Page 181 of Alchemised

“Pol,” Lila said, nuzzling her face in his messy blond hair, “this is your godmother, Helena. Do you remember that I told you about her? She was one of your father’s best friends.

She always looked out for him and me, and now—” Lila swallowed.

“Now she’s going to help look out for you.

Isn’t that nice? She came here with Ferron.

You might not remember him, but you met him when you were smaller. ”

Pol peered through Lila’s hair at Helena, with Luc’s dancing eyes, and it was like meeting Luc again—the young version of him that she’d watched vanish.

Her throat closed, and she struggled to speak. “Hello, Pol, I’m glad to finally meet you.”

Pol snorted and covered his face with his hand.

“He’ll warm up to you soon,” Lila said. “Never met a living creature he hasn’t wanted to be best friends with.”

“He looks so much like Luc,” was all Helena could think to say. Her heart was beginning to pound, and she couldn’t hear what Lila was saying, something about teething. Kaine’s voice abruptly broke in.

“I think Helena needs to rest.”

Lila’s expression froze, but then she looked more closely at Helena and nodded. “Right. Pol and I need to feed the chickens. Come on, chappy.”

Helena watched them head out the door, Lila moving easily again. She looked at Kaine and almost jumped.

His hair was brown, nearly as dark as it used to be. It made him look starker, given the contrast with his pale skin and eyes. He was dressed in common clothes, brown trousers and a rough-spun shirt. He looked entirely out of place. No one would ever look at him and believe he was a farmer.

“You don’t like it,” he said, touching his hair.

She couldn’t stop staring. “It’s not what I’m used to,” she said, almost wanting to laugh as she reached out, touching it, remembering when it had first started to lose its colour. “I’m going to miss the silver.”

“It’ll wash out. You’ll still see it sometimes.”

He said that, but she didn’t see Kaine much at all. Helena stayed inside the house; when she stepped out, the open and stillness unsettled her. After spending so much time in danger and on the move, the ordinariness of the cottage felt surreal.

Kaine and Lila seemed to alternate who was inside with her. When Lila was with Helena, he went out and would only reappear when Lila took Pol outside.

Helena assumed he was busy making final arrangements until Lila mentioned that he was in the stable. That he was always in the stable.

Hearing it, Helena immediately hurried outside, pausing only a moment before entering the shadowy interior.

Just as Lila had said, he was sitting on the floor in the stable, and Amaris was lying down, her enormous head resting on his lap.

He didn’t look up when she entered; he was rubbing his hand through Amaris’s fur behind her ears.

“I should put her down,” he said softly. “It would be kindest. She won’t understand if I leave her behind.”

Helena’s chest clenched as she came closer.

“You said she can hunt for herself,” she said.

He nodded. “But the transmutations on her will wear off over time. It’ll kill her eventually, like it did all the rest, assuming someone else doesn’t first. And if she’s seen in this area, it could point to us, where we went.”

“Has there been any word?”

“None that’s reached this far south.”

Helena looked down at Amaris. “She’s done growing, isn’t she? Maybe she won’t need help as much anymore. She might be fine on her own.”

He was silent for a long time. “It’s not worth the risk.”

Helena’s throat tightened. “I don’t think it’s fair not to give her a chance. We wouldn’t be here without her.”

“She’s just an animal.”

Helena said nothing, because he wasn’t saying it to her. She could tell this was an argument he’d been spending days making with himself. Amaris lifted her head and gave a low whine and licked across Kaine’s entire face. He grimaced and pushed her nose away.

He sighed, tilting his head back. “I’ve killed so many people,” he finally said. “I never thought I’d get stuck on an animal of all things.”

The morning they left, Kaine got up silently and went out to the stable while Lila was packing up the last few things she wanted to bring. Helena sat tense as he disappeared inside, her stomach twisting into a sick knot.

A minute later he came back out. He stood there, staring up at the sky for so long that her heart began to pound in her chest. When finally he came back inside, he stopped behind her.

“Someday,” he said softly, resting a hand on her shoulder, “your mercy is going to have consequences.”

She held his hand in place. “There’s blood enough on both our hands without adding hers.”

He squeezed her shoulder.

“Bayard,” he said after a minute. “It’s time to go.”

T HE SEA WAS WILD AND roiling even at its lowest and calmest ebb. The port was crowded with people arriving and departing. There were false identity papers waiting for the group at the postal service in the port town.

Helena had forgotten how different the world could be.

There was such consistency in fashion and feature in the North, she’d grown accustomed to it, but a port city during the Abeyance was a melting pot with sailors and travellers from every country across the sea, taking advantage of the annual opportunity to travel between the continents in a week rather than months.

There were enough Northerners that Kaine and Lila blended in, while Helena disappeared among the many Etrasians.

She hadn’t seen so much dark, curly hair and olive skin since she’d left Etras.

It was shocking to hear Etrasian casually spoken, and to realise that it had been so long, she struggled now to follow it.

They descended the cliffs to the boarding wharf, and Helena clung to Kaine’s hand in a near death grip as their papers were approved and tickets stamped.

The deck of the ship was crowded. Lila was so terrified that Pol would be knocked into the sea that they went inside to look out from the windows rather than standing on the bow.

Helena’s heart hammered inside her chest, bracing for someone to recognise one of them. To hear a raised voice calling their names.

Kaine sat tense and wary. She could feel his resonance tracking her heartbeat as his thumb moved in slow circles across her palm, keeping her grounded. Amid the clamour, a loud Northern voice rose from the table beside them.

“Trying to get as much oil across as I can before the new war starts. The liberators will pay out of the nose for it once they hit Paladia.”

Lila whirled. “What war?”

Kaine’s fingers twitched, tightening around Helena’s wrist. Amid the preparations and attempts at keeping the peace, Helena had avoided mentioning what she and Kaine had left behind when fleeing.

A Northerner with a large moustache and sideburns looked at Lila. “You don’t read the papers? That High Reeve of Paladia is finally gone. Novis and the other countries are expected to be moving in any day. It’s been in all the news lately.”

Lila’s face seemed to drain of colour. “Do you have a paper?”

The man reached into the pocket of his frock coat and pulled a pamphlet out.

“See? There’ll be a lot of machinery going in, dealing with all those corpses and whatever else those necromancers have cooked up.

They’ll need oil. If I get to Khem and back before the Abeyance, I’ll make a fortune, but even if I take the land route, if I get the first order in, it’ll still pay out.

You should’ve seen how much opium was going for a few years back.

” His moustache rose. “There’s nothing to rival war for money. ”

They were all too distracted clustering around the newspaper to reply. It wasn’t a proper paper with full articles but instead a bulletin, the kind popular among businessmen.

At the very top the first bulletin read in bold, HIGH REEVE DEAD , and then in smaller text, The world breathes a sigh of relief at reports that the steel magnate and iron guild heir Kaine Ferron, better known to the world as the High Reeve, was killed in the most recent Resistance attack, crippling the Undying regime.

Helena clutched at Kaine’s hand.

In the next bulletin were the words ETERNAL FLAME BANNERS RISE AGAIN: AS THE COUNTRIES UNITE AGAINST PALADIA, SOME DO SO IN REMEMbrANCE .

Lila finally spoke. “Did you know this was happening?”

Kaine said nothing.

Helena answered quietly, reaching across to squeeze Lila’s now bare wrist. “We knew that there was an alliance developing, but we didn’t know how fast it would move, or if they’d believe news of the death.”

Lila sat back, clutching Pol in her arms, but she was looking out the window, back towards the mainland as the ship horns sounded, signalling cast-off.

Lila kept shaking her head. “I had no idea.”

H ELENA WAS SEASICK FOR MOST of the journey, the pregnancy making what would have been mild symptoms much worse.

She still felt green when they arrived on one of the major trade islands.

Kaine offered to get a room at an inn and complete the journey the next day, but Helena knew he wanted to leave as little trace of their journey behind as possible.

The fewer places they stopped, the fewer people they spoke to, the harder they’d be to track down.

They took a bus across the island. It was so different from the North.

The city sprawling rather than climbing vertically as Paladia did.

Stonework was a world apart from architecture utilising alchemy.

They rode in a cart across a sea road leading to their destination.

The sea road was an immense causeway built up and paved smooth to allow crossing to the island during most of the monthly low tides.

With the Abeyance dragging the tides away completely, the seabed lay bare, far below the causeway.

There were people wandering across it, gathering whatever treasures the tide had left.