Page 3 of Quicksilver
I completed the rest of the climb in under two minutes. The gauntlet slammed into the tiny dune of sand shored up along the top of the wall. As I heaved myself over the ledge, particles of quartz in the sand began to vibrate, jittering in the air a millimeter above the sandstone as the gold came alive.
I froze, the breath trapped in my lungs, caught off guard by the peculiarity of the sight.
No. Not here. Not now…
The gauntlet whispered, rocking rapidly as I brought myself up to straddle the wall. The particles of quartz rose up, up, up.
She sees us.
She feels us.
She sees us.
She feels us.
She—
I slammed my hand down on top of the gauntlet, and the piece of stolen armor stilled. The glinting specks of quartz fell back into the sand.
“I’ll find you, girl! I swear it! Drop that gauntlet or make an enemy for life!”
At last, there it was—a tinge of panic riding the guardian’s plea. The truth of the situation had caught up with him. I wasn’t going to fall to my death. Neither was I going to accidentally drop the armor he threw to the ground in disgust once he’d realized he’d touched a plague rat.
I'd slipped through his bare fingers, and there was nothing he could do about it beyond shouting threats up at a ghost in the sky. Because I was already gone. The idiot below wouldn’t be the first enemy I'd made out of one of Madra's men, but I wouldn’t be giving him another thought. I was far more concerned with all of the incredible things I was going to forge with his impressive gauntlet.
But first, I was going to melt the glorious thing down to slag.
2
GLASSMAKER
“No.Absolutely not. Not here. Not in my furnace.”
Elroy glared at me like I was a four-headed serpent, and he didn’t know which one of my heads would strike him first. I’d upset the old man a million different times, a million different ways, but this disapproving look was new. His expression was one of equal parts disappointment and fear, and for the briefest of moments, I questioned my decision to bring the gold into the workshop.
Where else would I have taken it, though? The loft over the tavern where Hayden and I had been sleeping these past six weeks was infested with cockroaches and stank worse than a sand badger set. We’d found a way into The Mirage through a damaged section in the cracked slate roof. We were quiet when we crept in there to sleep amongst the rotten, long-forgotten wine crates and moth-eaten stacks of heavy, folded canvas, and so far, we hadn’t been discovered. But my brother and I weren’t stupid. It was only a matter of time before wewerefound out, and the proprietors of the public house evicted us from their attic space at the end of a blade. There’d be no time to collect our belongings. We didn’thaveany belongings aside from theclothes on our backs. Hiding the gauntlet there would be folly. Elroy’s workshop was the only place I could take it. No matter what, I needed to use the furnaces. I didn’t have a choice. If I didn’t melt down the metal and make something else out of it (verygods-cursed quickly), the gauntlet was a millstone around my neck that would wind up getting me tortured and killed.
“It’s bad enough that I had to tell Jarris Wade that you weren’t here an hour ago. He was furious. Said you’d broken some trade agreement with him. But then you show up here withthatthing. What the hell were you thinking?” The despair lacing Elroy’s voice made me regret showing it to him. “Why did you take it in the first place? We’ll have Madra’s vipers scouring this place with a fine-toothed comb, searching for it. When they find you, they’ll flay the skin from your bones in the square for everybody to see. Hayden will be right there next to you. And me?Me?Even if theydobelieve I had nothing to do with this, they’ll take my hands for even allowing that thing under my roof. How am I supposed to make a living with no hands, you stupid,stupidgirl?”
Elroy’s business was glass. With an abundance of sand at his fingertips, he’d made it his life’s work to become the best glassmaker and glazier in all of Zilvaren. Only those living in the Hub were rich enough to afford windows, though. And there were people who lived in the Third who sought other items that could be forged in a hearth. Once upon a time, Elroy used to make illicit weapons for the rebel gangs who fought to overthrow Madra. Rough-edged swords made from scraps of iron, but mostly knives. The blades were shorter and required less steel. Even though the pig iron was of the worst quality, it could still be honed into an edge sharp enough to send a man to the makers. But as the years had passed, life as an insurgent within had grown untenable.
Fresh food was impossible to find. In the streets, children clawed each other’s eyes out over a heel of stale bread. The only way to survive the Third now was by barter and trade…or by whispering secrets about your neighbors into a guardian’s ear. As a resident of the Third, if you weren’t dead or dying, then you were hungry, and there wasn’t much a starving person wouldn’t say to quell the ache of an empty belly. After too many close calls to count, Elroy had declared he wouldn’t be hammering out any more of his vicious, needle-like knives and told me I wasn’t welcome to forge them in his fires anymore, either. We were to be glassmakers and nothing more.
“I’m stunned.Stunned.I just—I can’t even comprehend—” The old man shook his head in disbelief. “I can’t evenbeginto fathom what you were thinking. Do you have any idea what kind of doom you’ve brought down on our heads?”
When I was little, Elroy had been a giant of a man. A legend amongst even the most dangerous criminals that ran the Third. Taller than most, broad, his back muscles straining beneath his sweat-stained shirt. He’d been a force of nature. A pillar of rock hewn out of a mountain. Immoveable. Indestructible. It was only recently that I’d begun to understand that he was in love with my mother. After she was killed, little by little, piece by piece, I’d watched him wither away, becoming less of himself. Becoming a shadow. The man that stood before me now was barely recognizable.
His calloused hand shook as he pointed at the polished metal glittering like sin on the table between us. “You’re taking it back is what you’re gonna do, Saeris.”
A huff of laughter escaped me. “The forgotten gods and all four fucking winds know that I’mnot. Not after everything I went through to get it. I nearly broke my damned neck—”
“I’llbreak your neck if that thing isn’t out of here in the next fifteen minutes.”
“You think I’m just going to walk up to the sentry post andhand it over—”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Gods,whydo you have to be so ridiculous? Scale the wall again and toss it back into the Hub once the Twins dip. One of those inbred bastards will find it and return it to the guardians without a second thought. They won’t even realize how much the damn thing’s worth.”
Gritting my teeth, I folded my arms over my chest, trying to ignore how prominent my ribs felt beneath the fabric of my shirt. My skin prickled with sweat. I was losing moisture I couldn’t afford to part with. I’d left my water ration hidden inside a wall in the attic back at The Mirage—hadn’t been able to risk someone trying to jumpmefor it whileIwas picking pockets—and the workshop was hellishly hot, as per usual.
