Page 29 of Alchemised

H ELENA KNEW SHE WAS ABOUT TO BE dragged out of the room, but rather than stand, she turned back to the array, wanting to unravel at least a fragment of it.

Her life was an incomprehensible mystery enough.

Rather than pull her from the room, Ferron came and stood watching as she tried to make sense of the symbols on the floor.

After failing at one, she tried the next, and then another.

It took a minute before she realised that they’d all been meticulously defaced to obscure any trace of what they’d originally been.

Unsolvable puzzles seemed fated to be her primary occupation.

She looked up at Ferron in resignation.

He was glaring at her. “It’s impressive how determined you are to be difficult.”

“Were you expecting something else?” she asked with a loose shrug.

He didn’t answer, but there was a hardening fury visible around his eyes.

She stared at him, calm enough to glimpse at what was beneath: a sea of seething rage. There was something about this room that he seemed particularly averse to. If she was lucky, maybe he’d snap her neck.

She looked over towards the cage. “Keep a lot of people in cages, Ferron?”

His jaw clenched, throat dipping as he swallowed.

“Only you,” he said, glancing around at the intricate, iron interior of his ancestral home. “Haven’t you noticed?”

Helena’s lip curled and she stood. She’d hoped to needle him, but he’d already seen through it. Better to behave so he’d leave her alone.

She walked out into the main hall, expecting to find the necrothrall waiting, placid as always. Instead, the woman was all the way across the room, clouded eyes wide as if in fear. The necrothrall’s lips moved, mouthing something silently as she looked at Ferron.

Kaine, Helena realised. The woman was saying Ferron’s name over and over.

Ferron gave a sharp flick of his hand, and the woman fled.

Helena watched her disappear, feeling a vague sense of guilt. “Don’t hurt her.”

“She’s dead,” Ferron said coolly as he closed the door. She heard it lock from within, and then the iron in the wall screeched, warping. The door would not reopen for anyone without iron resonance. “She can’t be hurt.”

He said it almost glibly, but Helena suspected he was not as indifferent as he tried to appear.

Helena rounded on him. “Why keep them?”

He shrugged. “It’s hard to find good staff nowadays.”

Her eyes narrowed. “How long have you had them?”

His mouth split into a grin. “Interested in keeping a few of your own? I doubt necromancy would agree with you.”

She lifted her chin, watching him archly. “You’re avoiding the question.”

His eyes flickered, but he shook his head. “I’ve reanimated so many, I don’t keep track anymore. Now, are you done in this wing, or are you still holding out hope that there are weapons lying around for you to find?”

She refused to rise to his baiting; a trick like that didn’t work when she was drugged. He was usually so direct, it was interesting to catch him being evasive.

“I assumed I was allowed in any rooms I found unlocked. Aurelia never said I shouldn’t go anywhere, just to keep out of sight.”

“Well,” he said, fingers spanning her lower back as he pushed her firmly away from the now warped door.

“I doubt Aurelia would feel much disappointment if you met an unfortunate end. It might spell my demise as well, and then she’d be a wealthy widow, free to conduct her tawdry affairs even more publicly than she already does. ”

Helena eyed him appraisingly as they walked. “You don’t care?”

He didn’t look at her. “I was commanded to marry her, so I married her. I was never commanded to care.”

Helena stopped in her tracks. “You sound as enslaved as I am.”

He paused and turned slowly to face her. “Are you trying to provoke me? Or sway my allegiance?” He gave a dark chuckle. “How terribly audacious of you.”

“You’ve already thought it,” she said, relishing how clearly she was able to think when she wasn’t overcome with the need to scan and watch for every shadow, when she wasn’t perpetually suffocating. “If you hadn’t, you’d be offended right now.”

He seemed momentarily impressed by her drug-induced bravado, but then glanced dismissively away. “It’s a pity the way you wasted yourself.”

She wasn’t sure she followed the line of thought but responded anyway. “Luc was worth it.”

“Why?”

The question caught her off guard. She shook her head. “Some people just are. You look at them, and you know it.”

“Blind adoration, then,” he said, turning to walk away.

“It wasn’t blind. I chose him,” she said.

He stepped back, and something about his expression sharpened. “Did you? Remind me, how many other choices were there?”

Her hand curled into a fist, the scars in her palm pressing against her fingertips. “Not many, I admit, but I knew whose fault that was.”

He began circling her idly. “You think the guilds invented the divide between us and the Eternal Flame? The Holdfasts claimed all their preferences were divinely moral and treated any concessions as a violation of their consciences; where exactly did that leave the wants and needs of the rest of us? When anything we wanted became a sin or form of vice simply because it inconvenienced them for us to have it? All we did was become what they’d already convinced themselves we were.

Ignoble and corrupt.” He stopped, hands clasped behind his back.

“You think it was an accident that we hated sponsored students like you? If we hadn’t, how would they have kept you so lonely and desperately grateful to them? ”

She shook her head. It wasn’t true. The guilds were the ones who’d started it.

Luc had always tried to see the best in everyone.

To him, his family’s responsibilities were a weight he’d had no choice but to accept for the sake of everyone else.

He’d tried to solve the problems that plagued the city, but none of the solutions were ever good enough for the guilds.

Ferron was a snake, trying to present himself as though he were on Helena’s side. As if her morality were dictated based on who was nicest to her.

She looked at him in disbelief, but after a moment the vague emotion faded, her attention drawn away by new questions. Staring up at him, she couldn’t help but wonder again at what he was.

He would have been sixteen when he murdered Principate Apollo. Something like that should have been enough to become one of the Undying, but Ferron did not look sixteen.

Overlooking his colouring, his general appearance was that of someone in their twenties.

Yet if his ascendance was so recent, he should look more aged by the years of war.

He was almost pristine, as though all the death and destruction he’d caused had never touched him.

The only sign that he’d even seen battle was his eyes: There was a hollow rage lurking behind them that she’d only ever seen in those who’d spent a long time at the front lines.

As if Ferron had any reason for that kind of anger.

Even locked out from her emotions, the hatred Helena felt for him was an inescapable structure in her mind.

Why do any of it? He didn’t seem to find any enjoyment in what he did. There’d been many sadistic Undying who fought in the war; Helena had cared for their victims. Ferron seemed devoted to brutal efficiency and yet seemed to derive neither pleasure nor benefit from it.

As High Reeve, he was merely a weapon, not permitted the prestige of his abilities. He was the only anonymous figure; no one else was kept hidden behind a title.

That must chafe, particularly when the rest of the Undying were filling their days with debauchery while Ferron still lived at the beck and call of the High Necromancer. Obedient as a dog.

What did he gain from it? Surely he was too intelligent to be so void of ambition. He had to be playing a long game. And if Helena could only deduce it, that would give her leverage, a means of manipulating him.

Or perhaps that was merely Helena’s vanity distorting her assessments—needing her captor to be cunning, because how pathetic was she, as his prisoner, if he was not?

She opened her mouth, wanting to prod, but reconsidered.

He smirked. “Analysing me again?”

Before she could reply, the sharp click of hurrying heels echoed down the hall. Helena moved to disappear, but Aurelia had already swept around the corner, her expression eager until she caught sight of Ferron.

Her eyes instantly narrowed, her lips pursing as she drew up, looking accusingly at them. The ringlets framing her face trembled.

“Are we all socialising together now?” she asked, her voice like sweetened arsenic.

“Just touring the house,” Ferron said, gesturing idly around the large hall, which was full of dusty portraits and busts of men who’d presumably been important members of the family.

Aurelia’s lips pressed together, turning white.

“I thought you had business today. You said your afternoon was quite full when I asked you to stop by the fundraiser.” She tossed her head, the perfect curls bouncing like springs.

“And yet”—she was speaking through clenched teeth—“here you are, ‘touring the house.’ I thought we weren’t beholden to the Eternal Flame anymore. ”

Helena stood very still.

Ferron’s eyes flicked upwards for a moment. “The High Necromancer was quite clear that this assignment takes precedence over everything else. Those are my orders.”

Aurelia gave a sharp, shattering laugh. “But you’ve already killed the rest of the Eternal Flame, so why does she matter?”

“Whatever the High Necromancer wishes to be done, I fulfil,” Ferron said with the impatience of someone who’d had this argument many times already. “If he wanted handmade paper clips, I’d do that with equal devotion.”

He wasn’t even looking at his wife anymore. His gaze passed over Aurelia’s head, staring at a mirror that reflected himself and Helena.