Page 30 of Alchemised

“Ah, and that’s supposed to explain why you spend so much time with her.

And when you’re not, it’s the thralls following her.

” Aurelia scoffed. “As if she’ll disappear otherwise.

” She cast a hateful glare at Helena. “There’s no need to act as if she’s anything precious.

I asked Stroud, and she told me: She was a nobody.

No one’s coming for her, but you’re still hovering about like you’re hoarding her. ”

Ferron gave a dark laugh, and a glint entered his eyes as they dropped from the mirror to Aurelia. Uncertainty flashed across her face, as if she was caught off guard by the weight of his attention.

“I thought you didn’t want to lay eyes on her, Aurelia.” The way he said his wife’s name was unnervingly intimate.

Aurelia flushed, the colour rising from her neck and staining her cheeks.

Ferron stepped towards her. “If you feel that I’m hoarding her, keeping her all to myself, perhaps I should include you more.

She could have dinner with us. I could move her into our wing of the house, bring her when we visit the city.

Perhaps we should have included her in that solstice photo that you bought. ”

Aurelia was turning paler and paler.

“The world already knows she’s mine,” Ferron said, his words pointed, “but if you’d like, I can remind them. I wouldn’t want you to think I’m hiding anything, my dear.”

Aurelia trembled as if on the verge of imploding.

“I don’t care what you do with her, just keep her out of my sight!” She turned on her heel, storming away.

Ferron stared after her with a look of annoyance, then turned and directed his scowl at Helena.

“You irritate my wife,” he said.

“Seems I do,” she said blandly. “If you want to do something about it, you could kill me.”

He snorted, amusement lighting his face for an instant.

“Those tablets really do a number on you.”

“I feel like I can breathe again,” she said, wishing she could feel this calm without being frozen. “Like I’d been drowning so long, I’d forgotten what oxygen feels like.” Then she grimaced. “The withdrawal leaves something to be desired, though.”

“Well, I’m not the one to blame for that.” He turned to walk on. “Besides, if I didn’t leave you on the floor retching, you might make the mistake of thinking I care.”

Helena inclined her head. “Yes. You seem strangely concerned about me thinking such a thing.”

Ferron froze for an instant, then turned back, a cruel smile thawing his face. “Your friends must have thought very little of you, if this seems like care.”

Helena was so stunned by his words, she felt her heart try to beat faster.

“Yes, they did,” she said quickly. “Of course they cared.”

He tilted his head. “Who?”

She swallowed. “Luc, and Lila, and—” There was a name on the tip of her tongue, but her mind seemed to swerve around it until she focused. “And S-Soren. Lila’s twin brother. He was—he was my friend, too.”

How had she forgotten Soren? She barely had time to wonder. Ferron seemed to be waiting for more names.

“Ilva Holdfast, Luc’s great-aunt. She advocated for me when my vivimancy was discovered. And—and Matron Pace. She managed the hospital.”

Ferron still seemed to be waiting, and it upset her so much that her anger broke through for an instant.

“Having a vivimancer as part of the Eternal Flame wasn’t something everyone was going to be comfortable with.

Especially since I was— foreign. It was too much for some people.

I didn’t have the same kinds of connections that others did.

If there’d been problems, it could have—it could have undermined Luc. ”

He raised an eyebrow. “Well, you seem to have it all very thoroughly rationalised for yourself. Congratulations. It was clearly all worth it in the end.”

He flashed an insincere smile and walked away.

Helena was tempted to fling a marble bust after him and ask exactly who cared about him. His own father wanted to disown him, his wife couldn’t stand him, and he couldn’t even keep living staff on to run his house.

If she hadn’t been drugged, she would have, but she was rational enough to know it was pointless, and her time was limited.

The necrothralls appeared and vanished like ghosts as she resumed her exploration. When she finished with the east wing, she fetched her cloak and gloves, determined to spend her remaining time on the outbuildings.

The sky was unusually clear, a stark winter blue. The reborn sun was a pale golden disc, too feeble for much warmth but a comfort to see.

The garden shed was locked. The next building was a small iron forge.

Locked too. Hardly surprising. So were the connecting storehouses.

She tried the stable, feeling the eyes of the necrothralls on her as she tested the large sliding doors and found them locked.

She tugged at them a few more times, wishing they’d give.

She’d always liked horses. They reminded her of the donkeys in Etras that were always nuzzling into people’s pockets with their velvety noses, looking for treats.

Animals were rare on Paladia’s islands. The city was so dense and multi-levelled, there was no place for them except as pets, and there’d been no pets allowed at the Institute.

The highroads became exclusively for motorcars and lorries, and so horses were only brought into the city for ceremonial events and parades.

Luc had the handsomest white destrier named Cobalt, who’d loved carrots but hated the city, and he was always taken back out to the countryside as soon as the summer solstice parade passed. Luc had told her that if she ever visited their country estate, they’d go riding.

Helena tried a smaller stable door around the corner and was surprised when it opened.

She slipped inside. The sweet smell of hay filled the air, and another scent she couldn’t place. She squinted into the dark. All the stalls seemed empty; no stomping or snorting greeted her.

She clicked her tongue and heard shuffling at the far end of the stable. The sound of something very large getting up.

She clicked again and heard a deep, huffed breath, but she couldn’t see anything.

“Hello,” she said tentatively, stepping a little farther in.

The door behind her swung wide open. Bright light spilling in.

She expected Ferron, but it was the two necrothralls from Central shoving their way in.

A snarl—almost a roar—rolled through the darkness. Every hair on Helena’s body rose on end.

There was the sound of a heavy chain being dragged, another snarl, more furious than the first, and Helena saw what was in the shadows. An enormous creature, black as night, lunged towards them.

It was a wolf.

No. Bigger than a wolf. It was larger than a destrier. So immense it seemed to fill the stable.

Grace had said the High Reeve had a monster, but Helena had not taken that literally.

The creature was monstrous. Fangs longer than her fingers flashed in the light. Wind rushed across the room. The smell of blood struck her face as a foaming mouth burst from the shadows, jaws snapping.

There was the sharp sound of a chain reaching its end. Taloned claws scrabbled across the wood floor as the monster lunged again.

The necrothralls grabbed Helena by the hair and dragged her back out into the courtyard, dumping her on the gravel.

Helena scrambled to her feet, heart trying to beat with fear but unable to. She was stunned by what had happened. Her captivity was so rigidly controlled, it was startling to brush with danger.

She couldn’t help but wonder if the stable door being unlocked was also Aurelia’s doing.

The creature was still snarling, and then a low gusting howl emerged, a sound like moaning wind.

She caught her breath and looked back at the necrothralls, who’d both stationed themselves in front of the stable, watching her as the creature inside quieted.

She moved away. The next building was a small, geometric one. Helena tried the door, and it clicked, swinging inwards. As soon as she saw the interior’s five walls, she knew what it was. A chantry.

She stepped inside, letting the door close behind her. Helena had always struggled with the rigidity of Northern religion, but now, at the end of everything, there was a bittersweetness to a place like this.

Paladia had been a culture shock for Helena in many regards.

In Etras, gods didn’t require being believed in any more than the mountains did.

They existed. A person accommodated them respectfully, and sometimes made little offerings and prayers requesting favour, but the gods represented facets of life on Etras, not purpose itself.

Things were different in Paladia. While the ancient gods were said to have required blood for their sacrifices, Sol required life itself, lived out in service to him.

Northerners were expected to devote their every moment in ritual sacrifice so that in death their souls might ascend to the heavens.

Everything revolved around what Sol did or did not allow.

Luc had tried everything to earn the favour Sol had extended to his forefathers. He’d possessed the alchemical gifts, sun-blessed like all the rest, but he never received the miracles his ancestors had enjoyed, which had ensured their triumphs in battle and the riches of their rule.

Luc would have given up all his gifts for one miracle, anything to bring the war to an end, but his prayers were never answered, his devotion never acknowledged.

He’d always blamed himself for that.

If he were still alive, he’d pray even now, but the ritual words stuck in Helena’s throat.

Each wall was for one of the five gods of the Quintessence. The radiant, unconquerable Sol, giver of life, was at the centre, flanked by the rest. The altar brazier that should have been burning ceaselessly with a flame from the eternal fire was cold, its amiantos wick dusty and dry.

The Ferrons had probably had a chantry built for their private worship and interments because that was something the upper classes did—although given the number of spires decorating the house, it did seem that the family had been religious at some point.

Paladians loved decorating in sets of five even though their venerations and celebrations were primarily for Sol and Lumithia.

Along the walls there were dozens of stones with plaques bearing names and dates. With limited land, Paladians kept the ashes of their dead for generations rather than burying them in cemeteries as some countries did.

Despite the visible neglect, the chantry was not entirely abandoned. One plaque was brighter than the rest, carefully polished. It sat beneath the altar of Luna, the lesser moon goddess.

ENID FERRON. ALWAYS BELOVED. A WIFE AND MOTHER.

Based on the celestial dates, she’d died during the war, 1785, three years into Luc’s reign. She must have been Ferron’s mother.

Helena studied the inscription, finding it ironic. However “beloved” Enid Ferron had been by her husband and son, it had not been enough to be granted the immortality they enjoyed.

Then again, the guilds had always been intensely patriarchal.

Ironically, the one thing the guilds thought the Holdfasts weren’t traditional enough about was women.

Girls had been welcomed to study at the Institute for decades.

There were female lecturers, instructors, and board members in the school.

It had been with Principate Apollo’s blessing that Lila Bayard had trained from childhood to become paladin primary.

The guilds, for all their talk of progress and equality, and freedom from rigid traditionalism, had very specific ideas about precisely who deserved that equality and freedom.

A low view of women was common in the North, especially among those of faith. Prior to the pressure exerted by the Principate, the Faith regarded women as categorically lesser, and even after the official distancing occurred, the belief remained pervasive.

It had been viewed as a fact of nature. Men were of Sol, active, hot and dry, full of vitality, and the source of life’s seed.

Women, it followed, were an inferior human form.

Wet and cold, passively bound to the monthly cycle of Luna, the lesser moon.

While their bodies were the necessary vessels for birth, it was their blood that was the source of all defects.

Both vivimancy and necromancy were regarded as a corruption of resonance caused by a “poisonous womb.”

Hence the long-standing obsession with creating homunculi even among the Faith, to erase women’s defective hold on humanity.

However, not all women were doomed to cold passivity.

To avoid such categorisation, a girl could devote herself to the cult of Lumithia, goddess of warfare and alchemy, who’d been born from the heart of Sol.

Women associated with Lumithia were not expected to be traditional; they could be alchemists, surgeons, paladins, anything.

But there was a price. Were they to marry or bear children, they had to give it all up. Lumithia was a virgin goddess. Mothers and married women were not welcome at her altar.

When Helena was done exploring, she stayed outside despite the cold, watching the winter sun sink behind the mountains.

The stars appeared in the night sky, shining briefly before the moons rose.

Luna first, a deformed quarter moon in the far horizon with her soft light, ushering in a gentle twilight.

Then Lumithia rose. She was a waning crescent, but still more than double Luna’s size and so bright it hurt to stare directly at her.

She ascended into the sky like a white sun, the constellations vanishing behind her light until only the planets and a few stars remained visible in the black abyss of sky. Glimmers fine as diamond dust.