Page 56 of The Deadliest Candidate (The Last Grand Archivist #1)

The sea is a cold green grave, and the princess lies deep inside.

Once there was a tower, a tower of glass with walls of living green. The air smelled of sulphur and vapour and acid. The princess was born in a pit of poison; no, she was made in a phial, a writhing grey thing brought to life against the will of the universe. No—the girl came out of a flower, fully formed and pale as a sunless morning, and completely wrong.

There was a prince, and the prince was a mistake. No—the princess was a mistake. It was the prince who should have been born, and the princess a biological error. An unnatural growth, an accidental duplication. She was a mistake, and she came out wrong, with her chest a hollow cage of bones. The prince had a heart, his and hers both at the same time.

Neither of them had a soul.

No. The princess had a soul, only it was a small, blackened thing, the useless residue of some great alchemy, capuut mortuum . Sometimes the princess felt it, this pointless, burnt thing she had for a soul; she felt the smoulder of it like the dying breath of embers rekindling themselves one last time before fading away. It hurt her to feel it, and she hated the pain of it.

The princess hated pain. Pain was a thing she called skin, and a thing she called air. Sometimes, pain was a thing that was just existence. It was the poison on her tongue when she was a little girl, when she’d tasted death before uttering her first word. It was her brother, the prince, writhing on a narrow bed, bleeding sweat onto white sheets. It was the master’s cold eyes and the long hours spent on the small stool of the devil’s smithy, breathing the fumes that made her lungs sear and bubble. It was the sound of her brother’s cries when he was being punished and the tremor of his thin back under her fingers when he wept in complete silence in the dead of the night.

There was no pain now. Only the green sea, the silence of the deep. She had tasted every flavour of death, but in the end, true death tasted of nothing at all. Death was black and silent. Death was solitude, and she had never been alone once in her life.

And that’s when she felt it. The tugging of the rope, the red, sinewy rope that strangled her heart and pulled, always, in the direction of her brother. She felt a sharp, horrible pull on the rope, and she shifted in the darkness, startled.

A flutter of pain travelled the length of the rope, made its way to her. No, not pain. Fear.

He was afraid .

The princess’s eyes opened wide. She saw nothing. Salt burnt her eyes, but that was nothing compared to the fumes of the laboratory. Her eyes had been burnt a thousand times. She tried to move. Her limbs were heavy. She felt that fear, the hideous redness of it, reach her. She opened her mouth to call out to her brother, to tell him she was coming, that he needn’t be afraid.

But of course, her lungs were empty, and one could not scream without air.

Air was cheap to one such as her. Princess, sister, master. Her power was a vast and boundless thing, just past her fingertips. She would have to reach deep and hard to get it. And for him, there was nothing she wouldn’t do.

She sought the source, the green, shimmering lake within. Her power. She had so much of it, she always had, for as long as she’d been alive. It had made her great—though it had never quite kept her safe. What was safety? Safety was a promise, a golden light at the end of a long black tunnel, and no matter how far she went down the tunnel, with her brother at her side and a litany of achievements, they could never quite reach the golden light.

Safety was the remote sun, which they could see but never touch, but they didn’t need it. They had something better, something potent and abiding, more powerful than any Divine Alchemy.

She touched the source of power, and something sparked through her. She could not create circles here, and the alchemical symbols in her mind, the encyclopaedia of them carved into her brain as though with the tip of a silver awl. She could do nothing but command the power inside her, and through that power, her own body.

She pushed, she pulled. Her body was the athanor, the self-feeding furnace. Around her, the black water gave way. Death released its grip. Things were not so silent now. There was a dull roar, a rush, growing louder. Pain was returning, and her damaged lungs constricted as though they were about to collapse under some terrible pressure. Her ribs creaked as though they were about to crack. Her throat was a tight tunnel.

Around her heart, the red leather rope gave a sudden, horrible pull. She had never felt something like this before. It pulled so hard she feared her heart, caught in the red knot, would burst like a delicate fruit.

Pure panic set in.

I’m coming, I’m coming. Wait for me, I’m coming.

She screamed into the airless dark, screamed, stifled in death’s embrace. The rope stretched taut, impossibly taut, and for a moment, she froze, seized by the terrible fear that it would snap.

Wait for me, Edmund. Please .

The red rope did not snap. It simply went loose.

She felt nothing at all now. She writhed and bucked and kicked and screamed in the darkness, in the crushing abyss. She had never felt so afraid. The fear was blacker than the abyss.

Maybe the sea can’t contain her fear. Maybe even the deepest watery abyss cannot withstand such a dark, painful thing. It releases her like a loosening fist, sends her spinning up like the fruit of a dandelion floating away into the air.

Later, the indifferent waves crash in their relentless rhythm over the silver length of a beach. In a rush of white spume, a body is brought to the grey sand, left behind, given back to the world.

The grey sky sees white limbs and blue veins and hair the colour of dulse. And, standing over her, a figure looks down with some surprise. A figure in white robes and a silver mask, and eyes that burn like white fire and see far more than they should.

And when he looks at her, he doesn’t see a princess, or a young woman with empty lungs and a handful of ashes for a soul. He looks at her, and his gloved fingers rise instinctively to the Abyssal cross he bears on his chest because all he sees is a being of danger and despair, capable of terrible, blasphemous things.

All he sees is a calamity waiting to happen.