“Is he lying?” Tomas asked, not bothering to hide the question from the emperor.
“About mage-craft having no effect on him?” Mirian tucked a strand of hair back behind her ear. “No.”
Nine set up for another run. Tomas growled, and he settled, reluctantly, by Mirian’s other side.
“First, why would I lie? Second,” the emperor continued as Tomas soothed the boy, “thank you for keeping my property from damaging itself, and third…”
He opened his hand. Nine jumped for the flash of gold. Missed.
Mirian felt the net snug up against her scalp, thought about hats, and bit back a giggle. It didn’t hurt this time, but that was possibly because she couldn’t feel anything but tired.
“You didn’t think I only had the original six, did you?” The emperor smiled broadly. “This is the artifact we used for primary testing back when we first discovered the cabinet in the Archive, so I know this one, unlike the one you wore before, is entirely functional.”
It didn’t feel functional, it felt old.
Mage-craft had been wound through and around the gold links—a twisted combination of healing and metals.
Gold. Soft. Malleable. Never tarnished. She’d seen coins of red gold once from Talatia in the Southern Alliance at her father’s bank.
“Mirian, there’ll be more guards soon.”
“I know.”
The guards would have silver, and she couldn’t…
She knew the gold. Not as well as she’d come to know silver, but well enough. Except…she had nothing left. She was only still standing because she was too stubborn to fall over.
The emperor said the Mage-pack had escaped. That was good.
But now he had Tomas. That was bad.
“What is wrong with your eyes? They’re white, aren’t they? At first I thought it was just the room because, in all honesty it can be just a little overwhelming—the tile, the lights—but no, they’re white. No color to them at all. Wait, I’ve read about that. Hang on.” He lifted a hand as if he actually thought the gesture would hold them in place. “I’m sure I’ll remember in a moment. I know it was an old scroll. Very old…”
“Used to be, everyone had to do a bit of everything to survive, but civilization means specialists because suddenly everything’s so bleeding complicated with foundries and gaslights and brass buttons, it takes all a person has to learn how to do just one thing and if everything’s that complicated, then mage-craft can’t be simple…
“You need to be a river, not a bucket. Way I heard it, the power is everywhere, but the mage has to open themselves and say fuck these bullshit rules.”
She had essentially blinded herself with the limited power in her bucket. In this room, in this light, she could see shapes, although she had to trust those shapes were her Pack. She felt as though she were looking through a series of overlapping veils. If she turned her head quickly, the veils shifted and she almost thought she saw Tomas watching her.
What would unlimited power do? How many more veils would it add? What else would she lose? Sight. Hearing. Touch…
Life?
“Mirian?”
Running off to rescue the Mage-pack from the empire might have been a bit crazy, sure, but she didn’t want to die.
Or lose Tomas and the boy and the eight others in their broken Pack.
Her life weighed against ten lives.
If completely opening herself to power did kill her, at least she wouldn’t have to live with having failed them.
So, that decided, how did she find the power Gryham had heard about?
She knew how it felt lying dormant—trapped, heavy, not fitting in the skin that should be yours. She’d known that for years.
She knew how it felt being used—like a breeze, a cool drink of water, warm earth underfoot, knowing the parameters of your body, silver running silken. Although that was more recent.
Oh.
Reaching out, she found Tomas’ hand and squeezed it. There was no time to explain, but if the worst happened, she hoped he’d remember and understand. “Fuck these bullshit rules.”
“Mirian!”
Gold ran down her cheek and caught against the collar of her dress.
When she screamed, the Pack howled.
When she turned toward him, her eyes gleamed white from rim to rim.
Her body felt like it dissolved.
It hurt.
Then re-formed.
That hurt more.
“Mirian!”
She turned toward his voice. She could see the way the air moved over and around him. Defining him. She could see his shape in the air, see him. He was mostly water. She hadn’t known that. She could see all of them for the first time. Faces. Expressions. Scars. For all the detail, there were no colors; it was all shades of gray. All but the silver fur that marked where the Pack had been collared—that blazed.
Mirian pulled her hand from Tomas’ grip and stroked the backs of two fingers over his cheek. The movement shot pain down her arm as her new body figured out what she wanted it to do. The contact burned, then faded to a dull throb. “Don’t look so worried. I’m…” In all honesty, she wasn’t sure what she was.
What else she was.
She was Mirian Maylin.
“You can see me?”
“I can.” She rubbed her face against his shoulder, savoring the burn as each new bit of skin settled. Turning toward the other end of the room, she rose on the air until she was level with the emperor. His gray body gleamed with points of blue and green and red and brown and gold and indigo. No silver. No one had tortured him. She pulled the iron rings from the walls, formed it into spears, and sent them through the bars.
They flattened against a flare of indigo and dropped to the floor.
“Amazing! But that’s metal-craft and I told you, I’m protected. You can’t blow me over, you can’t move all the water out of my body, you can’t wrap vines around me, or bury me, you can’t light me on fire, you can’t put me to sleep.” He hauled out the artifacts as he spoke. Mirian saw them as their power rather than actual physical things. She could see how that power protected them.
“You can’t hurt me.”
She tried anyway.
She couldn’t set him on fire, so she cracked the walls—the tiles were originally clay and threw the metal from the pipes…
…the water in the pipes.
Air spun around him.
He didn’t fall. He didn’t sleep.
He was right.
Exactly right.
She let everything fall and said, “That artifact that protects you from Healing is limited. It only stops me from putting you to sleep.”
The emperor smiled disarmingly from within a knee-high circle of debris and rubbed the gold light between his thumb and forefinger. “Well, yes, but healing is hardly aggressive now, is it? You can’t exactly heal me to death.”
Mirian remembered the rabbit and smiled back at him.
This time, no one was close enough to break his neck. He died thrashing, fingernails digging into his face, heels drumming against the floor.
It didn’t take long. She hoped he was terrified. She hoped it hurt.
Her Pack stood and watched silently as she rode the air back to the floor.
Tomas watched as she made her way through them—stroking shoulders, heads, ears, calming them, if only for the moment, with her touch. He was as silent as the rest.