Page 39 of Quicksilver
A long pause filled the silence. Rusarius coughed uncomfortably; he gathered up a set of writing quills, carrying them into the stacks and disappearing off to gods only knew where. I didn't have a pile of quills to carry off, and this wasn't my library to go poking around in, so I had no choice but to hover at the end of the clerk's table and stare down at my feet. Or at the point where my feet should have been. I couldn’t see them beneath my cursed dress's skirts.
“So that's it, then? Youhavegiven up on him?” Renfis demanded.
“No! No, I haven't. I just...I feelhopeless.”
“If I have enough hope for him, then I've enough for you, too.” Renfis sighed out a long, steady breath, tapping the table with his fingertips. “I'll see you later. Good luck. And good luck to you, too, Saeris.” He smiled warmly at me as he passed, whichmade me feel slightly less like I was eavesdropping on a private conversation.
Once he was gone, Everlayne bustled around the table, rifling through more pieces of parchment, organizing, and then reorganizing them. “All right.” She sniffed. “Where should we begin? Hmm. I think, maybe, if you start by telling us what you know about alchemical practices and how they might be used—”
“Uh, I don't even know what alchemicalmeans.” I didn't want to interrupt her, but I figured it was best to get that out of the way before she went any further.
“Oh! Right!” She smiled broadly, but it seemed as though there was a hint of hysteria to her. “Well. That's okay. I suppose that might even be for the best. No bad habits that way. We'll start from the beginning, just as soon as Rusarius—” She broke off, looking over her shoulder. “Rusarius? Where in the five hells did the mango?”
“Everlayne? Are you, uh, okay? You seem a little...”
“No, I'm fine. Fine. Really, I'm fine.” She pressed her fingers into her forehead, screwing her eyes shut for a moment, completelynotfine. “I..” She let her hand fall, all pretension dropped. “He was the very best thing in my entire life,” she said. “Theonlygood thing. And he's gone. I knew he would be, but it's hard...to see, and...to accept, and...”
“Speaking of crackers, I knew I had some somewhere. I found a whole tray of them on a shelf in the Seventh Era Land Records section. Must have left them there the other day.” Rusarius emerged from the stacks again, carrying a small silver platter of what indeed looked to be very dry crackers. Oblivious to the fact that Everlayne was dashing tears away with the back of her hand, he placed the platter down on the table with a flourish. “Help yourselves, my darlings. But, uh...yes, please. Make sure to keep the crumbs to a minimum.”
Alchemy, it turned out, was a form of magic. Forgotten, long-dead, old magic that was as much a myth to the Fae of Yvelia astheywere to the people of Zilvaren. There had once been three branches of Alchemists—Fae who sought to discover the path to immortality, Fae who sought to create and invent by transmuting various metals and ores, and lastly, Fae who sought to cure illness and disease.
Everlayne and Rusarius thought I was somehow like the second type of Alchemist—the kind that transmuted metals. At the beginning of our first library session, I had no idea what the word ‘transmute’ even meant, and by the end I still wasn't sure I understood.
Thousands of years ago, the Alchemists used their magical gifts to alter the state of compounds and transform them into precious metals. There was no record of which compounds were used, or what was done to them, but the Alchemists were successful. They found a way to transform elements into vast amounts of gold and silver, which was reportedly used to fill the royal coffers. At some point, the quicksilver was discovered along with the other realms its pathways connected, and all manner of chaos ensued afterward.
“None of this indicates how I’m replicating what the original Alchemists could do, though,” I said, snapping the book I'd been scanning closed. “How did they actually control the quicksilver?”
Everlayne shrugged. “It's assumed that they activated and deactivated it—or opened and closed the pathways—by using their magic.”
“It's hotly debated whether they controlled it all,” Rusarius said. “According to most documents from around that time, the second order of the Alchemists lived very short lives. They often went mad and killed themselves.”
“Oh, well, that's justgreat.”Whatever the Alchemists of old had done to earn themselves that fate, I wanted to know so I could do the exact opposite. But...damn it. Burying my head in the sand wouldn't help me activate the quicksilver again, and I had to work out how to do that if I wanted to know what had happened to Hayden. The idea that Hayden might have been conscripted into Madra’s army was preferable to imagining him dead, but I needed toknow.If Hayden was gone, he needed to be buried, and I needed to stand the customary seventy-two-hour vigil over his grave. If he was trapped as a new recruit of Madra's army, then I needed to save him and get him out of there.
Either way, I had to figure this out, no matterwhatit cost me.
I rubbed at my temples, trying to ease the tension headache that was forming there. What with all of the thieving and black-market trading just to survive, life back in the Silver City hadn't left much room for reading. My eyes weren't used to it. I stared down at the book I'd been...
Huh.
Wait.
I held up the book, tilting my head, eyes narrowed at Rusarius. “How come I can read this?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Well, I'm from another place. An entirely different realm. What are the chances that you and I even speak the samelanguage? That we share a written language? It's just...it's impossible.” It was wild that this hadn’t occurred to me before.
“Hmm, no. Not impossible. Not even improbable, actually,” said Rusarius. “You explain this one, sweet,” he said to Everlayne. “There’s one more book I want to find before you leave.”
Everlayne seemed happy to be given the task. “Well,” she said, leaning across the table to take the book out of my hand. “Right now, you're speaking Common Fae. This book was written in Common Fae, too. There are other languages in Yvelia. Other dialects. But Common Fae is spoken by all of the courts as a shared, well,commontongue. When the first Fae traveled to your realm, the humans there spoke a different language altogether. Over the years, our language and our written word became adopted by the humans. Even though we were cut off from the other realms, it seems as though our language has thrived. In Zilvaren, at least. Zilvaren had Madra, and your queen has always spoken Common Fae. She served as an anchor to our language. Perhaps in other realms, languages and alphabets have changed.”
Madra.
As ancient as the stone halls at the center of the universe.
I had to ask. I had toknow.“You seem to know a fair bit about her,” I said.
“Madra?” Everlayne pursed her lips. “I suppose I know as much as anyone here. She was young when she ascended to the Zilvaren throne. Blood-thirsty and hungry for power.”
