Page 110 of Quicksilver

Find the forge. Hah. Easier said than done. It took me thirty minutes to locate my new workspace, and by the time I did so, I was sweating, out of breath, and ready to throw some punches. The forge, Fisher had neglected to mention, was located halfway up the small hillside behind the war camp, and the path that led up to it was so steep that I had to use my hands to scramble up the rock face in places.

There was a fire already cracking and spitting in the hearth when I arrived, thank the gods, and all of my equipment from Cahlish was set out on a wooden workbench. The space constituted little more than a barn, but I was grateful for it. From way up here, I could see across the whole war camp. And it was quiet. I was alone. The peace and solitude would give me time to think. I got to work.

Again, Kingfisher had hidden the tiny amount of quicksilver I was to work with. I scouted around the forge, rifling through rotting wooden boxes full of copper coins, and in cupboards and on shelves, but it was nowhere to be found. After going over theplace twice, I stood at the bench, working to calm my spiking temper, and I listened. The voice was just a whisper. Quiet and distant. I almost mistook it for the breeze. But no. As I angled my head and closed my eyes, homing in on it, I finally worked out which direction it was in: to the east. Outside of the forge. Further up the mountain.

“Damn him,” I muttered, trudging up the sharp incline. For every step I took, I slipped back three. The soles of my boots had very little tread on them, and so much fresh snow had fallen during the night that the ground was treacherous. I'd landed hard on my knees and slid back down the hill on my ass twice before I made it to the small, rocky plateau a hundred feet above the forge.

Carrion was there, waiting for me. He sat in the mouth of a cave, happily tending to a fire while reading a book. “Did you know, the Yvelian Fae are the youngest of the Fae houses? By a thousand years. There was a dispute between these two brothers, and they splintered off to make their own court.”

I folded my arms over my chest, standing on the other side of the fire in front of him.

“Do you mind? You're blocking the light,” he grumbled.

“How the fuck are you just so okay with all of this?” I demanded. “Ever since you got here, you've justacceptedit all. You didn't know the Fae existed. Suddenly, there are massive fighters with pointed ears and sharp teeth everywhere, and you're just like, okay, yeah, sure, of course there are Fae. Of course there are other realms. Of course there's magic, and vampires, and all kinds of horrifying, terrible things out there that want to kill me. This all makesperfect sense!”

Carrion lowered his book, huffing. “And who said I didn't know about the Fae?”

“What?”

“I knewabout the Fae, Saeris. My grandmother told me.”

“Oh, come on. Be serious. Being told stories when you're a child is one thing. But none of us everbelievedthose stories.”

“I did,” Carrion said matter-of-factly. He dove back into his book. “You've met my grandmother. Does she strike you as the sort of woman who'd spread tales of fantasy and make-believe in her free time?”

Now that I thought about it, he had a point. Gracia Swift was one of the most cut-and-dried, no-nonsense people I'd ever encountered. Even more straightforward than Elroy. She was an engineer, charged with ensuring new buildings in the Third were built on stable foundations. If she'd read books to Carrion at all as a boy, I would have put money on them being mathematical tomes relating to calculations for slope stability, not fanciful stories about made-up creatures.

“She has this book,” he said, holding up the one in his hand as if it were the book in question. “Has all kinds of pictures. Illustrations. The text's faded in places, but she knows that damn thing from cover to cover, so it never mattered. I dare say I know it by heart by now, too. 'Fae creatures of the Gilarian Mountains,' it's called. There's a note written on the first page. It says,'Never forget. Monsters thrive best in the dark. Commit all you read here to memory. Prepare for war!!’Carrion held up his middle finger and his index finger. “Twoexclamation points. The Swifts have always been very serious people. Gracia took the superfluous punctuation to mean that the situation, should these Gilarian Fae creatures ever show their faces, would be very dire indeed. I wasn't allowed to have dessert until I'd recited at least seven traits of the Gryphon sprite or explained in great detail how to kill a blooded Fae Warrior wearing full plate and armor.”

Well, that was unexpected. Where the hell had a book about the Fae come from? Madra had burned any literature that even mentioned the Fae or magic a long time ago. It was a curiousthing—to find out that Carrion had, in a way, been brought up to believe that this would happen to him at some point. I didn't have time to ponder on that now, though.

“Did Fisher send you up here to wait for me?” I asked.

“That's one way of putting it,” Carrion said. “I was fast asleep in my tent. Then, there he was, a black cloud with a shitty attitude, growling at me to get up. The sun hadn't even come up yet, and he kept griping about me being lazy. He called me a waste of carbon. What does that evenmean?”

I ignored him, holding out my hand. “I need it. Whatever he gave you to look after.”

Carrion pulled a sour face, reaching into his pocket. He drew out the same small wooden box Kingfisher had secreted the quicksilver away in the last time, tossing it to me. “Our benevolent kidnapper strongly advised against me opening that. I'd have disobeyed him on principle the second he left, but my hand went all prickly when I held the box, and I figured maybe I'd listen to him just this once.”

What would have happened to Carrion if he had opened the box? The quicksilver was in its inert state, solid and sleeping, but there was a chance Carrion might have accidentally triggered it. Why not? If I was able to do it, then there was a chance he could, too. I had no idea whyIhad been born with the gift to work the quicksilver. Perhaps it was a latent gift that hadn't manifested in Carrion yet. His handhadprickled when he'd held the box. Maybe that meant something.

“What are you doing right now?” I asked him.

“Aside from prodding this fire with a stick and reading this?” he asked, holding the book up again. “Nothing much. Why do you ask?”

“Want to come and set fire to some far more exciting things?”

He snapped his book closed with a flourish. “Absolutely, yes.”

• Magnesium powder, finely ground salt, distilled water.

• Bismuth, copper, antimony.

• Bluestone, chalk, lead.

Result: No Reaction.

Three more experiments down and three more failures. Not only that, but I had never even heard of antimony before, let alone worked with it, and it turned out that the fine white powder was an extraordinary skin irritant. It burst into flames the second it touched the quicksilver, and the fumes it cast off made us so sick that both me and Carrion ran and threw up in the snow.