Page 179 of Alchemised

T HE N OVIS M OUNTAINS LOOMED STARK AGAINST THE starlit sky. Helena put their backs to them, flying south.

Amaris had been younger and smaller when Helena had last ridden her. Her wings were stronger and steadier. Once Helena pointed her south, she seemed to know to follow the river.

The darkness below was nearly endless, punctuated with the clustered lights of towns and villages.

Everywhere Helena looked there was endless dark. She buried her face against Kaine’s back, trying to breathe.

“Don’t die, Kaine,” she kept saying, pressing her face between his shoulders, feeling the feeble thud of his heartbeat against her forehead to reassure herself that he was still alive.

She didn’t know how long they flew; the night seemed endless.

Amaris began to descend without warning, and Helena nearly slipped sideways. For a terrifying moment, she thought she’d fall.

Kaine jerked from barely conscious to awake. His hand shot back and he grabbed her, holding her tight as she managed to get centred again. She tried to squeeze with her legs, but they were so tired she could scarcely hold on anymore.

Amaris hit the ground at a run and Helena nearly bit through her tongue.

She looked around desperately, trying to make out where they were as Amaris cantered through the dark.

There was an electric torch in one of the saddlebags, but she couldn’t remember which anymore.

Amaris halted, standing and waiting as Helena shifted to dismount, sliding down.

Amaris was several hands taller than she remembered. The ground did not meet her feet when expected. She fell the rest of the way, caught by thick, lush summer grass. She lay, staring up at the stars, a glittering path across the sky.

Before the Disaster, it was said people could travel by following the stars, but no one knew where they went anymore. She struggled back to her feet.

“Kaine,” she said, fumbling through the dark until she found Amaris and then Kaine’s leg, his boot hooked in the stirrup. “I don’t know where we are. What do we do now?”

He lifted his head slowly. She could only see his silhouette in the dark. He tried to get off and then realised he was fastened to the saddle.

Helena felt her way to Amaris’s head and urged her down to the ground before finding the straps and clips and unfastening them as best she could. Kaine leaned on her as he dismounted.

“Hunting cottage just …” His voice sounded raw.

They walked forward slowly, and then there were steps and a wooden door, and they stumbled inside. There was a shelf by the door that held a torch, and she flicked it on. It was barely more than a shack. Simple and rough-hewn, just a place to sleep.

There were two narrow beds, but Helena and Kaine collapsed into one, not bothering to remove their boots or cloaks.

“We did it, Kaine,” she said. “Just like we always said we would.”

S HE WOKE BECAUSE HER BACK was on fire, her left wrist throbbing with a nearly numbing pain. She struggled to open her eyes, staring around in bewilderment before remembering where they were.

Kaine was sitting beside her, awake but haggard. He was leaning forward, a hand pressed against his chest as though all his ribs were cracked.

“Are you—all right?” She struggled to sit up.

He nodded jerkily. “Fine. I’m sure it’ll pass.”

His throat was still hoarse and raw. He’d torn it apart screaming, and now things like that would take time to heal on their own.

“What will pass?” She tried to reach out but only managed to brush her fingers against his coat. Her body felt boneless. “What’s happening?”

“It’s nothing. I’m just not used to feeling—human anymore,” he said.

She managed to get close enough to reach out. He was right, there was nothing wrong, but he felt delicate as a spiderweb inside. If a single thread snapped, it might all be for nothing.

She rested her head on his shoulder, breathing slowly.

“You have to be so careful. It could take months, maybe even years before your soul fully integrates again. No vivimancy or animancy, nothing that could strain your vitality at all. One mistake could be enough to kill you. And you can’t lean into the array anymore.

You won’t regenerate, and it could burn your back open. ”

He tucked a curl behind her ear. “You already told me all this yesterday. You know, I do make a habit of listening when you talk.”

She nodded but couldn’t help herself. “You have to be careful.”

“I will be. Now, are you all right?”

“Just tired,” she said, slumping, but the pain across her shoulders felt like she was being rebranded.

“How’s your back?”

She winced. She hadn’t wanted to bring it up, because she knew it would bother him that he couldn’t heal it.

“I think the salve wore off,” she said. “It’s starting to hurt a little.”

He started to reach.

“Don’t,” she said. “Give me a minute and then we’ll use the salve so we can go.”

“We’ll rest till dark,” he said. “Amaris is too recognisable for travel during the day. It’s a few days’ journey to the coast.”

When her eyes opened again, it was dark outside. Kaine was packing the saddlebags. He looked up the instant she stirred. “Are you strong enough for more travel?”

They would have stayed if she said no, but she knew the more distance they put between themselves and Paladia, the less likely they were to be tracked down. They were racing against time. The Abeyance wouldn’t wait.

“Yes,” she lied.

They flew almost the whole night. The sky was silvering with signs of dawn when Amaris landed again. There was no cabin. Kaine removed Amaris’s saddle, and they slept leaning against her furry sides, her black wings blotting out the daylight as the sun rose.

When Helena opened her eyes, Kaine was still asleep beside her, his face turned towards her as if he’d fallen asleep staring at her.

She traced her eyes across his face. His now mortal face, softly illuminated.

They were free.

Her heart swelled inside her chest.

It felt like a dream. One wrong move and it would all dissolve. Even staring at him, she could not shake the feeling that it wasn’t real. And even if it somehow was, then it would not last.

The beautiful things in her life never did.

He was so still that she reached out, fingers trembling. At her touch, his eyebrows furrowed, and his eyes opened. She watched the light fill them as he looked at her.

“Hi,” she said, because she was too overwhelmed to say anything else. She cleared her throat, sitting up. “I need to check you.”

Amaris stood up, stretching, and abandoned them, wandering off into the woods, while Helena had Kaine open his shirt. She pressed her hand against his chest, trying to sense his condition now that she was no longer dazed with exhaustion.

He was still nothing natural, that was undeniable, but there wasn’t anything they could do except give him time and hope that his body could find its way back to a semblance of normalcy. There was a fragile tenuousness to his vitality, as if a careless touch could shred it apart.

She was equally worried about his physical condition.

It would have been better if they could have waited.

He’d still been recovering from what Morrough had done to him, and now it was possible that he never fully would.

Both his heart and his tremors worried her, and the thought of the array charring his back open if he ever leaned into it again made her throat close. Her hands shook.

“There are things you’re used to treating as ordinary that you can’t survive anymore,” she said.

“I know,” he said. His voice was still rasping. She shifted closer, pressing her hand against his throat to repair all the damaged tissue.

“I know you know rationally,” she said, “but I mean instinctively. You have years of bad habits that you don’t realise.”

The thought terrified her. What if they were attacked? Kaine was highly competent in combat, but immortality was a crutch that he did not know how to fight without.

She should have planned more carefully. He’d told her to get her strength back, but she had focused on research, and that had saved him, but what if they were attacked, and she couldn’t fight, and he was killed? What if it was all for nothing?

Fear ran like a fissure through her chest.

She looked around, trying to spot the saddlebag. There were knives in it. She needed to get them. She should be carrying them.

Everything was so bright, blurring—

“Helena—Helena, breathe. Look at me. I’m going to be careful. I’m not going to let anything take me from you.”

She tried to nod, but her throat caught.

“But what if something goes wrong?” she asked, her voice straining. “It’s going to fall apart. It always—falls apart.”

She tried to pull away, eyes casting around. They were in the open, endless forest around them. Danger could come from any direction. It wouldn’t even need to be the Undying. It could be anyone.

He turned her so she’d face him. “Look at me. We have not left any trace to follow. I’ve hunted fugitives, I know how you get caught.

And we are not going to get caught. You’ve seen me fight carelessly because I could afford to in the past, but I have learned to be more careful.

Slower regeneration has taught me caution.

Look at me: I trusted you, and you got us here. It’s your turn to trust me.”

She nodded jerkily.

“Now then,” he said, reaching towards her lap, “are you going to tell me what’s wrong with your hand?”

She looked down. The last two fingers of her left hand were curving inwards and didn’t move with the others. She curled her hand into a fist to hide it.

“The array had quite a pull to it. It took a bit of straining to manage everything. The ulnar nerve just—came apart. I tried to fix it, but—there was too much long-term damage, it wasn’t really salvageable.”

Kaine took her left hand gently in his and straightened all her fingers. When his thumb stroked the last two, Helena couldn’t feel it. Not in her fingers or along the outer part of her palm. His fingers trembled.

“It’s fine,” she said. “It’s not even my dominant hand, so I can still do most alchemy. I bet I’ll barely notice.”

“Don’t,” he said through gritted teeth. “Don’t act like it’s fine.”

She pulled her hand free. “It is fine if I get you instead.”

There was food in the saddlebags, and Helena used retrieving them as a pretext for digging out her daggers and concealing them in her clothes.

The day wore on. The longer they were free, the more anxious she grew.

Kaine was restless, too, although he hid it better. The more he recovered, the more he wanted to patrol and verify that they were as safe as he claimed they were, but he stayed beside her so she could bury her face against his chest, fingers tangled in his shirt, sleeping restlessly.

After flying that night, they reached another hunting cabin. The travel exhausted them both. They barely spoke, just slept tangled in each other’s arms until it was nearly evening. When she woke, Kaine was sitting beside her. His eyes had the faintest gleam to them again.

He looked almost like a painting.

She could see the possessiveness in his eyes, enough to realise how absent it had been in his attempts to let her go. He leaned over her and kissed her.

She wrapped her arms around his neck, wanting him nearer, under her skin, beneath her ribs, inside her heart. To hoard him so close nothing separated them and the terror of losing him would finally end.

Time always ran out for them. They’d spent years surviving on stolen moments, and now she finally felt how starved it had left her.

It was only after, as she lay beside him, her fingers tracing absently along the scars of the array, that she realised her back didn’t hurt. That it should have by then, but it didn’t.

She craned her arm around, touching her shoulders. Kaine sat up.

“What did you do? Did you heal me?” She whirled on him. “I told you, I warned you not to use any vivimancy.”

He looked completely unapologetic. “I’m fine. I was careful, and you know that plenty of healing doesn’t use any vitality. You’re already too injured for this amount of travel without my father’s torture still seared across your back.”

She reached for him, fingers shaking as she pressed her hand against his chest, terrified of what she’d find, that he was already slipping away from her.

What if she’d woken up and found him dead beside her, and been left alone there to realise why? She checked over and over.

Her throat worked several times before she could speak.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said, her voice shaking. “It wasn’t worth it. Plenty of people heal from burns without any vivimancy. I was fine. I was.”

He held her face in his hands. “Helena, look at you. You have broken yourself into pieces, over and over, because of me, and you don’t seem to understand that it kills me. Living is not worth it to me if you’re the one who keeps paying the price for it. Let me fix what I can.”

She closed her eyes, her face buried against his chest, listening to his heartbeat, willing herself to believe that he was all right.

“We have to stop hurting ourselves for each other,” she finally said. “Both of us. We’re not going to last if this is the only way we know how to love.”

When it was nightfall, they flew onwards. From the darkness, something vast and faintly silver rose before them. Helena’s breath caught.

It was the sea.

They veered off, travelling away from the river, the sea gleaming to their right.

Kaine seemed to know where he was going, despite the darkness. They passed over several small bodies of water, the lights of a village, and onwards through the dark until they saw a small flickering light visible through shutters.

Amaris descended straight towards it. The shutters rattled violently as Amaris’s wings fluttered. Helena slid off, legs aching.

A door flew open, and warm light poured out. Helena squinted.

Haloed in the doorway stood Lila.