He looked around, his teeth gritted. “Fuck. I’m being called back to the city.” He stepped away but kept staring down at her. She could see the calculation in his eyes as he seemed to hesitate over something. Finally an expression of despair flashed across his face.
“Davies,” he said. His voice barely carried, and his eyes went out of focus for a moment. “Come here.”
The door behind him opened, and a woman entered. Helena didn’t know enough about servants’ uniforms to place what she was, but she recognised the name.
Enid Ferron’s lady’s maid stood beside Kaine, looking down at Helena with rheumy blue eyes. A faint whiff of something dry but organic drifted into the room with her. She was dead but so expertly reanimated, she looked almost lifelike.
Helena looked around the room and towards the window, realising that she couldn’t see any buildings, just sky and trees.
“Where are we?” she asked abruptly. She didn’t even know how long she’d been unconscious.
“Spirefell. My family’s country estate,” Kaine said, pulling on his uniform, the black coat and cloak. “I’ll explain more later. I have to go. Don’t be afraid of Davies. She won’t hurt you.”
Helena kept staring at the necrothrall. One of the servants who’d died when Kaine became Undying, whose life was responsible for his immortality and immutability. He’d reanimated her?
“I’m sorry,” he was saying, “I thought I had more time to explain. You’ll be safe here. No one will find you. I’ll be back as soon as I can.
“Davies, take care of her.” He leaned over Helena one last time, stroking her hair. “You’re safe. I promise.”
Then he was gone. She could hear something in the walls and floor moving but couldn’t see what it was as she was left paralysed, in the care of a necrothrall.
She looked at it—her—again. Davies stood watching Helena, her gaze vague but constant.
“Can I have water?” Helena finally asked.
Davies poured a cup of water from a pitcher on a table nearby and then brought it over to Helena and helped her sip enough to wet her mouth. It was bitter; Helena recognised the taste of laudanum.
She had no idea it was possible to reanimate necrothralls to this degree. The woman seemed alive.
“You were Enid Ferron’s lady’s maid, weren’t you?” Helena asked, fighting the wave of exhaustion the drug brought upon her.
Davies nodded slowly as if she understood the question. Helena struggled to focus.
“You’ve been here, all this time?”
Another nod. Davies mouthed a word silently. Kaine.
If that were true, it meant she’d been reanimated for nearly seven years without showing any signs of decay. Helena hadn’t known that was even possible.
“Why? Why would he do that to you?”
If the necrothrall answered, Helena wasn’t conscious enough to see it.
She slipped in and out of lucidity, in more pain each time she came awake. Davies was sitting in a chair beside her, knitting what appeared to be socks. The numbness was wearing off. Pain was shifting from a distant impression to a weight steadily bearing down harder and harder.
Her throat was bruised and raw inside; she must have been on a breathing apparatus at some point.
When the pain grew oppressive enough to wake her again, she found that Kaine had returned. He was standing beside her, replacing several of the vials connected to the intravenous drip.
“What happened to the medical team?” Helena asked, her tongue thick and dry again. “The people you had save me. What did you do to them?”
He stared down at her. The room was dark; his black uniform made him blend into the shadows, but his pale hair and eyes almost glowed.
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to.”
“Did you kill them?” Her voice sharpened.
He flicked a switch, filling the room with dim orange light.
“No, I didn’t kill them. An entire medical team turning up dead would have raised questions. They think they saved a woman who died under interrogation yesterday. And they do not care at all that they spent hours saving you for the ostensible purpose of my torturing you to death afterwards. They were proud to be of service. You are, after all, a terrorist, they said.”
She knew he was trying to distract her. “So you would have killed them but didn’t because it would have raised inconvenient questions.”
His eyes flashed. “Yes, I did all of this for convenience, which you know I have so abundantly in my life with my two mutually exclusive masters.”
Guilt caught in Helena’s throat like a stone. “I don’t want you to kill people because of me.”
He gave a barking laugh. “What exactly is it that you think I do with all my time? I kill people. I order other people to kill people. I train people to kill people. I sabotage and undermine people so that they will be killed, and I do it all because of you. Every word. Every life. Because of you.”
She gave a ragged gasp as the room tilted, swimming as the blood drained from her head.
The viciousness in his expression vanished. “Wait. Helena, I didn’t—”
“No,” she said harshly. “Don’t even try to take it back.”
“I—” His voice was soft. Pleading.
“No,” she said again. “It’s true. What you said is entirely true. Everything you do is on my head, too. Every life …”
“Don’t.” He sat on the edge of the bed, picked up her right hand. “Don’t carry it. It’s not yours. Stop trying to carry a whole damned war on your shoulders.”
“This is all my fault, though,” she said. “I did this to you. I made you like this. Someone should regret that, and you can’t. But if I do—maybe that will be enough to make you stop someday.”
He looked away and said nothing. She watched his fingers move across hers, wishing she could feel it.
“What’s happening in the city?” she asked.
He was silent for a few seconds. “Althorne’s dead. There were several units trapped in one of the buildings; they got them out, but he died during the retreat. From our estimates, the Resistance has lost at least half their active forces. We retook the ports two days ago.”
There was nowhere for the despair of that information to go but to lance into her mind. No twisting horror in her gut; no sense of emptiness. She could not feel her body. She could only think.
“There has been considerable backlash to the bombing, though. They didn’t expect the dust to contaminate both islands. There’s been panic and outrage over the widespread loss of resonance, the hospitals are overwhelmed with patients needing chelators, and the death toll for the Resistance, while significant, has provided us almost no new necrothralls because Durant forgot that the nullification compound would interfere with reanimation. They have to pump fresh blood into the corpses to reanimate them. So I doubt it will happen again. At least not on that scale.”
A paltry source of comfort, but it was something.
“I don’t know what to do,” she finally said. “I can’t ignore a threat to the Eternal Flame.”
He sighed, head dipping. “I was just angry.”
“You’re always angry, but you can’t make threats like that or reduce a war like this into a simplistic blame game. And you can’t hold the Resistance hostage to control me.”
His shoulders slumped. “If you die, Helena, I’m done. I won’t continue this. I’m tired.”
He looked at her, and she could see the whole war in his eyes, the toll that came from struggling with no end in sight, driven by a terror of what might happen if he ever stopped.
“I mean it. I won’t kill them—but I will be done. You are my terms of service. The contract is void if you die.”
She managed to turn her head a little. “There is a life for you on the other side of this war. You have the Stone. If Morrough dies, you might be fine, and you’d be free. You could do—all sorts of things. Don’t reduce your world to me.”