Page 123 of Quicksilver
Annorath mor!
Annorath mor!
Annorath mor!
Thunder in my ears.
A bleak omen.
During the darkest hours of the night, when clouds must have swept across the moon and the room was thick with shadows, Fisher stilled for a while. “Tell me something. Distract me. Sometimes it'll ease if...my mind goes elsewhere.”
I ran my hands along his shoulders, working my thumbs into his taut muscles as I had been for the past hour. I wasn't surprised when the ink beneath his skin drew closer to the places where our skin met. I watched it climb my fingers, forming shapes, and then runes and delicate designs as they inched upward. There was every chance they'd still be there in the morning, but I couldn't bring myself to care right now. “What should I tell you?” I asked.
“Anything. Tell me about your life...before.”
I sat for a moment, wrestling with that. I didn't know where to begin. There were a lot of things I didn't want to talk about. Many things I didn't want to remember. Dangerous corners of my mind I had no desire to return to.
Fisher's head shifted against my stomach. “Why are you frowning like that?” he asked. I glanced down and found thathewas the one frowning up atme. His brow wasn't rolling with perspiration anymore. The shaking seemed to have slowed down a little too. A relief.
“I don't know. I have very few bright, happy memories to share from Zilvaren.” I’d touched Fisher's skin plenty over the past few hours, so I didn't even think about it—I ran my finger over his forehead, down his temple, sweeping away the wet hairfrom his face. He closed his eyes, his lashes fine and delicate as strokes of black ink against his pale skin.
“I don't want bright and happy,” he whispered roughly. “I wantreal.”
Those words weighed heavy. This, from the male who refused to give me the real answers to the questions I had about him, was enough to make a girl want to scream. But my suspicions on that front—that Fisher was bound in some way andcouldn'tanswer—had, at some point, solidified as fact in my mind. And look where we were. He was lying in my arms, immobile and vulnerable in every sense of the word. Laid bare. I could be a little vulnerable, too.
“My father died when I was two. I don’t even remember him. My mother was four months pregnant with Hayden when it happened. A sand dune came down on a trader’s outpost on the glass flats. He was either crushed or suffocated to death, one of the two. And when we lost his income, my mother became a prostitute,” I said bluntly. This wasn't a secret back in Zilvaren. Everybody had known Iris Fane, either from exchanging chits for her time or because the other mothers in our ward would bitch and complain as loud as the day was long about the fact that a woman of loose morals lived amongst them. “She sold her body for food and water mostly, but she made money, too. Her client list was mostly comprised of guardians. Madra's men. Five days out of the week, she worked at this place near the market. The House of Kala. Kala's employed security, so the women who worked there were safe for the most part. One shout from a bedroom and five huge bastards would kick the door down and beat the living shit out of whoever was causing trouble. But she worked from our home sometimes, too. To make ends meet. I used to watch through a crack in her bedroom door when the guardians would come, resplendent and proud, dripping in their golden armor.
“The man I used to apprentice for. Elroy? He loved her. She was beautiful and full of this...this fire. He'd come to the house and fix things from time to time. He never tried anything on with her, though. He wasn't like that. The amount of times he took care of her when one of the palace guards beat her black and blue at our house...” I shook my head, absentmindedly twisting a piece of Fisher's damp hair around my finger.
“She didn't want me to follow in her footsteps, so she made him promise to take me on in the forge as soon as I was old enough. I was ten when I first stepped into his workshop. And my mother? She’d already started smuggling weapons into the ward by then. It started as pieces of scrap metal. Things that could be turnedintoweapons. Elroy was happy to make them at first. Just daggers. Small knives. My mother handed them out to her friends at Kala's first, to protect themselves with when they took their work home with them. But then she started bringing home swords and shields. The kinds of things that would get her killed if she was caught trading in them.”
I hated remembering the knocks at our door in the middle of the night while my mother was working at Kala's. The masked men who would thrust heavy hessian sacks into my hands and then sprint off into the dark. But I forced myself to do it. “She had me running items from our house to the forge every day soon after that. The guardians didn't pay much attention to a scrawny kid on her way to work. Years went by, and she started introducing me to all kinds of men...”
Fisher's breathing hitched. He'd been loosening up gradually, but now he stiffened again, his nostrils flaring. He didn't say a word, but I knew what he was thinking.
“Not those kinds of men. They never touched me. They showed me where the entrances to various tunnels were. The ones that led to the underground reserves where Madra kept water reservoirs. Plenty to supply the whole city and then some.They showed me how to tap the tanks and siphon off a little here and a little there. They showed me how to pick locks and how to climb. I learned how to fight with daggers and how to throw them. A rebel would stay at the house, hidden in the attic, for a week, or a month. Sometimes maybe two. Then they'd switch out, and someone new would show up. Hayden knew nothing about it. He was too young to understand most of what was happening, and he didn't know how to keep his mouth shut. So I learned how to fight, and steal, and how to take care of him, too, since our mother was never home anymore. And that's just how it was for a long time. I spent my days in the forge. After, I cared for Hayden. Cooked for him. Kept the house clean. And then, as soon as he went to sleep, I'd be out stealing whatever we needed to live.”
“When did you sleep?” Fisher wasn't fighting against the pain anymore. It sounded like he was struggling to stay awake.
“I didn't, really. I took naps whenever I could, and...I don't know. I just kept going.”
“Sounds shit.”
“It was. And it got worse. My mother started to get angry. She was sick of being treated like crap and degraded by the men who thought they were so much better than her. She refused to accept guardians as clients anymore. Some of her regulars, the ones who used to come to the house, didn't like that. One morning, six years ago, she left the house and headed to Kala's, but she forgot her water ration. She'd left it sitting there on the kitchen table, her bottle full. Hadn't even taken a sip out of it. I knew if she didn't have it with her, she wouldn't get any water all day, so I grabbed it and chased after her. I found her in the square, already on her knees. The guardian she'd turned away from the house the night before was standing there, smug as fuck, while his underlings searched her bags. They found two knives on her.Tiny, pointless things. The blades were barely even three inches long, but that didn't matter.”
“Because the punishment for carrying a weapon in the Third is death,” Fisher whispered.
“I watched them slit her throat,” I said. “No arrest. No trial. They love carrying out their sentencing on the spot. Saves time and energy, I suppose. She died face down in the sand, in the blistering heat, with five men pissing in her hair and on her back. And then they left her there. I ran to her as soon as they went. Flipped her over. Shook her.” I shrugged. “But she was already gone. I couldn't carry her by myself, so I had to run and fetch Elroy. When we got back to the square, our neighbors were out there, standing over her, spitting in her face. Elroy knocked out one man who was trying to tear the clothes off her body.”
What's the problem? She was a dirty, disease-riddled whore.She didn't care about the world seeing her tits. Here, how about I fucking pay her?”He'd dropped a scuffed-up penny onto my mother's stomach and then kicked her in the ribs. That's when Elroy had broken his face. I didn't tell Fisher that part, though. There were memories that could be put into words, even if it felt like dying to give them light and air. And then there were those that couldn't. I would never repeat the words that man said about my mother.
“We burned her the next morning in the dunes, a mile from the glass flats. The air was so hot that singed the insides of my nostrils. Hayden passed out, and Elroy had to carry him home, but I stayed and watched my mother’s pyre until she was ash and cinders on the breeze. When I finally stumbled back home, I found our house all boarded up, the door and the windows blocked off with lengths of wood. There was a big black ex painted across the stonework. Ours was the first house they quarantined. More followed, though. A week later, Madra hadthe whole ward placed on lockdown. No in or out. They said the ward was stricken with a plague.”
Those days were distant, foggy nightmares that haunted both my waking and sleeping hours. Hayden's grief had turned into anger very quickly. He'd blamed our mother for the loss of our home. His friends had finally told him that she hadn't been abarmaidat Kala's. Some of them told him their own fathers had fucked Iris Fane for the price of a cheap pitcher of beer. He'd rebelled in just about every way he could think of, and when he was done with that, he’d started with the gambling.
“You stayed with Elroy?” Fisher asked. He rubbed his forehead, massaging the spot between his eyebrows, and I realized that he could move now. But he hadn't shifted from his position, leaning up against me. When he let his hand fall again, he let it rest against my leg. Comfortable. Familiar.
“No. If he'd taken us in, the guardians would have put two and two together and realized that he had made the daggers my mother had been carrying that day. I didn't want to endanger him, so, for all intents and purposes, Hayden and I disappeared. We found our own attic spaces to sleep in. Above taverns mostly, where a little noise at night wouldn't be noticeable. I’d sneak in and out of the forge, so no one knew I was working there. The skills my mother's rebel friends had taught me ended up keeping us alive. We managed.”
