Page 26 of Alchemised
There were stitch marks along the hems and the neck and bodice from where the details and lace had been carelessly ripped off to make it as plain as possible.
Helena wished bitterly she hadn’t flinched at the sight of those roses.
She looked over at the food again. She’d have to be careful around Aurelia.
At the bottom of the bundle were three sets of slippers. Dancing slippers by the look of them, impractically thin-soled and delicate shoes with ribbon laces, cast off because the fabric on the toes was wearing thin and they’d lost their satiny sheen.
Aside from the stockings, Helena put it all into the wardrobe, preferring to remain in the thin scratchy dress from Central.
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?
