Page 141 of Alchemised

B EING INJURED WAS HORRIBLE. H ELENA WAS ACCUSTOMED to the efficiency of healing to circumvent the slowest and more unbearable aspects of recovery; having to suddenly endure the natural speed of healing was utter misery.

She spent much of the first week in a drugged stupor, feverish with an infection. When she finally grew lucid again, she found Kaine still beside her. He had a large stack of books and folios that he was flipping through.

“What are you doing?” she asked after watching for a little while.

His eyes flicked up. “Studying human anatomy for my future career as a healer,” he said in a dry voice.

She knew that the real answer was that he would have to be her healer once the nullium was cleared from her system, but she played along. “We can open a practice together, like my parents did. Up on a cliff. We’ll be able to look out the windows and see the tides.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Do I get any say about this future life of ours, or are you making all the decisions?”

“Do you have ideas?”

There was a pause. “Can’t say I do.”

She drew a slow breath. She could move her fingers now. As her fingers flexed, she realised her right hand was bandaged, the fingers splinted, and she remembered the last moments in the field hospital.

“I almost forgot,” she said. “I think I discovered something in the hospital.”

He looked up.

“The obsidian I told you about. I had some in my pocket when the necrothralls came. I think—I think I severed a reanimation with it.”

“Are you sure?”

She squinted, trying to remember more details, but all she recalled was the red-orange light, and the pain. “Not entirely, but I think we should test it again.”

“Well, don’t worry about that right now.” He snapped his book shut and came over to change the bandages.

She’d regained enough mobility that as he peeled off the gauze, she lifted her head, determined to see. Running like a ragged seam down the centre of her chest was a huge incision, sewn closed with black thread and bone wire. The skin was swollen, yellow, and white and pink.

Helena had seen more wounds than she could count, watched innumerable people grieve over the loss of who they’d been before and what their bodies had become. She knew all the things to say, the encouragement and reassurances, that it would be all right, that it would get better.

Staring at the wound, she forgot all of it.

“My gods,” she said, head dropping, her throat convulsing, too horrified to keep looking.

“It’ll heal. Give it time,” he said quietly as he checked for signs of infection.

She knew from treating Lila that she would scar. Even if she tried to heal herself afterwards, organised all the matrices, there was a limited time frame for preventing scars, and something about nullium seemed to have a mild keloid effect on the tissue.

She drew several sharp breaths.

She was lucky to be alive. A few scars were nothing compared with the injuries others in the Resistance would carry for life. She still had all her limbs, both eyes and ears. Even all her teeth.

She was very lucky by any metric. What did a scar matter? It would be fine.

She could feel Kaine watching her and forced herself to speak. “I think your scars are prettier than mine,” she finally said.

“I have a better healer.”

I T TOOK THREE WEEKS JUST for the nullium in Helena’s blood to reduce enough that Kaine could use resonance to monitor her healing, although actual transmutation was still far off.

Her own resonance was barely a hum in her veins.

Whenever Kaine was absent, Davies stayed with her. Helena’s head was finally clear enough to notice more of her surroundings.

The room was sterile. Almost bare. There was a bed, a towering wardrobe, a desk, and a chair. Falcon Matias had more indulgent quarters, and he was supposed to be an ascetic.

When she teased Kaine about it, he grimaced. “This is my room.”

Helena fell silent, looking around again, abashed. “Oh. I thought that a country house would have bigger rooms.”

He nodded. “There are larger ones. I moved in here because it was closer to my mother’s room, then never left.”

“I’m sorry I brought you back,” she said.

He shook his head. “You didn’t. I come back to check on the servants.”

She hesitated but then asked, “Are they all dead?”

He nodded.

“Why did you—?”

He looked away, his throat dipping as he rubbed his hands together.

“It was just after. I don’t remember everything.

I could feel them screaming inside me. I found their bodies piled up in a corner like discarded rags.

They were still warm. I’d never—I didn’t even realise what I was doing. I was trying to put them back.”

“So they’re—them?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what they are. I like to think I was able to put a part of them back, that it’s why it got easier after that, but it’s more likely that they act like themselves because I want them to. I just—can’t seem to let go.”

When Helena was finally able to have a pillow, Davies would prop up books for her to read during the hours when Kaine was absent.

She was curious about the kind of library that existed at Spirefell, but Davies unfortunately did not seem to be literate, at least not anymore.

The books Helena received were largely at random.

One day, she received an encyclopaedia of butterfly species, the next a florilegium of Cetus’s earliest writings.

Because “Cetus” had written thousands of alchemical texts and letters, dated across centuries, excerpts were often assembled into various collections by scholars based on which parts of his work and history they happened to consider legitimate.

Depending on the florilegium’s edition, Cetus was born in ten different countries.

Sometimes he was a king, other times a priest; some letters even claimed he’d worked with Orion himself.

In the florilegum Helena received, Cetus was very taken by an ancient Khemish cult, which claimed that human resonance was the alchemisation of mankind. That alchemists were an ascendant form.

“Sounds like something alchemists would believe about themselves,” Kaine said in the late evening while she was telling him about it. He was much more interested in Helena’s lungs than in ancient cults.

Helena tried not to wince as the bandages came off. “Do the Undying have a religion?”

“The High Necromancer is our deity,” Kaine said, tracing his resonance carefully along her ribs where several had cracked. “Our lives are in servitude to his infinite power.”

“If he’s that powerful, why doesn’t he come out and win the war?”

He glanced up for a moment. “He’s a god.

You’ll notice that making humans die for them is the gods’ primary mode of operation.

You’d think Sol could personally smite a few necromancers if he hates them so passionately, but somehow, it’s always the Holdfasts coordinating those efforts. Makes one wonder if he really cares.”

Ever since she’d told him about Orion and why the Holdfasts had become Principates, he seemed to think that if he just criticised the Eternal Flame enough, she’d give up on the Resistance.

Her sigh made her lungs rattle, and Kaine seemed to completely forget the conversation for several minutes.

“Since Holdfast started showing up in combat, Morrough has stayed far away from the front lines,” he said at last.

“But if he’s so afraid of Luc, why didn’t he kill him when he was captured?”

Kaine shook his head. “I don’t think he wants him dead.

The orders have always been to take him alive.

I used to think it was because Morrough feared usurpation from whoever made the killing blow, but now, after that capture, I think it’s something else.

Holdfast has been at the front lines for six years.

Do you really think that if Morrough wanted him dead, he couldn’t have found a way to kill him by now? ”

I T WAS FOUR WEEKS AFTER the bombing before Helena could get up without feeling like she’d shatter.

Her resonance had feebly returned, and the bandages were off, but the wiring remained because her sternum was still worryingly delicate.

Before lacing on a chest brace, she sat with a mirror, looking at the scar that ran down between her breasts.

It was far from pretty.

She’d always admired the way Lila wore her scars, her jokes about naming them; it was only now that she began to realise how difficult it was to be proud of them.

The visual evidence of the injury would never go away.

In a moment of intimacy it would be all there was to see.

Staring at it in the cold light of day, she couldn’t help but think that someday Kaine might not want someone who had the war so overtly carved into them.

Surely he’d want to be able to forget sometimes.

Now, with her, it would be impossible.

He was sorting the vials of medicine on the table, but she could feel him observing her from the corner of his eye.

“It’ll fade,” she said quickly.

Her face was burning. She dropped the mirror, putting her hand over the scar to hide it. It took the span of her entire hand.

“Once I’m better, I’ll treat it every day so—it’ll fade more,” she said.

She could feel a divot in the bone where it had refused to regenerate.

She could attach titanium plating there to reinforce the bone, but given her repertoire, it might interfere with her work.

Part of the reason titanium was so medically useful for alchemists was because the resonance for it was rare.

Her jaw trembled. “It won’t look like this forever.”

He set a vial down. His silver eyes were intent, his attention like a beam of light through a magnifying glass, suddenly focused solely on her. He stepped over and gently but firmly pulled her hand away.

She knew he’d seen the scar more than she had, and in far worse stages than this, but she hated having him look at it.

“Do you see my scars that way?” he finally said. “When you look at me, are they all you see?”