Page 185 of Alchemised

H ELENA SAT IN BED, COUNTING HER DAUGHTER’S fingers and toes, studying the tiny fingernails and the squashed profile. Lila had rubbed the vernix in thoroughly and swaddled the baby with expert speed before giving her back to Helena.

The matted brown hair was beginning to dry and stand in little tufts around her soft head.

“Looks like she got my hair,” Helena said as she looked up, smiling.

Kaine was standing almost as far from her as he could without going for the door.

She stared at him in confusion. He had barely left her side for weeks, but now he looked cornered.

“Kaine … come and see her.”

He swallowed. “Helena—”

“She’s your daughter.”

The muscle in his jaw jumped. “Yes. I know. I remember how it happened.”

The smile on Helena’s face vanished.

She looked down, the silence in the room so heavy that she felt as though she were being crushed by it. Some wounds would never heal, and sometimes she felt that she and Kaine had a nearly lethal number of that variety.

“I think I should go.”

“Come here,” Helena said, not giving him a moment to interpret her silence as agreement. Her voice was hard and flat.

He exhaled, his eyes despairing, as though his heart were being carved out of his chest, but he didn’t move.

“Kaine … come here,” she said forcefully.

He swallowed and stepped closer.

“We didn’t have any choice. You didn’t. But that’s over now. We said we’d start over when we ran away. That’s what we’re doing now. She’s never going to know that world.”

Kaine was looking anywhere but at the baby.

“She’s not going to hurt you, and you’re not going to hurt her.”

“Helena.” His voice was strained. “I’m not supposed to have this life. Paladia is drowning in the blood I’ve spilled. You think that doesn’t include children? Killing is the only thing I’ve ever done well. Do you really want someone like that near your daughter?”

Helena froze, staring at him, and finally looked down. “You didn’t have any choice,” she said. “And it’s not all you’ve done. You saved me. You saved Lila and Pol. We—we did what we had to, to survive. But we get to be better than that now. We’ll do it for her.”

He finally dragged his eyes from the far wall.

Their daughter’s silver eyes peered up at them. Her hair had dried into a halo of brown curls. Her face was squashed from birth, and both her hands had escaped swaddling and were up near her face. She was aggressively sucking on the knuckles of her right hand.

She was the loveliest thing Helena had ever seen.

“Look at her. She’s ours. She’s all ours. You’re not going to hurt her.”

Kaine was frozen as he stared at her. He’d stopped breathing, and his fingers spasmed, trembling as he finally reached out. He barely brushed the baby’s palm, as if he thought his touch might poison or break her. The tiny hand instantly closed around his finger, gripping it.

Helena watched him and recognised the expression that slowly filled his eyes as he stared at the tiny person tenaciously clinging to him: possessive adoration.

E NID R OSE F ERRON WAS, ACCORDING to Lila, the easiest baby ever born. The older she grew, the more she looked like Helena, except for her eyes, which were, in colour and angle, just like Kaine’s and the grandmother that she was named for.

She slept beautifully and rarely cried. She would sleep for hours in her overly indulgent father’s arms, snoozing on his chest as he watched Helena work in the kitchen or in the little laboratory set up in one of the outbuildings.

Enid possessed the solemn curiosity of an owl, head swivelling as she observed everyone around her. Helena would carry her in a sling, tucked against her chest, where she could wrap her arms tightly and protectively around Enid’s tiny body when the shadows grew too long.

Once Enid could safely sit up, she would spend half the day sitting on Kaine’s shoulders, riding about with him while he walked the perimeter of the property over and over, checking all the buildings and visiting Amaris, who would vibrate with excitement but hold utterly still when Enid tugged her ears and patted her.

Kaine talked to Enid more than he talked to anyone, even Helena.

He would monologue to her about everything: the trees, the sea, the tide and moons, alchemy techniques and array theories, what the weather might be, and Enid listened to him intently, fretting if he got distracted or fell silent for too long.

When the next summer Abeyance arrived, it brought news from the North, detailing the siege currently in progress, how the city was being starved into compliance as demands of surrender were ignored.

They were all relieved when the Abeyance ended and there was no more unspoken question hanging in the air of whether they could or should do something more.

Enid might have been a perfect child, if not for the terrible influence of Apollo Holdfast.

The instant Enid could walk, the idyllic quiet of the island was forever shattered. The two children tore through the house, shrieking and shouting, oblivious to the ways their parents flinched and started at sudden noise.

From Pol, Enid learned to climb hills and trees, tearing her clothes to bits scrambling down the cliffs. She made mud pies and soups and “healing” potions in jars stolen from the kitchen. She learned to wrestle, and to fight with the play swords that Lila had made to teach Pol combat basics.

Pol planned to be a warrior someday, and Enid wanted to be one, too. Both children held Lila in high esteem because she was a warrior with a metal leg, which they found significantly more interesting than their own legs.

Pol showed an early and exceptional proficiency for pyromancy.

Then Enid, apparently not to be outdone, healed Pol’s lip after he split it open running into a door.

Helena was horrified by the early manifestation, but Lila reassured her that she had been similarly young when her abilities began making intermittent appearances.

Enid was reading by the time news came that Paladia had finally surrendered.

The allies had poured into the city, securing and dispatching necrothralls so stick-thin and malnourished that they scarcely put up a fight.

There were stories about the conditions found there, of citizens so starved that they were mistaken for necrothralls as they swarmed the liberating soldiers, begging for food.

By all accounts, it was an exceptionally successful campaign, with few casualties for the allied armies. The Liberation Front was ceaselessly praised for bringing the tyranny of the Undying to an end.

But Helena felt sick reading of it, overcome by a sense of betrayal.

How different it could have been if the international community had decided to put even a negligible amount of effort into caring sooner.

If Hevgoss and Novis had been less concerned over which of them would control Paladia afterwards.

They’d all bided their time, waiting until the situation grew intolerable for them, and only striking after their victory was assured, and still somehow they were heroic.

In the papers, all the horror stories about the conditions inside the city, described in lurid detail, were only shared to highlight what the Paladians had been saved from, rather than as an admonishment of what they’d been left to endure.

Morrough was not among the casualties or captives. Somehow he remained alive in the caves beneath the Institute, and after a few failed attempts to breach the underground, the Liberation Front left him there, hoping he would die on his own.

With the “liberation” out of the way, the focus of the allies turned to the urgent matter of getting Paladia economically productive once more, with debates raging about what Paladia should look like in the future, whether it should exist at all or perhaps become a shared territory that Hevgoss and Novis would collaboratively control.

Trials were expected to begin soon. The international community denied any knowledge of the forced labour on the Outpost, or that all the industrially vital lumithium had been extracted by necrothralls for the last several years.

However, they couldn’t deny knowledge of the repopulation program, so instead they insisted that as far as they knew, participation had been voluntary.

At some point in the siege or seizure of the city, Stroud had disappeared.

When the women began to be released from the Tower, stories about the program began to emerge—the abuse and torture that Stroud had permitted, and the children born and subjected to experimentation to study early-childhood resonance and how it developed—but they were regarded as too horrifying for print.

Most of the focus was on the forced labour on the Outpost and the mines and the malnutrition among the surviving civilian population.

There was pressure for the matter of the repopulation program to be quietly resolved.

The women urged to move on rather than be retraumatised in court; hysterical unmarried mothers could hardly be expected to provide admissible testimonies.

It was a stain upon the Northern identity that such atrocities had occurred, and so it was treated as some evil and twisted idea that had sprung from the Undying’s regime, as if selective breeding had not been long rooted in guild culture.

No, there would be convents for the mothers and, for the children, an orphanage where they could grow up to become productive members of society. And so it could all be forgotten.

Kaine was the only one who didn’t seem surprised at how things unfolded. Helena was so upset that she was sick for days, and Lila started to disappear, leaving Pol with Helena and Enid for long periods.

After the children were in bed one night, Lila came into the kitchen where Helena was working on a chymiatria project that she hoped might help to manage her heart.