IT TOOK TWO DAYS BEFORE Helena could see reliably, and three before she could sit up without feeling dizzy. She tried to read but the words swam, leaving her with nothing but her thoughts to preoccupy her.
One the third day, one of the maids brought a tray of porridge to her bed. She looked at it, meeting the cloudy blue eyes.
“Ferron, will you come here?”
The maid stared at her, and then looked away, leaving without acknowledgement, but that evening as she was picking at her dinner, the door opened and Ferron entered.
“You called?” His tone was sardonic.
“I had a question I wanted to ask you,” she said, sitting forward even though it made her head throb until her eyes threatened to pop.
She drew a slow breath, gathering up all the threads of information she’d collected over the months. As if without realising it, she’d been weaving a tapestry, and only now could she make out the image forming at her fingertips.
“Mandl wasn’t the first of the Undying to be killed,” she said at last. “They’ve been dying for weeks. I didn’t realise what the disappearances had in common until now. I thought it was censorship, that maybe they were dissidents, but it’s the Undying. They’re disappearing because they’re being killed, and you’re the one who’s been covering it up.”
Ferron said nothing, his expression carefully blank.
She swallowed hard. “You know, the Undying have never made much sense to me. Scientifically or logically. Immortality seems like a dangerous thing to just—gift to people, and Morrough’s hardly the altruistic type. I know how vivimancy works. There’s a price for complex regeneration, and someone always has to pay it. There’s no way around that. In order to regenerate the way the Undying can, someone is paying for it.”
“I thought you had a question,” Ferron said.
“I’m getting there,” Helena said calmly, trying to ignore the throbbing in the back of her head. “When the Undying are in dead bodies, they don’t retain their old resonance; they get whatever resonance the new body has. Like your father: He’s an iron alchemist, he doesn’t know anything about pyromancy. So if someone like you, an animancer, lost their body, you’d lose that ability, and if you thought being a lich was a punishment, something you do to teach someone a lesson, you’d cling to your body no matter what condition it was in and be desperate to figure out transference. But even if you did, you’d still need to find an animancer. But someone like that would fight the transference.”
She winced, pressing her hand against her forehead as if she could push back the pressure. “So … that’s where the repopulation program comes in,” she said unsteadily. “Morrough doesn’t care about the economy or what kind of alchemists there are in New Paladia. The real reason Stroud’s using selective breeding is to find a way to control what resonance children are born with. That’s why they brought back your father and I saw him at Central. She’s trying to produce an animancer for Morrough. If transference is perfected by the time she does, he’d have the means and the perfect vessel to use, but he’s—he’s running out of time.”
Ferron’s eyes narrowed.
She drew a deep breath. “Something’s wrong about him. He’s too old, and that should affect resonance, but it hasn’t with him. He’s got some other source for his power, something he can draw from. But he’s deteriorating anyway. I saw him only a few months ago, and he wasn’t like that. That throne is now keeping him alive. I kept trying to guess what could possibly hurt someone like him. It’s not like anyone could get close. Then I thought, maybe the source of his power is right in front of us, but it’s been disguised, so that people wouldn’t realise. Perhaps it’s presented as a gift, something people are desperate to earn, but really he’s the one who needs it.”
Pain shot through Helena’s head. Her vision turned red. She gave an agonised gasp, toppling sideways. Ferron was moving towards her.
She looked up, forcing her question out.
“The Undying. You’re his source of power, and the Resistance—we figured that out, didn’t we? How to kill him. How to kill all of you.”
CHAPTER 14
HELENA WAS SEATED ON A STOOL IN a laboratory. Lying on the table before her were rows and rows of transmuted metals and compounds, some shaped into hollow spheres, others still in small vials, waiting for testing.
Directly across from her sat Shiseo, studying a sphere grasped in his fingers, as he made notations on a slip of paper.
“You have an interesting repertoire,” he said in a quiet voice as he reached towards a vial in the third row. “Very unusual. Good attention to detail. I am surprised you are not a metallurgist.”
“I wasn’t sure what to do,” Helena said, handing another sphere over for grading. “It felt like whatever I chose, someone was disappointed. Everyone—” She started to move her fingers but stopped, folding her hands. “Everyone wanted a lot for me, and I’m not sure I ever knew what I wanted.” She shrugged. “Probably good that I didn’t, since it didn’t matter in the end.”
Shiseo didn’t reply. He was studying his notes; then he looked at her folded hands before his impassive eyes reached her face. “I don’t think a steel weapon would suit you.”
“What?”
“You are exceptional with titanium. I met the titanium guildmaster once, and even his work was not so perfect.” Then he picked up a piece of her nickel work, studying it as well. “Have you ever tried nickel-titanium alloy?”
She shook her head.
“It would make a better weapon for you. Very light. You’d waste your strength with steel.”
“This isn’t for a weapon,” Helena said quickly. “It’s just—curiosity.”
Shiseo made a little click with his tongue. “Well … if you wanted a weapon, I would advise you to use nickel and titanium. Don’t limit yourself to what Paladians do.”
THE ENTIRE RIGHT SIDE OF Helena’s body was vaguely sore, and her tongue had the sensation of oversensitive, newly regenerated tissue across its surface as she struggled to wake.
She stared dazedly at the canopy over her, trying to remember what had happened.
Ferron—she’d been talking to Ferron. She looked around for him, but he was gone.
She’d been telling him that Morrough was dying, that killing the Undying somehow hurt him; she’d finally pieced it all together and then—
There was nothing after that.
She sat up slowly. It must have been another seizure. She shifted her shoulders, opening her mouth cautiously, expecting the muscles to catch, residual tension holding her back, but it didn’t.
She looked down at herself. She’d been treated.
Seizures were not something she’d encountered much in a military hospital, but Titus Bayard had suffered from them after his brain injury.
Muscle tension wasn’t something that could be treated with a mere touch of vivimancy. Resonance could loosen the knotted muscles, but the tension had to be manually massaged away to help the limbs to stretch and extend again.
Which meant that someone had, at minimum, touched the entire right side of her body. She shuddered and hoped it hadn’t been one of the necrothralls—but then reconsidered when she reviewed the alternatives.