Quicksilver (The Fae & Alchemy Series Book 1)

I was up, bathed, dressed, and ready for an argument when the shadow gate appeared in the bedroom the next morning. Only Fisher didn’t appear from the undulating shadows. I waited a minute, then another full minute, realizing with annoyance that he wasn’t coming through to get me and expected me to just head on through on my own.

Motherfucker.

Against all odds, I had managed to fall asleep last night. I’d woken up in a tentatively happy mood, but that had changed the instant I’d caught sight of my naked body in the full-length mirror by the copper tub. Now, Fisher had some explaining to do.

I wasn’t even remotely nauseous as I stepped through the gate and out into the crisp, bright winter morning in the war camp. Fae warriors bustled about their business, gathered outside the front of the mercantile, busy rushing across the muddy square. Fisher stood ten feet from the shadow gate leaning against a wooden post, hands in his pockets, head bowed. The moment I emerged, he shoved away from the post and started walking away at a fast clip.

“Hey!” I walked quickly, following after him. “Hey, asshole! What the hell? Get back here.”

He didn’t stop. He didn’t even slow. I upgraded to a jog, my breath forming a cloud of steam when I fell into step beside him. “Would you care to explain what the fuck this is?” I snapped, yanking down my shirt collar.

A flicker of annoyance flashed in Fisher’s eyes, but he did not look at me. “Don’t worry. It’ll fade. Probably,” he said in a flat tone.

Oh, so he knew what I was pissed about, then? Gods, he was a piece of work. “I did not ask for a tattoo, Fisher,” I hissed. “I definitely didn’t ask for a bird to be permanently inked right above my fucking boob. You need to take it back.”

His gaze remained fixed straight ahead. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“Bullshit, it doesn’t. It came from the ink on your body. You touched me. It slipped from your skin to mine. So, fuck, I don’t know, shake hands with me or something and take it back!”

“I’m not shaking hands with you,” he said dismissively.

“Then what the hell am I supposed to do with it?”

Fisher looked like he was struggling not to roll his eyes. “It’s a tattoo, Osha. It won’t kill you. Just forget it’s even there.”

“I will not! I have plans for my own tattoos, y’know. Ones I voluntarily go out and get. And this one is right in the middle of my fucking chest!”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he rumbled. “Feel free to have someone cover it if it upsets you so badly.”

I stopped in the mud, watching him walk away. “I can do that?”

“Wouldn’t bother m—” He cleared his throat. “Of course you can. There are any number of bored warriors with a needle and some ink in camp.”

“Okay. Fine, then. I will cover it. Look, can—can you hold up for one second, please! Where are you taking me?”

“To the camp healer,” he gritted out. “You need to take something.”

“What do you mean, I need to take something?”

“Because of last night. Because children might be extraordinarily rare between the Fae and humans, but they can still happen, and—”

I burst out laughing.

Fisher stopped dead in his tracks, his eyes wide. “I don’t pretend to understand you at the best of times, but why is this funny to you?” he demanded.

“I can’t have children, Fisher. I was cleansed when I was fourteen.”

I expected to see relief on his face. But instead, his face drained of color. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”

I stopped laughing. “I was cleansed. When I was fourteen. They do it to about seventy percent of the girls in my ward.”

He came and stood very close to me, his head bowed over mine, nostrils flaring. “What do you mean…cleansed?”

“I mean…they sterilize us,” I whispered. I figured he’d known last night. I would have expected him to at least mention contraception otherwise. But from the look of shock he wore, he hadn’t had the first clue. “The Third Ward’s the poorest,” I told him. “Madra’s health advisors decided that we shouldn’t be allowed to procreate, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to support ourselves. The policy’s been in effect for over a hundred years. Seven out of every ten female babies are tagged when they’re registered with the ward officials.” I showed him the small black cross tattooed behind my left ear. The mark that meant I wasn’t allowed to breed.

Fisher’s expression flattened out. His eyes went blank.

“What? I figured you’d think that was good news.”

Clenching his jaw, he spun around, his eyes searching the horizon for gods only knows what. Had he heard something? Some promise of danger that my inferior human hearing hadn’t detected? “Fisher. Hey! What’s wrong?”

When he faced me again, his eyes were almost fully black, his pupils blown wide open. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Find the forge and get to work. Everything’s already waiting there for you. I’ll expect a report at lunchtime.”

He stormed away without a backward glance.

Find the forge. Hah. Easier said than done. It took me thirty minutes to locate my new workspace, and by the time I did so, I was sweating, out of breath, and ready to throw some punches. The forge, Fisher had neglected to mention, was located halfway up the small hillside behind the war camp, and the path that led up to it was so steep that I had to use my hands to scramble up the rock face in places.

There was a fire already cracking and spitting in the hearth when I arrived, thank the gods, and all of my equipment from Cahlish was set out on a wooden workbench. The space constituted little more than a barn, but I was grateful for it. From way up here, I could see across the whole war camp. And it was quiet. I was alone. The peace and solitude would give me time to think. I got to work.

Again, Kingfisher had hidden the tiny amount of quicksilver I was to work with. I scouted around the forge, rifling through rotting wooden boxes full of copper coins, and in cupboards and on shelves, but it was nowhere to be found. After going over the place twice, I stood at the bench, working to calm my spiking temper, and I listened. The voice was just a whisper. Quiet and distant. I almost mistook it for the breeze. But no. As I angled my head and closed my eyes, homing in on it, I finally worked out which direction it was in: to the east. Outside of the forge. Further up the mountain.

“Damn him,” I muttered, trudging up the sharp incline. For every step I took, I slipped back three. The soles of my boots had very little tread on them, and so much fresh snow had fallen during the night that the ground was treacherous. I’d landed hard on my knees and slid back down the hill on my ass twice before I made it to the small, rocky plateau a hundred feet above the forge.

Carrion was there, waiting for me. He sat in the mouth of a cave, happily tending to a fire while reading a book. “Did you know, the Yvelian Fae are the youngest of the Fae houses? By a thousand years. There was a dispute between these two brothers, and they splintered off to make their own court.”

I folded my arms over my chest, standing on the other side of the fire in front of him.

“Do you mind? You’re blocking the light,” he grumbled.

“How the fuck are you just so okay with all of this?” I demanded. “Ever since you got here, you’ve just accepted it all. You didn’t know the Fae existed. Suddenly, there are massive fighters with pointed ears and sharp teeth everywhere, and you’re just like, okay, yeah, sure, of course there are Fae. Of course there are other realms. Of course there’s magic, and vampires, and all kinds of horrifying, terrible things out there that want to kill me. This all makes perfect sense!”

Carrion lowered his book, huffing. “And who said I didn’t know about the Fae?”

“What?”

“I knew about the Fae, Saeris. My grandmother told me.”

“Oh, come on. Be serious. Being told stories when you’re a child is one thing. But none of us ever believed those stories.”

“I did,” Carrion said matter-of-factly. He dove back into his book. “You’ve met my grandmother. Does she strike you as the sort of woman who’d spread tales of fantasy and make-believe in her free time?”

Now that I thought about it, he had a point. Gracia Swift was one of the most cut-and-dried, no-nonsense people I’d ever encountered. Even more straightforward than Elroy. She was an engineer, charged with ensuring new buildings in the Third were built on stable foundations. If she’d read books to Carrion at all as a boy, I would have put money on them being mathematical tomes relating to calculations for slope stability, not fanciful stories about made-up creatures.

“She has this book,” he said, holding up the one in his hand as if it were the book in question. “Has all kinds of pictures. Illustrations. The text’s faded in places, but she knows that damn thing from cover to cover, so it never mattered. I dare say I know it by heart by now, too. ‘Fae creatures of the Gilarian Mountains,’ it’s called. There’s a note written on the first page. It says, ‘Never forget. Monsters thrive best in the dark. Commit all you read here to memory. Prepare for war!!’ Carrion held up his middle finger and his index finger. “Two exclamation points. The Swifts have always been very serious people. Gracia took the superfluous punctuation to mean that the situation, should these Gilarian Fae creatures ever show their faces, would be very dire indeed. I wasn’t allowed to have dessert until I’d recited at least seven traits of the Gryphon sprite or explained in great detail how to kill a blooded Fae Warrior wearing full plate and armor.”

Well, that was unexpected. Where the hell had a book about the Fae come from? Madra had burned any literature that even mentioned the Fae or magic a long time ago. It was a curious thing—to find out that Carrion had, in a way, been brought up to believe that this would happen to him at some point. I didn’t have time to ponder on that now, though.

“Did Fisher send you up here to wait for me?” I asked.

“That’s one way of putting it,” Carrion said. “I was fast asleep in my tent. Then, there he was, a black cloud with a shitty attitude, growling at me to get up. The sun hadn’t even come up yet, and he kept griping about me being lazy. He called me a waste of carbon. What does that even mean?”

I ignored him, holding out my hand. “I need it. Whatever he gave you to look after.”

Carrion pulled a sour face, reaching into his pocket. He drew out the same small wooden box Kingfisher had secreted the quicksilver away in the last time, tossing it to me. “Our benevolent kidnapper strongly advised against me opening that. I’d have disobeyed him on principle the second he left, but my hand went all prickly when I held the box, and I figured maybe I’d listen to him just this once.”

What would have happened to Carrion if he had opened the box? The quicksilver was in its inert state, solid and sleeping, but there was a chance Carrion might have accidentally triggered it. Why not? If I was able to do it, then there was a chance he could, too. I had no idea why I had been born with the gift to work the quicksilver. Perhaps it was a latent gift that hadn’t manifested in Carrion yet. His hand had prickled when he’d held the box. Maybe that meant something.

“What are you doing right now?” I asked him.

“Aside from prodding this fire with a stick and reading this?” he asked, holding the book up again. “Nothing much. Why do you ask?”

“Want to come and set fire to some far more exciting things?”

He snapped his book closed with a flourish. “Absolutely, yes.”

• Magnesium powder, finely ground salt, distilled water.

• Bismuth, copper, antimony.

• Bluestone, chalk, lead.

Result: No Reaction.

Three more experiments down and three more failures. Not only that, but I had never even heard of antimony before, let alone worked with it, and it turned out that the fine white powder was an extraordinary skin irritant. It burst into flames the second it touched the quicksilver, and the fumes it cast off made us so sick that both me and Carrion ran and threw up in the snow.

By mid-afternoon, we were recovered and brave enough to risk a late lunch, though. Carrion hiked down into the camp while I began the refining process, returning just as it started to snow with an armload of snacks and a pitcher full of water.

We sat outside and ate. Cold cuts of meat. Pieces of cheese. A small container of nuts. Bread, and a handful of tiny, salted fish that were delicious.

“Hard at work?”

I nearly choked when Kingfisher emerged from inside the forge, sneaking up behind us. The moment I saw him, my traitorous mind took me back to last night, and his hands and mouth on my body, and the million sinful things he’d done with his tongue. He glanced at me and then narrowed his eyes, turning his focus toward the camp as if he was remembering me in a bunch of compromising positions, too. Then I saw his bleeding lip, the shadow of a bruise on his jaw, and the fact that his shirt was spattered with red blood, not black, and my mind went elsewhere.

“What happened to you? Why are you bleeding?”

“Training,” he said stiffly. “Don’t change the subject. Why aren’t you working?”

Suddenly, I didn’t care so much that he was injured. In fact, I kind of felt like hurting him myself. “Since we’re not slaves, we’re taking a break to eat. Look, two plates and everything,” I said, showing him that I was, in fact, eating my own food and not sharing Carrion’s. Not that it seemed to make him any happier. “And anyway,” I said. “I’ve done all I can for the day.”

“And the trials you ran?”

I curved an eyebrow at him. “What do you think?”

He said nothing by way of response.

“I have a question,” I said to him. “Back at Cahlish, you hid the quicksilver from me in that little box on the shelf. Today, you gave it to Carrion and made him wait for me halfway up the godscursed mountain. Why do you insist on hiding it from me? Why can’t you just leave it out for me. Y’know, so it’s easy to find? Maybe if I didn’t waste so much time tracking it down before I can run my trials, I’d have time to run more of them.”

There were shadows under Fisher’s eyes. He looked tired. “Forgive me for making the day a little more interesting for you. It’s good for you to improve at finding the quicksilver. You never know when you might need to detect small amounts over great distances.”

“It’s annoying.”

“Well, you have your quicksilver now. Do you have more trials planned for the afternoon?”

Peevishly, I said, “Nope. I have to refine the silver.”

Fisher cast Carrion a dubious glance. “Do you know anything about refining silver?”

“Not a fucking thing,” he answered. “I’m more of a logistics guy.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m very good at moving things from one place to another.”

“We have plenty of other asses for that. You should go and find something useful to do,” he snapped.

“Uh, he’s been helping me!” I got up, brushing one hand off on my pants as I handed the small bowl of nuts to Carrion, who took the bowl and tossed a nut into his mouth, shooting Fisher a needling smile. Fisher didn’t react. Not personally, I supposed. A wave of black smoke swept over the campfire we’d started to keep warm while we ate, hitting Carrion square in the chest. It wasn’t a powerful blow. It was only equivalent to a strong breeze, but it sent the bowl of nuts toppling from Carrion’s hands, scattering its contents all over the ground.

Such a child.

“Find Ren. Ask him for a job, or I’ll find one for you,” Fisher said. “I’m assuming cleaning the latrines doesn’t sound appealing to you since you have no magic and would have to do it by hand?”

Carrion’s grin faltered. “You are extra fucking miserable today. You should really get laid. Might help improve your mood. Tell him, Sunshine.”

I choked. Loudly. Carrion couldn’t have made a more unfortunate suggestion if he’d tried. I thumped my chest, trying to get a breath down, and all the while, Fisher just looked at me. He wore no emotion. No expression at all. The quicksilver swirling in his iris was the only thing suggesting that he might not be as calm inside as he appeared on the outside. His eyes seemed to drink the light as he eventually turned a disdainful glare on Carrion.

“Don’t call her Sunshine,” he commanded.

“Why not?”

If Carrion’s plan was to poke the bear, then he sure as hell knew how to go about it. But Kingfisher didn’t respond to the taunting note in his question. He just cocked his head a little, nostrils flaring, and spoke in a low rumble. “Because she is moonlight. The mist that shrouds the mountains. The bite of electricity in the air before a storm. The smoke that rolls across a battlefield before the killing starts. You have no idea what she is. What she could be. You should call her Majesty.”

Heat flared across my face. It scorched me behind the center point of my chest, turning my insides to cinder. I’d expected a quip from him about Carrion’s suggestion that he get laid, not…that. What had that even been? Carrion withered under the weight of the quiet anger simmering in Kingfisher’s eyes, his poorly hidden smile slipping from his face.

I’d found myself in some awkward situations before, but this was by far the most uncomfortable I’d ever felt. I cleared my throat, reminding both of them that I was still present. “Did you need something, Fisher? Or can we get back to work?” I asked Fisher.

His expression was just as flat when he turned his attention to me.

“You’re done here for the day. I’ll send someone else to refine the silver. There are plenty of other smiths who can do that kind of work in camp. Unfortunately, there’s something else I need from you, Osha.