Page 87 of Quicksilver

“You're both as insufferable as each other. Now can you please get your filthy, muddy boots off of the bed?”

“What does it matter? The mud just disappears, anyway.” He demonstrated, wiping the mud-caked soles of his boots against the rucked-up sheets, looking very pleased with himself when the mess he made promptly disappeared.“See.”

“What the hell have you been doing?” I demanded. “Why are you so dirty? And...wait, where did you even get those boots? Last time I saw you, you were walking around barefoot.” I laughed scornfully. “You lookedstupid.”

“Well, I was hardly gonna walk around with just one boot, was I? Whileyou'vebeen stuck in here, staring at the ceiling, I've been out training with the new guards. They have a fascinating fighting system.” It was an airy taunt. Payback for saying he'd look stupid. If there was one thing Carrion Swift couldn't tolerate, it was being made fun of. “As for the boots, your friend Fisher gave them to me.”

I set down my fork. “Hedid?”

Carrion nodded. “That night, before you had dinner with him, actually. You'd already left for the dining room. He showed up with these in his hand and said he'd give them to me on one condition.”

“Which was?”

Carrion snagged a grape from the tray and popped it into his mouth. “That I take a bath.”

“A bath?”

“Yes, a bath.”

“That's a weird request.”

“I know. Even after being kidnapped, dragged into a different realm, and carted for miles on the back of a horse, I still smelled great. But he was all wound up about not liking the way I smelled, so I figured fuck it. Whatever. A bath for a new pair of boots was a fair trade. And it felt great to soak in all of that hot water. Strange, right? All of that water? I still can't wrap my head around the fact that there's just so much...”

He prattled on, but the bite of toast I'd just taken had turned claggy, like glue. “He said he didn't like the way you smelled?”

“Yes, and he wasveryrude about it. He had a bunch of sprites come in and scrub me with these stiff brushes until I was raw and pink all over. I swear they took off four layers of skin. They put this thick white clay all over me, then, and let it sit so long that it went hard, and they had to crack it to get it all off.”

“Gods.”

“Andthen,” he said, taking another grape. “They rubbed me down with this special kind of moss, which is where things got interesting. They paid particular attention to my...” His eyes trailed down his body until they rested in his crotch.

I raised my eyebrows at him. “You let a fire sprite jerk you off with a handful of Fae moss?”

“Not a fire sprite,” he said defensively. “These were water sprites. Three of them. They're smaller than the Fae women and very nice to look at. I didn't mind their attentions one bit.”

“You've been in Yvelia for five seconds, and you've already had a foursome with a different species of magical creature?” I didn't know why I was surprised. It was absolutely something Carrion would do.

“Jealous?” he asked, winking again.

“No! I'm—I'm disgusted! What if you catch some kind of Fae disease?”Ieyed his crotch for emphasis this time.

Another grape went into his mouth. “Ahh, I'm not worried about that. They wereverythorough with that moss.”

“Gross!”

“Come on. Hurry up and eat. That gorgeous healer told me to let you know you'd be able to get out of here as soon as you finished everything on that tray.”

I let my mouth fall open. “Carrion Swift, you are such an asshole! That should have been the first thing you said when you came in here.”

I'd never finished a plate of food so quickly in my life. Not even when I'd been starving back in the Third.

The silver spat in the crucible, bubbling angrily. The combination of iron filings and the yellow powder I'd first mixed in saline solution and then added to the molten silver had not ended well. Neither had the experiment where I'd attempted to add a small sliver of gold and some human hair (mine) to the metal. Both times, when I'd placed the medallion I forged with the materials into the quicksilver, it had roiled, the voice within hissing furiously in a foreign tongue. This time, I'd burned somewood, ground up the coals that had remained, and sprinkled that into the silver. The two didn't want to combine, but I poured the contents of the crucible into the mold and flashed the whole thing in the slack tub anyway, wincing as the water cooled the metal, creating a cloud of rank smoke.

The second I dropped the medallion into the crucible that held the quicksilver, I knew this attempt had ended in failure as well. The quicksilverlaughed.

And that was that. I could only do three experiments a day. With so little silver to work with, I needed to spend the rest of the day refining it so that it would be ready to test with again tomorrow. Swearing angrily, I gathered together the scrap I'd created and dumped it into a firing chalice, my temper rising along with the temperature inside the forge. Even with one side of the workshop open to the elements, it was still as hot as the dungeons in Madra's palace by the time I was done for the day.

When he wasn't chasing the birds or hunting for mice, Onyx had taken to lying underneath the giant oak tree, watching me from a distance, cooling his belly in the snow.