, because—”

“Saeris,” Lorreth said more firmly, speaking over me for a second time. “Your hands .”

They were glowing again.

Fuck.

I’d worn a new pair of leather gloves today. I still didn’t want my runes becoming a major talking point in the halls of Ammontraíeth—it was bad enough that I kept catching my friends staring at my hands—and besides, the gloves made me feel powerful. Capable. They were a part of the costume I had donned when I’d walked down those stairs into the Coronation Hall and declared myself queen of this court. And right now, they were smoldering.

“Gods fucking damn it.” I bit out the words, my canines lengthening with frustration. I ripped off the gloves. The pain wasn’t so bad right now, but it was getting worse. The backs of my hands blackened as the runes throbbed with power, embers of fire flaring just below the surface of my skin.

“Does it hurt?” Foley asked curiously.

I gave him a look. “What do you think?”

He snorted, peering over to study the smoke curling away from my burning skin. The tendons in my hand looked like they were lit up from the inside. “Yes, that does look painful,” he conceded. He picked up a quill from an ink pot in the middle of the reading table, using its sleek black feather to point out the lines of one of the runic shapes in particular. “This one seems especially inflamed,” he observed. “This—” He cast a wary glance at Avisiéth; he’d had to come closer to Lorreth’s sword to reach me. “You see this rune here? The one that looks like an arrow bisecting a circle? This is one of the most important Alchemical symbols.”

I saw the rune he was talking about, all right. The shape had already burned through my skin and was weeping plasma; the clear liquid ran over my hand and dripped from my wrist. “What does it mean?” I asked.

Foley’s eyes snapped to mine. “I think you can probably guess that one,” he said. “That rune is so predominant because you’ve already been utilizing its magic for some time.”

“It’s the rune for quicksilver?”

Foley nodded. “The quicksilver’s sentient. It pulls power to it. It makes sense that this rune is hurting you the most. In the records I’ve found, the quicksilver rune has always been the hungriest. The first to awaken.”

Oh, I knew how greedy the quicksilver was. Always wanting something. Always making demands. I had plenty of firsthand experience with that .

The vampire’s curiosity rose as he angled his head, inspecting the back of my right hand. “Remarkable. Truly. I’ve never seen an Alchimeran shield this intricate before.”

“Alchimeran shield?”

“Yes. This,” he said impatiently, tapping the back of my hand. “ This is your shield. All Alchemists had them.”

“You don’t need to talk to me like I’m stupid. Magic hasn’t existed in Zilvaren for a very, very long time. How am I supposed to know any of this?”

From his expression, Foley wasn’t about to accept my upbringing or my background as an excuse for my ignorance. “You cannot eradicate magic from a city. Once it takes root within a community, it never leaves. It will find a way to thrive, one way or another. You just didn’t care to look for it. Like within yourself, for example.”

“I kind of had some other things going on at the time. Y’know, trying to make sure my brother and I didn’t die of dysentery.”

Foley disregarded the comment, refusing to give it weight. “Your power didn’t just show up overnight. It’s been with you since birth. You must have been using it haphazardly for many years without any attempt to control it. You’ve been utilizing your affinity with quicksilver even more of late. That’s how you find yourself in this position.”

“All right, Foley. Leave her be. She had no clue what she was dealing with back in Zilvaren. You judging her for it won’t help us now, will it?”

Foley cracked his knuckles as he skirted around the table toward the tallest stack of books he had compiled. Casually, Lorreth picked up Avisiéth and moved the sword, placing it down close to the vampire again. Foley saw what he did; he shot the warrior a look full of recrimination, then took up a book and flicked through it for a moment, his dark eyes scanning the pages until he found what he was looking for.

He handed the book to me, open toward the front, the aged pages marked with small, hand-drawn symbols. “Can you read this?” he demanded.

My eyes skipped over the page, taking in the spidery black handwriting that filled it from top to bottom.

. . . unorthodox Tria Prima, the basis of which is always the same: Salt. Quicksilver. Brimstone. The uses for all three are varied and wide. Combined, they . . .

I looked up from the page. “I can.”

“Good. Turn the page. Read the exercise at the top of the page there, on the left.”

I did as he bid, reading out loud. “A Faeling may be fearful at first. Opening themselves to the energetic flow of the quicksilver can be an overwhelming sensation. The Faeling should learn to embody the quicksilver’s energy, aligning themselves with it in body and mind, before they try to transmute the substance from a metal to a solid. Every day, the Faeling should be encouraged to alter the quicksilver repeatedly between its natural states until this skill comes easily and they have built a rapport with the quicksilver itself. Once the Faeling has mastered this skill, they will be ready to set their affinity for the quicksilver’s magic and seal their first Alchemical rune.”

I sought out Lorreth, relief building inside me. “You heard that, right? I’m ready to seal the quicksilver’s rune at least.”

Foley jumped in before Lorreth could. “You’re far from ready, Saeris.”

“But I can already transmute the quicksilver from one state to another. According to this, I am ready to seal the rune.”

“Is that so? Is it as simple as turning a handle and stepping through the door? Or do you kick the door down and fall ass over tit through it as a result?”

Slowly but surely, I was beginning to hate this vampire. “I don’t see that it matters how I get the job done, so long as it gets done.”

“If you have to force your magic to obey your will, then you haven’t mastered it. You’ve learned how to violate it. You can either develop a partnership with your magic, with give-and-take and understanding, or you can cow it into submission. Which do you think would prove to be the more beneficial relationship? No, tell me, since you seem to be such an expert on the matter, what happens when something or someone is oppressed for long enough that it finally rises up and says enough? Hm?”

The gods and martyrs damn him all the way to the bottom circle of hell. He had a point. “I want to treat the quicksilver fairly. I want to partner with it in the right way, believe me. I’m just very worried that I don’t have time to master children’s exercises, or . . . or these simple, nonsense pictures!”

“Simple, nonsense . . .?” His expression indicated that my comment had left a foul taste in his mouth. “Show me this simple, nonsense picture you’re referring to.”

I looked down at the book and huffed. “There. How about this one. A circle. How is a circle supposed to be important?”

Foley looked down at the plain black band of ink that formed a circle on the page I held out to him, then gave me a bone-dry look. He spoke slowly as if he were dealing with someone too simple to understand basic constructs. “That is not just a circle. That is the foundation of all powerful sigils and runes. The strongest magic is circular, like a wheel. It is the symbol of forever, the beginning and the end of everything. It carries magic on a loop, amplifying it, giving it strength. That is the most important magical symbol there is .”

Ahh.

Shit.

My cheeks flushed hotly.

“Additionally, those exercises aren’t for children. They’re for Faelings. Faelings are far smarter than human young. But that’s academic. The skills this book teaches are designed for an individual starting out on a journey to become a proficient Alchemist, no matter their age. They form the foundation upon which all other skills and abilities rely. Would you build a house on top of shifting sand, Saeris Fane? Willingly? Knowing that it will come crashing down around your ears?”

If he had used any other analogy, literally any other, I wouldn’t have had any qualms about ignoring him. But he had used that one, and it tore at a buried hurt deep inside me that still woke me, sweating, from my dreams sometimes.

Did he know somehow? About my father? No, he couldn’t have.

I closed the book and pinned it under my arm. “All right. I’ll take it to the forge. I’ll practice for an hour if you think that’ll make a difference—”

“I think practicing for two hours would make an even bigger difference,” Foley said. “That way, you won’t pose such a threat to the whole court, will you?”

I turned away from Foley, fixing a mutinous glare at the male who I’d assumed would have my back. “You’re terrible, you know that?”

Lorreth gave me an apologetic shrug. “Sorry, Saeris. But he’s right.”

Whether Foley was right or wrong had no bearing on the situation. I set my jaw and made for the stairs that led back down into Ammontraíeth, fuming under my breath. I had almost reached the stairs when the bright kiss of pain stung the back of my neck. Hissing, I rubbed the point just below my hairline, which still hurt, and my fingers came away stained red.

Something had bitten me.

No, something had cut me.

The source of the injury became apparent as the sound of rustling paper filled my ears. A stargazer flapped its paper wings a couple of feet away, hovering in place. My first instinct was to check its beak to see if there were any strands of long black hair hanging from its mouth, but there were none. Foley had gotten into my head, the bastard. I hated that I’d let it happen—but the paper bird had attacked me, hadn’t it?

It was small, its body the length of my thumb. Its wings flapped so hard that they were a blur as the tiny thing drifted toward me and stilled again. It had no eyes. No features at all, really. It was a creature made of plain white paper, animated by magic, but I got the feeling it was trying to get my attention. I took another step backward toward the stairs, and the little stargazer followed again, rising so it hovered at eye level.

“What? You want something?” I asked it.

Over on the other side of the library, Lorreth and Foley were locked in a tense conversation. Neither noticed that I was still loitering at the top of the stairs. The bird zipped forward and plucked at the front of my shirt with its tiny beak. It wasn’t very strong. It barely had the strength to lift the fabric.

“You cut me,” I told it. “That wasn’t very polite.”

The bird rose above my head, executing a tight roll in the air before it descended back to eye level. Was that supposed to be an apology? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t have time to hang around and find out, either.

“Next time,” I told it. “I’ll come back and see you tomorrow.” If I didn’t get to the forge soon, half the night would have passed and I still wouldn’t have made any of the relics I’d promised Fisher. I backed away, stepping out of the library, down the first step—

The stargazer flew right at me. Its wing grazed my cheek, and a second later, a sting of pain lashed across my cheek. “Ow! What the fuck ?” The bird’s momentum carried it forward, through the library’s door—where it fell out of the air, dead.

It landed on the fourth step of the stairs, stark white against the black stone. I picked it up, turning it over in my hands, marveling at the transformation that had taken place. As soon as it had left the boundaries of the library, it had been severed from its magic. I cradled it in my hands, suddenly feeling terrible. It had wanted something from me. Wanted that something bad enough that it had left its sanctuary to get it, and it had lost its little spark in the process.

Quickly, I stepped back into the library, holding out my hand, holding in my breath, waiting for the creature’s little paper wings to stir back to life in my palm.

But the stargazer didn’t move.

The little bird was gone.

With a pang of sadness, I slipped it into my pocket and left.