Brimstone By Callie Hart - 36

“SAERIS! SAERIS! HE’S awake !”

I jolted from sleep, too startled to comprehend where I was or what was going on. For a foggy moment, I thought I was still in Zilvaren, delirious from trying to sleep through reckoning. Reality came back piece by piece . . . and then there was Archer standing at the bottom of the bed, peering over the footboard with eyes as big as saucers.

Wait, what ?

I sat up too fast, my vision pitching. “Archer! You’re here! You’re awake!”

The fire sprite had no eyebrows, but I could still tell that he was frowning. “Not me , my lady. Your brother. Master Hayden has woken up!”

Next to me, Fisher was sprawled on his front, his inked arms splayed out, both hands tucked beneath the pillow. When he pushed himself up, propping himself up groggily on his elbows, his hair was sticking up in five different directions. The second he registered who was hovering at the foot of the bed, he sat up brushing his waves back out of his face. “Archer. What in all five hells are you doing here?”

The fire sprite stepped back, a small flame kindling on his shoulder. “Me, Master? I, well, I came to let the mistress know that her brother—”

“No, why are you up here, in the house? Why are you working ?”

“I—I am sorry, Master. I did try to stop that feeder—”

“It’s okay, Archer. You did more than you should have. I only mean to say that you should be down with the pyre, healing from your injuries.”

“Oh.” The fire sprite relaxed. “That’s all right, Master Fisher. Fire sprites don’t need recovery time after we’re injured. We’re either alive or we’re dead.” He let out a squeaky laugh. “The brimstone my brothers donated to me took all night to cool. Once my wounds were solid again, I woke up right as rain.”

He turned, hands in the air, wiggling his hips side to side in a little dance that seemed far braver than normal. When he had completed his dance, he cleared his throat and said rather seriously, “I am one inch taller than I used to be.”

“Oh. Uh . . . congratulations? Well done,” I told him.

He bowed his head, accepting the compliment. “Your brother is in the sitting room, my lady. He’s quite anxious to see you.”

Hayden.

After everything, he was here, and he was awake. Inside, I was brimming with excitement, but made myself stay calm as I got up and got ready to go see him. Long before she died, I’d promised my mother I would watch out for him. Keep him out of trouble and make sure he didn’t wind up in Madra’s cells. Honoring that promise had been a full-time job. I’d bailed him out of countless situations where he’d gambled away water or money he didn’t have. I’d protected him from Carrion more than once. The things I had sacrificed, sold, or traded to guarantee my brother didn’t die of dehydration . . . and I’d brought him here. There was an abundance of water in Yvelia. Plenty of food, too. But after everything I had done to keep Hayden alive and safe in Zilvaren, would bringing him here be the thing that finally did him in?

With the rot and everything else going on in Yvelia, the truth was that Hayden might have actually been safer staying in the desert.

The irony of that was far too bitter to swallow.

What had I brought him here to face?

What was he going to do?

Fisher had said it himself while we were resting: Humans were difficult to keep alive in a place like this, and there was still so much about Fae and Yvelian politics that I didn’t know. I had barely scratched the surface of what it meant to be a part of this realm, and now I had brought my brother here. When I’d arrived, I had been the only human in Yvelia. Now the mantle of that title fell to Hayden . . . and I had no idea how he was going to handle it.

I moved slowly, getting dressed, watching Fisher out of the corner of my eye as he did the same. The muscles in his back shifted as he shrugged on a shirt and turned to face me, tattooed fingers deftly fastening the buttons. “I can feel you worrying,” he said quietly.

I ducked my head, pulling on my boots. “There’s no point telling me not to worry,” I replied. “He’s my brother.”

“I wasn’t going to.” Fisher lifted his leathers over his head, settling his chest protector in place. He had the straps fastened over his ribs in no time. “There’s every reason to be worried. The future’s very uncertain for your brother. It’s uncertain for all of us.” The floorboards creaked as he crossed the bedroom and came to stand before me. “But we’re going to figure it out together, Osha. We’ll get through all of this and have a far better idea of what the lay of the land looks like in time, too.”

I smiled up at him sadly. “I actually did want you to tell me not to worry,” I admitted. “Can you rephrase all of that for me, please?”

Kingfisher’s eyes danced with amusement as he bent down to kiss me. “Would that I could, Osha. Would that I could.”

Cahlish was a huge place, full of hidden, secret corners. I’d spent days exploring when Fisher had left me here after I’d been attacked by the feeder in the dining room, but there were still entire wings of the estate I hadn’t investigated. Rooms I hadn’t set foot inside.

This was one such room.

The south drawing room, Archer called it. A bank of tall windows overlooked a rose garden shrouded in white. The buds on the thorny bushes were all open despite the cold, and a sea of velveteen blooms swayed on the other side of the glass, their petals dark as blood and dusted with snow.

A tufted armchair sat before a crackling fire. Gilt-framed portraits hung on the walls. A writing desk had been positioned in the window, as if whoever had penned their correspondence there had liked to look out over the garden while they contemplated their words. That was where Hayden stood, on the other side of the writing desk, looking out the window with his hands in his pockets.

The door creaked as I entered the room, startling him. He turned, his blond curls just as crazy as ever, his face deeply tanned, lips cracked. His eyes widened when he saw me. He didn’t speak. I’d imagined this scene in my head so many times since I’d come to Yvelia, but now that Hayden was here and it was happening, none of the scenarios I had anticipated was coming to fruition. My brother didn’t look pleased to be here with me. He looked scared .

“It’s true, then. He didn’t kill you—that gigantic asshole with the pointed ears.”

I lowered my head, unsure whether to smile at that or not. “No. He did not.”

“Where is he, then?”

“His name is Kingfisher. And he’s gone to fetch one of our friends. He was supposed to bring him back to Cahlish yesterday, but . . . something came up.”

Archer, in the courtyard, leaping to my defense.

Archer, nearly dying to save me.

I blinked away the memories of his brimstone jetting from his throat.

Hayden huffed. Stepping away from the window, he crossed the room and stood in front of me, looking me up and down. The bridge of his nose was dotted with freckles.

Pacing around me in a slow circle, he performed a full inspection of me; his shoulders tensed when he caught sight of my ears poking through my loose hair, but he made no comment on them. At last, he came to a stop, facing me with his hands still shoved into his pockets.

“You look well,” he said stiffly. “Healthy. Carrion told me you’d changed.” He frowned, his eyes growing distant. “He said you’d become something different. Like him,” he said in a small voice. “I understand now.”

“ Do you?”

He nodded. “Madra, she’s been telling everyone that you’re dead. Murdered by Fae rebels. She gave a very convincing speech.”

“I’ll bet she did.”

“She’s painting you as a martyr to her cause. Using your name and your story. Twisting everything, making you sound like some kind of Zilvaren patriot who loved her city. She said you were working for her, a loyal subject, violently killed by strangers wielding outlawed magic.”

“And people are believing her?”

Hayden shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. Madra’s always said strange things about the Fae. Especially around this time of year, with the Evenlight Festival right on top of us.”

“I don’t mean about the Fae , Hayden. I mean about me . That I was working for her. That I was a loyal Zilvaren subject!” The very idea of it was preposterous. Madra had told some lies in her time, but this one was the most galling. My whole life, I’d railed against her rule. I’d done whatever I could to cause dissent and mayhem for her house without getting myself killed, and now she was spreading rumors that I had been working for her all along? Working for her meant spying on my neighbors. It meant whispering secrets in her ear that weren’t meant to be shared. It meant that I was a traitor and a liar, and I had betrayed my friends.

Hayden wouldn’t meet my eyes. “She gave the whole city extra food rations and a triple water supply to honor you. For your service to the crown.”

“What?”

“The people of the Third wouldn’t accept it. They poured their canteens out in the street. They gave their bread to the crows. They cursed you as they did it.”

That fucking bitch .

I didn’t want to be a hero to my people. I didn’t care if they never knew my name. Anything I had done to aid Zilvaren’s rebels had been in secret and in silence. I’d never needed to draw attention to myself. I sure as hell didn’t need a clap on the back from anyone in recognition of my “good deeds.” But the idea that the people of the Third, my people, were cursing my name and refusing extra water in protest of me? Fuck me. I was going to throw up.

“I need to go back. I need to set them straight. All my contacts across the city—”

“Don’t bother, Saeris.” Hayden looked at me now, and the cold hard truth I found on his face was a blow I could never have expected. “They don’t want you.”

“But surely, Elroy—”

“Elroy believes you’re innocent. He defends you whenever he hears anyone speak ill of you.”

Well, that was a relief. Of course the old man knew the truth. Him better than anyone. But the others? Many of them had trusted me. Many of them had traded with me, counted on me, and now they thought that I had been informing on them to the guardians?

It was a clever play. Discredit someone the people of the Third thought they could trust. Make them question anyone who claimed to stand against Madra. Make them cease their incendiary activities, for fear of who might whisper their names into the queen’s ear.

“He’s black and blue.” Hayden’s harsh tone cut through my racing thoughts. “Elroy. Every time he stands up for you, someone throws a punch at him. He’s had a lifetime’s worth of split lips and black eyes lately, and he’s not as tough as he thinks he is anymore.”

My head snapped up, something troubling suddenly clicking into place in my head. Elroy believes you’re innocent. That’s what Hayden had said. Elroy believes and not we know .

There wasn’t a single mark on my brother. No cuts, no scrapes, no bruises.

No one had thrown a punch at him lately.

It occurred to me all at once that since I’d entered the room, he hadn’t smiled at me. He hadn’t fucking hugged me. Hadn’t even seemed all that relieved to see me.

Numb to my core, I took a wobbly step back from him, angling my head to one side in the vain hope that I might be able to get a better read on what it was that he was thinking. “You think I did it, don’t you?” I whispered.

Hayden clenched his jaw, looking away.

“You think I betrayed my friends. You think I actually worked for her!”

“I didn’t say that,” he snapped.

“But you’re not denying it! Gods and sinners, you actually think I worked for her, don’t you?”

“I don’t know!” he exploded. “How the hell am I supposed to know? You never included me in any of the things you were working on. You never let me go anywhere with you after reckoning. You were always off to one secret meeting or another. You’d never breathe a word of where you were going, would you?”

“So that must mean I was in league with the guardians, then? Is that it?”

“Maybe.” He set his jaw, looking imperiously down his nose at me. “You shut me out. Kept me a million miles away from anything that was important. I don’t know anything, Saeris, and that’s because of you . And we always did seem to have more water and more food than everyone el—”

He didn’t finish that thought. He couldn’t, with my fist slamming into his jaw. Hayden’s head whipped around so fast that I worried for a moment I’d hit him too hard and broken something, but then the rage his comment had elicited flared full force, and I hoped that I had broken something. I grabbed him by the front of his shirt and shoved him away.

Fuck you, Hayden. More food?” I shoved him again. “More water?” Again. Harder. Tears blurred my vision. I stabbed my finger in his face, trying to speak, but only a sound of pure fury came out of me. I had to start again. “If we had anything , if you didn’t starve and die in the fucking sand, it was because I bled to keep you alive. I had to crawl on my stomach through sewer lines to reach the royal reserves. Once a week, I had to do that for you. Do you have any idea how disgusting that was? And did you ever hear me complain?” I shoved him hard enough that he fell down this time, but just like always, Hayden Fane was given a soft fucking landing. The tufted chair caught him, saving him from the indignity of landing ass-first on the rug.

My mouth was all bile and copper. Heat rose up my throat from somewhere deep within the basement of my soul. “I didn’t tell you what I was doing every day because I had to go into tense situations, in fucking horrible places, and do unpleasant things,” I spat. “I didn’t bring you with me to those places, because I didn’t want life to be hard for you like it was for me. But I see now that I’ve done you a disservice. You have this . . . this fucking illusion that life should be easy, that it owes you something, and that’s on me.” I thumped my own chest, clenching my jaw to the point of pain. “I broke myself to look after you. I slipped into every other ward in Zilvaren, and I robbed, and I stole, and I bartered and traded, just to make sure that you were comfortable and your belly was full. And then you have the audacity to turn around and accuse me of the most heinous thing I can possibly think of, because I made life too fucking easy for you while everyone around us had to suffer.”

“Saeris—”

“Shut up, Hayden. Just shut the fuck up.”

“No. Your hand,” he whispered. “There’s something wrong with your hand .”

Another rune on fire.

This time, the rune for brimstone.

It swept artfully around the solid quicksilver rune, intertwined with it, connected and yet separate. If possible, it hurt twice as much as the quicksilver rune had, and the lines of fire trailing up my arm reached all the way to my elbow. For an hour, I just held my arm, breathing, trying to meditate my way through the pain. The gods only knew whether the breathing and meditating worked, but eventually the smoldering embers the rune cut into my flesh went out and the symbol glowed a soft red instead.

It was then that I had run to Fisher’s bedroom; the place that had been a prison to me once was now the place I felt safest in all Cahlish. Surrounded by my mate’s scent, I sat on the rug, back resting against the side of the bed, and I took out the book at last.

Not the tome Algat had given me.

Edina’s book.

Dear child, I know you might not be feeling very trusting of me right now. I misled you with my request to keep this book secret from my son, and I apologize for any ill feelings that may have caused. I am not a woman given to participating in cruel games, and it brings me no pleasure to trick you. I can only hope that you will forgive me for the subterfuge and one day understand why it had to be done.

I am afraid, with that trickery still fresh in your memory, that I must ask you for a solemn promise. I am breaking all the laws of the universe with this gambit, but for it to work, you cannot skip ahead in this book. You will read things that will prevent you from facing the challenges in front of you for fear of the ones ahead, to the ruin of us all.

I implore you, please. Do not do it.

Each entry in this book had been written in service of a specific moment to come. For any of this to bear fruit, the dominoes must fall in order.

With that said, I must acknowledge that there are many ways to approach what comes next, and nearly all of them will kill you.

Your second rune has awoken. By now, you must know that brimstone is not a plentiful resource in Yvelia, as it once was. Historically, Alchemists shied away from the second bough of the Tria Prima, not only because it was too powerful and difficult to wield, but because its only purpose seemed to be linked with death and destruction. Even knowing you must conquer this rune, it pains me to advise that you must do so, as sealing this magic to your soul will come at great cost.

You will have to unlock a door within yourself that will be hard to close thereafter. I will not—cannot—lie to you. You will change if you choose to walk down this path. But with the brimstone rune sealed to you, there is a chance you will be able to use it to help save Yvelia from the veil I see descending upon it. If you decide to reject this rune, there are still other courses of action that can be taken to fend off the darkness, but the odds of those plans working are slight in comparison.

In fairness to you, I will first explain how you can reject your brimstone rune . . .

I read on, skimming over Edina’s elegant handwriting, devouring her words. She had known everything, then. Seen everything. It was all here: a map to surviving the chaos and the pain that lay ahead. It was almost impossible not to flick through the book and go to the end, to see what might tip the scales of victory to our favor . . . but Edina’s warning rang voiceless in my head.

You will read things that will prevent you from facing the challenges in front of you for fear of the ones ahead, to the ruin of us all.

The warning did not inspire confidence in me. The book was long , after all. But as I read past Edina’s instructions for rejecting my brimstone rune—I would need to submerge my hand in quicksilver and instruct it to strip the magic from me—she went on to explain that the first half of the book was a guidebook to my powers. It was the latter half of the book that contained instructions with regard to the rot.

The beginning of her prophecies read thus:

Concerning the Evenlight Ball: turn this page before leaving your chambers.

An appointment awaits.

Hours later, my head was still buried in Edina’s book. I had learned more from her in the span of an evening than I could have gleaned in a lifetime scouring the libraries of Yvelia for scraps. And, honestly, I was scared. The Alchemists were often corrupted by their powers. Their fates were ruled by their strength of will, but also by the heritage of their blood. If I was born an Alchemist, then I definitely had a Fae relative somewhere in my ancestry. Knowing nothing about them meant I had no idea whether I had a predisposition to succumb to my magic or not, and that was frightening in and of itself. But there was more.

The Alchemists hadn’t just channeled quicksilver. In some cases, they had become so intertwined with it that they merged with it altogether to become silver-eyed heralds of the gods. These were the Alchemists who had spurred Belikon and his ilk to murder the Alchimeran line and eradicate them from this realm and all others—because they had become powerful beyond all measure and threatened the grasp of the Triumvirate’s power.

As I read, the pain in my hand slowly ebbed, until the new rune on the back of my hand was healed. It was only an outline, not filled in like the quicksilver rune that had preceded it. Incomplete. A door that went to nowhere. There was no magic to it yet. I could sense that. But maybe soon there would be.

Fisher found me staring into space, attempting to process all that I had read, just as dusk was bruising the sky and ushering in the night. He carried Onyx in his arms; my mate had taken him along when he’d left Cahlish earlier, and now the little fox was excited to see me.

Chittering loudly, he yelped, slipping out of Fisher’s arms, then collided with my chest, tumbling over himself, hind legs sticking up, tufts of white fluff floating into the air.

“Good gods. You’re ridiculous.” I sniffed as I ruffled his fur, scratching his sides and the base of his skull, behind his ears—his favorite spot.

Fisher smelled like fresh snow, smoke, and the faintest hint of powdered sugar, which told me that he’d stayed at Wendy’s long enough to share a cup of tea and a Bettell biscuit with the female before returning home from Ballard. I reached for his hand, and he brushed my fingertips with his own as he stepped over me and sank down on the floor next to me, sagging back against the bed. It was then that I saw how drawn he looked.

Onyx was busy licking my ear. I petted him distractedly, frowning at my mate. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

He rolled his head to the right so that he was looking at me. “Ren,” he said. “He was supposed to ride along the Darn and then up into the Shallow Mountains to treat with the Gilarian Fae, then down through the forests to Ballard, then on to Inishtar, where I would collect him. I went to Inishtar first, but the satyrs haven’t seen him. They knew nothing of the rot. I had to tell them of it myself. I went on to Ballard to see if Ren had stayed there to wait for me, but Wendy hasn’t seen him, either. I checked in with Royan, king of the Gilarian Fae, next. Ren did warn them. They’ve already started taking steps to quarantine their cities in the mountains. Royan said Ren left their stronghold a day and a half ago and hasn’t been seen in the Shallow Mountains since.”

“What?”

“I visited every small town between Gilaria and Ballard to see if he’d been waylaid, but no one’s seen hide nor hair of him.”

A lead weight, ice-cold, formed in the pit of my stomach. “You don’t think . . . Belikon . . .”

Fisher shook his head, dark waves brushing the tops of his shoulders. “No. Ren’s smarter than every single one of Belikon’s guards put together. He moves like a ghost along those forest roads. There’s no way anyone stumbled across him and knew to command him to return to the Winter Palace on behalf of the king. No, this is something else. I just can’t put my finger on it.”

“Do you think he’s in danger?”

Fisher gave me a sidelong look that answered that question in no uncertain terms. “We’re all in danger, Osha. But yes, I think Ren might be in some kind of hot water. And I have no idea how to find him so we can get him out of it.”