Another tray arrived the next morning, somehow worse. Helena was hungry enough by then to pick out the few bites that hadn’t been so boiled that the colour had leached out.
She wanted to try leaving her room again, but the thought made her stomach twist into a vicious knot.
Instead, she preoccupied herself with exercise, performing callisthenics. She needed to at least be able to climb a flight of stairs without having her legs threaten to give out. Her arms were weak, too, but anything that required her to put weight on her wrists was out of the question.
She stared bitterly at the manacles. She’d always been so proud of her hands—all the things she could do with them.
The longer she spent preoccupying herself with excuses not to leave the room, the guiltier she grew.
Anyone else in the Resistance would have already mapped the house, identified potential weapons, and murdered both the Ferrons.
Lila would never allow herself to be so weak. It wouldn’t matter what she was scared of. But Helena had never been much like Lila. She had to do things her way. Better to wait, let Ferron come to her.
He was sure to turn up soon.
She could only guess at what transference would entail.
She thought of Crowther’s corpse in Central with the lich inside it. Perhaps that would be her soon, except still alive, aware of what was happening to her as Ferron took over, possessing her mind and body.
At least if she had to see Ferron frequently, she’d have opportunities to figure out what made him tick. To find a weakness.
She racked her memory for what she knew of the family. The Ferrons were entwined with the alchemical industrialisation of the last century.
They had formed the very first iron guild shortly after Paladia’s founding. Iron was one of the eight traditional metals associated with the eight planets: lead for Saturn, tin for Jupiter, iron for Mars, copper for Venus, quicksilver for Mercury, silver for Luna, lumithium for Lumithia, and gold for Sol.
Being intractable and highly prone to corrosion, iron was regarded as lowly and ignoble, especially when compared with incorruptible substances like silver, lumithium, and gold. The Ferrons themselves had also been common. Blacksmiths and ironworkers making ploughs and farm tools more often than holding illustrious jobs like forging steel weapons for the Eternal Flame the way other iron alchemists had.
As time passed and new metals were discovered, iron remained a stubborn and base fixture until the Ferrons developed a method of efficient alchemical steel manufacturing. With the precision of their iron resonance, they could assure quality at an industrial scale that no one else could match. It had changed the world, and it had changed the Ferrons. They’d transformed from trade workers to a new and incredibly wealthy working class, the world transforming with them.
It didn’t matter whether theologically iron was classified as celestially inferior; the modern world was built with Ferron steel. Factories, railway lines, motorcars, even Paladia itself as its architecture shot skywards, climbing with the industrial boom.
Spirefell, deteriorated as it now was, had clearly been built as a monument to that growing influence and wealth, and the family’s immense pride in it.
Helena’s first memory of Kaine Ferron was during Year Two, not as a person but merely a name on a list. Helena had ranked first on the National Alchemy Exam for their year, beating out Ferron, who’d taken the spot the year before.
Luc had been so proud of her, loudly proclaiming that Year One barely counted, because it had been Helena’s first year ever studying alchemy, and she was doing it in her second language.
Helena had almost fainted with relief. Her scholarship at the Institute depended on her academic performance, and the exam was a significant part of her evaluation. Her father had given up everything in Etras to bring her to Paladia; they would have been ruined if she’d lost her scholarship.
During the six occasions Helena took the national exam, top rank had swung like a pendulum. Helena Marino. Kaine Ferron.
A rivalry, albeit an indirect one, never openly acknowledged.
He was guild. Guild students didn’t speak to “the Holdfast pet.”
She couldn’t imagine how he’d become High Reeve.
He’d been academic track like her. Not a specialised combat alchemist like Lila, or double track, the way Luc had been. Why would a guild heir be hunting down and killing all the surviving Resistance members?
The more time she had to think about it, the more a seething sense of hatred filled her at knowing, even distantly, someone so evil.
In a way, it was strangely poetic that it was Helena who’d been brought as a captive to Spirefell.
She’d beaten Ferron before. If she was careful, and clever, she would do it again.
WHEN FERRON DIDN’T APPEAR ON the second day, Helena forced herself into the hallway, ignoring the way her organs shrivelled and her throat closed. She hugged the wall, letting her fingers trace the wainscotting, not caring that the dust crept into the grooves of her fingerprints, blackening them like an infection.
You can do this, she told herself as she edged slowly towards the darkness, trying to evade the sharpest shadows. She tried the nearest door along the hallway and found it locked. She kept going, just a little farther.
The wind moaned through the halls, twisting into a scream, windows rattling. The house creaked like shifting bones.
Helena tried to breathe but she couldn’t, not in the hallway with the shadows crawling up her like fingers.
After the third door, she couldn’t go any farther. She turned back, the hallway swaying, the dark moving closer.
Before she reached the open door, her legs gave out. Everything blurred, blackening around her.
Lila Bayard emerged from the darkness.
It was not the Lila that Helena remembered. Not the beautiful, statuesque girl in armour who wore her pale-blond hair plaited in a crown around her head like the statues of Lumithia.
Lila’s hair was cropped short as a boy’s. She looked shrunken, despite her unusual height.
She stared at Helena. The right side of her face and neck was mottled with scarring, a long cruel gouge across her cheek that ran down her throat. Her eyes were red.
“Lila. Lila, what’s wrong. What happened?”
Helena felt herself growing cold, fingers numb as she reached out.
Lila opened her mouth to answer but then faded away.
“Lila …”
When Helena opened her eyes, she was lying on the floor in her room, head throbbing.
Something niggled in the corner of her mind, dangling just past the edge of recollection.
She tried to focus, but sharp red pain splintered her mind. Whatever it was vanished like water through sand.
The windows rattled, and the house groaned, sending a vibration through the floor as though it were coming alive. She pushed herself up, favouring her hands, and went to the window.
The mountains were white, but snow hadn’t reached the river basin yet. The winter solstice to mark the new year must be at least a few weeks away.
Fourteen months. She tried to remember the last date she could recall during the war. It would have been late summer when the final battle occurred, but she couldn’t remember the month or lunar phases at the time. The hospital ward did not change with the seasons.
As she was peering out, the door behind her opened. Her spine prickled as she turned, anticipating Ferron.
Instead it was Aurelia, who entered in a swirl of blue fabric, gilded in metal once more as if she were a filigreed exoskeleton. If the Ferrons were short on money, it was likely because Aurelia’s skirts required a dozen yards of imported silk.
Aurelia might have an unusual resonance for iron, but she seemed new to money. Not that Helena had ever had any herself, but it was unavoidable knowledge when among the noble families that served the Holdfasts and the Eternal Flame.