Page 18 of Alchemised

F ERRON LEFT AS THE MAID FINISHED WITH Helena’s slippers, and Helena immediately stood, refusing to let the corpse touch her further.

The maid headed inside. The instant her back was turned, Helena snatched up Ferron’s discarded newspaper, hiding it behind her back as she drew a deep breath and stepped inside.

She focused on the paper in her hand as she hurried towards the stairs.

The shadows loomed but Helena refused to let herself look at them, counting each step, hand pressed against the banister and then along the wall, focusing on the amber pools of light cast by the sconces, until she reached her room.

In her absence, it had been aired out. The bed stripped, linens changed. The air was almost as cold as it had been outside, but the windows were closed and locked again.

Helena was drenched and freezing but Ferron might realise he’d left the newspaper and come for it. She had no time to waste.

She huddled near the window where the light was strongest, her eyes drinking in every word, starting at the very top. NOVEMbrIS 1788.

She stared at the date in shock. That couldn’t be right. Her last memory with a clear date was the hearing about Lila Bayard resuming paladin duties and returning to combat early in 1786.

If the war had ended fourteen months ago, that would have been in late summer of 1787.

Which meant that she had no memory of nearly nineteen months of the war.

It blurred out of focus when she tried to think back, to remember anything more than the hospital shifts.

She had no recollection of anything, not of conversation or the seasons, or Lumithia’s Ascendance and Abeyance, of anything but the endless loop of shift after shift in the hospital, like an eternal scream.

She squeezed her eyes shut, racking her brain. There must be something. She couldn’t have lost that much, but it was like trying to catch the wind with her fingers. A sharp pain splintered through her skull.

She blinked, vision flickering red as her eyes opened.

There was a newspaper in her hands.

She clutched it tightly. She had to read quickly before Ferron noticed she’d taken it. Her eyes raced to the first article.

The last fugitive of the extremist group calling themselves the Order of the Eternal Flame has been apprehended and faces interrogation.

New Paladia’s Central office has confirmed the identity of Helena Marino, a foreign alchemy student from the southern islands of Etras.

The Etrasian government denies any involvement in or support of the Eternal Flame’s terrorist activities.

To protect the citizens of New Paladia from further violence, Marino has been imprisoned outside the city at Spirefell while her fate is decided.

Spirefell, the renowned Ferron estate, was built of iron by Urius Ferron. With a unique structure, built as a celebration of the family’s exceptional resonance, the house makes a secure location for dangerous prisoners.

The Ferrons, one of New Paladia’s oldest families, have a history in the region that predates the Holdfasts.

They were frequent victims of the Eternal Flame’s persecution.

Iron Guildmaster Atreus Ferron was arrested and executed for speaking against the Holdfasts’ oppressive regime, and his son, Kaine Ferron, was baselessly accused of assassinating Principate Apollo Holdfast. All charges against father and son were later dropped …

Ferron had been accused of killing the Principate? The assassination responsible for causing the war?

She stared at the words until they blurred.

She remembered Principate Apollo’s death.

He was found brutally murdered in the Alchemy Institute’s commons, and an investigation had immediately been opened.

She didn’t remember there being any conclusion.

There’d been so much happening at the time: the funeral, the preparations for Luc to be crowned Principate.

What should have been a joyous occasion was shrouded by grief and shock, Luc in denial even as his friends were swearing oaths to die protecting him.

The ceremony was barely over before the sedition and the Undying, and the war that never seemed to end.

Had Ferron killed Principate Apollo? Surely not, he would have been only sixteen. Perhaps the claim had been fabricated to further portray the Ferron family as victims of the Holdfasts? That seemed more likely.

She read the rest of the article, hoping for more information but finding simply a reiteration of the Undying’s usual narrative about the war: that they had not started it; that in fact there had never been a “war” but instead civil unrest caused by a small group of religious extremists who refused to acknowledge the democratically elected Paladian Guild Assembly.

It made Luc out to be a power-hungry monster who’d tried to burn down the entire city rather than let anyone else have it.

Luc, who’d gone up onto the roof of the Alchemy Tower the night before becoming Principate, standing alone on the very edge.

Helena had followed him and stood as close as she dared, promising him that she would do anything for him if he would just step back and take her hand.

He hadn’t listened, not until she swore that if he jumped, then she would, too. He’d stepped back to save her.

They’d sat together there on the roof until sunrise.

She’d gripped his hand and talked the whole night, telling him about Etras, the cliffs, and the little villages with the donkeys pulling painted carts, the olives, all the farms, and the sea on summer days.

They’d go there someday, she told him. Once everything was better, she’d take him and he’d see how beautiful it was.

Luc had never wanted to be Principate. If there had been anyone else, he would have given it up in a heartbeat.

Helena turned the page of the newspaper, blinking hard.

A column within listed executions performed by the High Reeve the previous week. There was a picture of wretched-looking men and women on their knees on a platform. Dressed all in black, with an intricate helmet obscuring his face and hair, stood Ferron, one pale hand outstretched.

She could tell it was Ferron just by his posture and the familiar tilt of his long fingers, but the article only referred to him as the High Reeve.

There was no reference anywhere to Kaine Ferron being the High Reeve.

Was that a secret?

Who would benefit from that? If the deteriorating condition of the estate was anything to go by, it was not the Ferrons.

No. Morrough must be responsible. After all, keeping the High Reeve’s identity hidden provided the High Necromancer with an exceptionally powerful tool.

If the High Reeve could be anyone, people were kept paranoid, always wondering.

It would also prevent Ferron from gathering his own followers or accumulating enough power to overthrow Morrough.

Perhaps Ferron had ambitions that Morrough feared. That was a tantalising possibility. Something Helena might take advantage of.

It also made Spirefell the perfect trap. If anyone tried to save Helena, they would assume they were attacking a guild heir; they’d have no idea who her captor truly was.

She read the rest of the paper quickly. There were some vague allu sions to grain shortages.

It was strange. The countries on both sides of Paladia were significant agricultural exporters.

The Novis monarchy had historical ties with the Holdfasts, so an embargo by Novis was predictable, but Hevgoss, their western neighbour and a heavily militaristic country, had been angling for better trade agreements with the guilds for decades.

The Holdfasts had always blocked the negotiations, refusing to have alchemy used for industrialised warfare. Guilds found to be violating the trade restrictions with Hevgoss had their access to lumithium cut off, preventing them from alchemical processing on an industrial scale.

Why wouldn’t Hevgoss be pouring grain into Paladia now?

The political section of the paper was almost funny in a horrible way.

The Guild Assembly, whose formation was ostensibly the reason for the war, was three weeks into negotiations over the lift fare, as if New Paladia had nothing more urgent to do before the hibernal solstice ushered in the new year.

More interesting was a paragraph mentioning that a Paladian envoy had arrived at the Eastern Empire and been permitted to cross the border. It was the first time any Paladians had been allowed into the Eastern Empire in several hundred years. Was that where that traitor Shiseo had been headed?

Helena mostly skipped the society pages, but she couldn’t help noticing how often Aurelia Ferron’s name was mentioned. Quite the socialite, it seemed.

Then an editorial caught her eye. It was almost innocuous, describing the current labour shortage and lamenting the recent loss of so many talented alchemists in the “conflict” caused by the Eternal Flame.

There were statistics presented about how Paladia’s economy was expected to continue to shrink due to a multigenerational loss of alchemists.

The solution, the author declared, was sponsored births.

The article suddenly stopped being editorial and read more like an advertisement.

The head of the new science and alchemy department at Central, Irmgard Stroud, was heading up a program to bolster the next generation of alchemists using new scientific selection methods to give them the best start.

Volunteers were wanted. Participants would be provided food and lodgings, and upon completion of the program, those with criminal convictions would be eligible for retrial.

Helena read the editorial several times, hardly able to believe what she was seeing. It was a breeding program being passed off as an economic solution. As if alchemists were dogs to mate in pursuit of economically desirable transmutation abilities.