Blood Storm: The Second Book of Lharmell Read online

  Renata’s eyes grew colder. ‘You shall go where?’

  ‘Back to Pergamia, of course. Rodden and I have a lot of work to do.’ I’d wondered if, after our argument, Rodden would attempt to leave without me. But he’d seemed reluctant to leave me alone despite his obvious discomfort with my feelings for him.

  Was I so distasteful to him? Did he still love Ilona, despite her being dead for so many years?

  She threw up her hands. ‘Forget him, Zeraphina. Enough of these childish games. You must marry.’

  I raised my voice. ‘This isn’t a game. This is about being free. Our people being free. I can do far more for our nation in Pergamia than I could ever do walking up an aisle. You have not seen what the Lharmellins can do. Rodden and I, we’re not like the others. We have some modicum of free will, but the others are slaves. They steal children. They kill people for their blood.’

  Renata glanced at the guards. ‘Keep your voice down,’ she hissed. ‘It is not your responsibility, Zeraphina. It is for people like Rodden to handle this problem, not you.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have expected you to understand. It’s your fault I am like this, after all.’

  She raised her arm to strike me, but my bruises and cuts must have made her think twice. She stood over me, her face mottled with rage. ‘I pray you never have to nurse a sick child while your husband lies in a fresh grave.’

  ‘I will say this for the last time: I will marry whom I please, if and when I say so.’

  ‘You are quite wrong, Daughter. You will marry at my pleasure, not your own.’

  ‘Mother, if you try to force me again I will tell the entire court at Xallentaria what I am and how I came to be this way. Then you can be sure no one will want me.’

  ‘No one shall believe you. At court those creatures are nothing more than a tale to scare little children.’

  ‘Ah, but I have proof.’ I looked to my guards. ‘Leave us,’ I commanded. ‘And close the door behind you.’ I waited until they’d shuffled out before taking my place in the centre of the room.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  The window was open on the dusk. I closed my eyes and felt the dew falling. With invisible fingers, I began to draw moisture inside, covering the ceiling with a thick fog. The room melted away, the palace vanished, until I was standing alone in a great expanse. My feet no longer felt the floor beneath them. I saw wind flowing around me, shining like rivers of sunlit water. Currents whipped at my dress. I felt every drop of moisture for miles around. The rain wanted to be ocean; the ice in the mountain caps wanted freedom. I’d never known that water held such longing. The clouds above my head rumbled like a growling wolf, impatient to release their burden. I held the rain there a moment longer. I turned to Renata, heard her gasp and knew my eyes glowed blue.

  I spoke a single word. ‘Rain.’

  The clouds sighed. Water spattered on the flagstones. The rain brought me back into the room, and I laughed at the spectacle. It was raining inside, great sheets of water flowing down the walls and pooling on the floor. Renata, soaked through, huddled beneath her parchments, ink running in black rivers down her arms.

  The clouds were exhausted and the rain stopped. The room shone with moisture. I tugged my clinging dress from my body and squeezed the water from my sleeves. ‘I’ve never done that for fun before,’ I said, grinning. ‘It was beautiful. I wish you could see what I see, Mother.’

  I turned and saw Rodden standing in the doorway, looking in amazement around the sodden room. At me in my dripping dress. He looked at me properly for the first time in days, and I saw admiration in his eyes.

  ‘We’re leaving?’ he guessed, a smile tugging at his mouth.

  I nodded. He held out his hand, and I ran to him.

  FIFTEEN

  If there had been any light at all, everything would have gone black.

  ‘Zeraphina!’

  Pain exploded in my back and my head thumped painfully against the ground. I struggled for breath. Wings beat the air, the breeze a mockery to my empty lungs.

  Footsteps over a hard surface. Skittering stones. ‘Are you hurt? Can you move?’

  I felt wetness beneath me. I shifted side to side, trying to coax the breath back in my body. Finally, air rushed in. ‘I’ve split – my cuts,’ I gasped.

  Rodden felt beneath my shoulders. ‘It feels like it. I can’t see a thing. The clouds are too thick.’

  The memories of just a few moments ago returned. ‘I fell,’ I said, indignant at my own body. I remembered being in the saddle of the brant, and then suddenly here, on the ground, with no memory of the seconds in between. ‘I fainted and fell. How high were we?’

  Rodden’s fingers probed my scalp, feeling for cuts. ‘A dozen feet or so. We’d only just taken off. Can you move everything?’

  I wriggled my fingers and toes. ‘Yes. Nothing broken.’

  ‘Wait here.’

  Only too pleased to oblige, I lay still. There was the sound of feet stumbling over uneven ground. More swearing. A brant hissed in the darkness. A faint mew from Leap and coaxing noises from Rodden.

  He came back. ‘Leap and Griffin are in saddlebags,’ he whispered. ‘They’re not happy but they’ll be safe. Now, try not to scream . . .’ His hands went under me and he lifted. Pain exploded in my back and I choked off a yelp. He settled me on a brant’s saddle and got up behind me, one hand around my waist and gripping the saddle horn.

  This was one way, I thought as a settled myself against his body, to get him to stop treating me like I was a porcupine. Though ever since he’d seen me cause a storm in my mother’s sitting room he’d come out of his moodiness. I wondered why that was so.

  ‘The birds are tethered together. Are you ready?’

  I managed a faint moan to the affirmative, and we lurched into the air.

  I slept for a day and a half when we returned to the palace in Xallentaria, trussed up tight in fresh white bandages, courtesy of Rodden, and administered nothing more powerful than a herbal draft to take the edge off the pain. I received no visitors, and wondered what could be keeping my sister.

  I did receive a lovely note from Queen Ulah, telling me she hoped I recovered quickly from the malady that had struck me down on the last portion of our journey. I puzzled over this, until I realised Rodden must have made my excuses to the king and queen, knowing I didn’t wish to speak of the flogging unless I must. The scandal that would ensue wasn’t something I wanted to cope with right then.

  I was relieved to receive the letter. Our clandestine departure, it seemed, hadn’t angered the king and queen. Rodden must have made suitable excuses for us before we left, or Amis might have smoothed things over. I felt a little guilty that I hadn’t even considered such a thing.

  Several days later I felt strong enough to get out of bed, and the first thing I did was seek Lilith out. I paced the palace halls on stiff legs, gritting my teeth and holding myself rigid beneath the shawl I’d draped over my shoulders. I felt like an old woman.

  I found Lilith in her suite of rooms. Her hands were folded in her lap and her eyes were directed out the window. I went to embrace her but something in her countenance made me pause. I stood before her a long time, waiting to be acknowledged. Finally, she flicked her gaze to me and her eyes raked my figure. She turned back to the window with a twist of her mouth.

  ‘Hello, Sister,’ I said. I felt the first twinges of guilt for having sneaked from the palace in the middle of the night directly after she’d told me not to.

  ‘Do you have any idea,’ she bit out, ‘the humiliation and worry that I have been subjected to?’

  ‘Why, Lilith, what has happened?’ Humiliation? Surely, that couldn’t have anything to do with me. I had disobeyed her, but I hadn’t humiliated her. What else could it be? My eyes flicked to her belly, which was flat. Remembering Renata�
��s letters, I felt a flash of anger. The pressure she put her daughters under was criminal.

  Lilith turned her cold eyes on me. ‘You is what has happened to me.’

  My heart sank under Lilith’s glare. ‘You sounded just like Mother then.’

  ‘Don’t speak to me of Mother,’ Lilith spat. ‘I have had letter after letter from her these last months. It is I who has suffered her rants, her fury, while you have been away gallivanting about the countryside with that man. But has that not always been the way: you shirk duty and responsibility and it is me who bears the brunt of it? In Amentia all Mother needed to do was open her mouth and you would flee to the grounds. You were always leaving me with her. And then when Lester died, where were you?’ Her eyes were bright with angry tears. ‘Well? Where were you?’

  She didn’t know what I was, I told myself, as white hot fury built in my breast. The fire was stoked with guilt, for what she said was right. I had always left her with Mother. But I hadn’t realised she cared until now.

  ‘You were still shooting that silly bow and arrows,’ she cried.

  ‘I know that’s the way it looks, but I couldn’t help it.’

  ‘No, for you are irresponsible. Shameful. Instead of doing your duty you consort with that man. I suspect you are no longer fit to be married. The whole court suspects it.’

  ‘I do not give a fig what the court suspects. Rodden has been the perfect gentleman.’

  ‘He is no gentleman. He is crude and coarse.’

  My patience snapped like a bow string. ‘How dare you speak of him so! You have no idea how much gratitude you owe him. The whole kingdom should be grateful to him.’

  Lilith’s lip curled in disgust. ‘You are not only infatuated, you are deluded. Tell me this: why do you return to Pergamia instead of staying in Amentia where you belong? It is not for my comfort, so do not say it is.’

  I was silent.

  ‘Go on, tell me. You stay for love of that man. Don’t you?’

  I turned and hobbled out.

  ‘“The alchemical endeavours”,’ I read aloud, ‘“are transmutation, the creation of the panacea, and the search for the universal solvent.”’ I had one of Rodden’s alchemy texts open on my lap, a huge, dusty tome filled with fancy lettering and esoteric diagrams. We were in his turret room and I had been propped up on a low couch in a corner while he, wearing goggles and a rubber apron, conducted strange experiments that crackled, flared and smoked. It was rather like being at a magic show. The skylight was propped open for ventilation but the room still reeked of rotten eggs. The funny thing was I hadn’t seen an egg all day.

  My back throbbed with pain and heat and I sweated continuously. I hadn’t seen Lilith in several days. I had avoided the high table of an evening, not only because of my sister, but because I also suspected she’d been telling the truth about the court: they would stare and gossip about me the minute I made an appearance. Until I could hold myself up straight I would hide in Rodden’s turret of an evening. Besides, we were busy.

  I turned my attention back to the book in my lap. I knew what transmutation was: the conversion of one object into another. Rumours sprang up now and then that an alchemist had turned urine or lead into gold, but the claims always proved false.

  ‘What are the panacea and the universal solvent?’ I asked.

  ‘The panacea is the elixir of life,’ Rodden said. He scraped a blackened substance out of a beaker, his nose wrinkling at the smell. ‘It cures all diseases and allows immortality. A solvent is a substance that can dissolve other substances while remaining unchanged itself. The universal solvent dissolves everything, hypothetically speaking.’

  ‘Hypothetically? By the way, is that supposed to happen?’ I asked, nodding at the burnt beaker.

  ‘No. It’s not,’ he muttered. ‘The universal solvent has never been discovered. And if it was isolated, the trick would be containing it.’

  ‘Because it would dissolve its container.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What about the panacea, has that been found?’

  ‘No.’ He paused a moment, thinking. ‘I wonder if they’ve experimented with Lharmellin blood . . .’ He shook his head. ‘No, the side effects rather outweigh the benefits.’

  ‘So alchemists can’t make gold, they can’t cure disease and they are unable to dissolve . . . everything. Do they do anything useful at all?’

  ‘Once in a while. A very little while.’ A beaker of viscous yellow liquid was about to boil over and he made a grab for it with a pair of tongs. He held the glass vessel up at eye level and shook it. ‘When they’re not keeling over from lead poisoning or going mad from the distillation of mercury they manage to accomplish one or two things that are useful in the practical sense, such as manufacturing vitriol. As I’m trying to do now.’

  ‘I saw that word, “vitriol”. Hang on.’ I flicked through the yellowing pages, past diagrams of stars and representations of the cosmos. ‘Here it is, vi–’

  There was a flash of light accompanied by a loud bang. Rodden dived for cover as glass shattered over the bench and a plume of sickly yellow smoke wafted up to the ceiling. It was the eleventh beaker to explode that morning.

  ‘Oh, dear. You’re not very good at this, are you?’

  ‘It’s not me,’ he huffed. ‘It’s the alchemists. My raw materials are inadequate. Pure sulfur and saltpetre they promised, and look –’ he stabbed a finger at a clutch of leather bags – ‘seven different coloured compounds from seven different alchemists. They’re all supposed to be the same. Look at this saltpetre. It’s pink. Pink! The stars know what’s been mixed in. Full of impurities. Imbeciles, the lot of them.’ He swept broken glass from the bench and set out a fresh clutch of beakers.

  I turned back to my book without saying a word. ‘“Vitriol is the most important alchemical substance. Highly reactive, it is used in the purification of gold, as it dissolves many salts, metals and other compounds without reacting with the more precious metals. It is named for the motto Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem.” What does that mean?’

  ‘“Visit the interior of the earth; through purification you will find the hidden stone,”’ he intoned, not looking up from the powder he was spooning into a vessel.

  ‘Gold?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If vitriol could be used to purify gold, then can it be used to purify other metals?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Like yelbar?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘But not only that,’ he continued, shaking the beaker, ‘when we react pure yelbar with hot, concentrated vitriol, we get gaseous yelbar: thick, strong and lethal. The tiniest amount is enough to kill you. Or me. Or any harming or Lharmellin.’

  ‘Oh, my,’ I breathed. I turned to the crate that had been shipped from the desert, all the way from Verapine. ‘That’s what the glass balls are for.’ The first thing Rodden had done upon our arrival was check them, and they were all intact. I met Rodden’s eyes across the room. ‘We’re going to poison the air, aren’t we?’

  ‘That is the plan. It would have worked well in the open air, but underground? Even better.’ He strode to the crate and lifted out a glass ball. Holding it aloft, he looked me in the eye – and then hurled the sphere to the floor.

  I gasped, expecting the glass to shatter. The ball bounced and rolled harmlessly to a standstill.

  ‘Are they magic?’

  Rodden laughed. ‘There’s no magic. There are only laws.’ He dug around in the crate and pulled out a box. ‘Inside this,’ he said in reverent tones, ‘is the master glass. Break it, and they all shatter.’ With care, he placed it back in the crate.

  ‘How does it work?’

  ‘All the glass balls were drawn from the master glass when they were made. I
t’s a special technique that only the master glassblower of Verapine knows. He would have taught me the secret one day, had I stayed.’

  I must have looked doubtful, as he went on.

  ‘Think of them as one glass, not dozens of glasses. Their properties are all linked. There is a theory among alchemists – some of the better ones at least – that matter can become entangled like this, but it’s almost always too small for us to see. These glasses are entangled on a larger –’

  Two beakers exploded, one after the other. We both ducked for cover. I heard Rodden muttering from beneath his bench.

  ‘Do you have to do this yourself?’ I asked.

  ‘Want to.’ He reappeared and pushed his goggles on top of his head. His face was sooty except for two clean circles around his eyes.

  ‘We don’t have to do everything ourselves. We can ask for help,’ I said, then muttered, ‘Clearly you need it.’

  ‘I don’t want any help. I know basic chemistry. This should be easy.’

  ‘And manufacturing gaseous yelbar, is that basic chemistry?’

  He glared at me.

  ‘Well, is it? At any rate, it sounds a rather dangerous thing for a harming to do. One exploding beaker and you’ll drop down dead. Could a human do it?’

  ‘Hypothetically.’

  ‘Rodden, I could do it hypothetically. What I mean is, would it be dangerous for them?’

  ‘No more dangerous than handling hot vitriol.’

  I closed my book. ‘Well, then. Find an alchemist.’

  ‘And what I am supposed to do in the meantime?’ He looked around at the mess he’d created, irritated and forlorn at the same time.

  ‘That’s easy. Anything you like.’

  My cuts were still too fresh for me to ride so I didn’t accompany Rodden into the city in search of an alchemist who wasn’t completely potty. I couldn’t train either, so I found an arbour in the grounds and spent the days in the shade of rosebushes. Carmelina sat with me sometimes and brought me all the gossip from the great hall. I listened politely, but in truth it didn’t interest me at all. I read frivolous books when the words could hold my attention, but mostly I sat in quiet contemplation. My eyes would follow a peacock as it picked its way across the grass or the path of a dragonfly as it careened over the flower beds. Often I wasn’t seeing the palace grounds at all, but the oasis where the Jarbin lived, and I would be filled with longing to be there. How peaceful it had been.