“You are a fool,” the Destroyer said, not bothering to turn around.
“And you…” replied Nyx, carefully placing one foot on the ground, her voice coarse and splintered, “are a bitch.”
The Destroyer glanced over her shoulder. The whites of her eyes gleamed like glacier ice, buried so long in the heart of the mountain that it remembered no sunlight. “‘Bitch’ is what people call women whose power they fear.”
Nyx swallowed convulsively. She leaned her good shoulder—“good” being very relative—against the wall and pushed herself far enough up to put her other foot on the ground, so that she was no longer kneeling. “It’s also…what they call serial murderesses. So I stand by it.” She was gasping for air by the end of the declaration, and nearly ready to reconsider her commitment to goading her way to her own death.
The Destroyer turned fully around now. She looked Nyx up and down, reconsidering her. “Why do you fight so hard?” she said softly. “Only loss lies down this path. Whatever you want, it is as far from your reach as the moon.” There was an odd wistfulness to her voice, something childlike, there and gone almost before Nyx could notice it.
“What do you know of loss?” Nyx snarled.
The Destroyer quirked an eyebrow, and one corner of her mouth curved up humorlessly. “Nothing. You can’t lose what you’ve never had.”
“You’ve had everything,” Nyx spat. “You grew up with everything. I had one thing, one precious person, and then you took him too just because you could.” She inhaled painfully. “Mark my words: one day soon, you will face a reckoning.”
The Destroyer tilted her head. A calculating light came into her expression. “What is your name?”
“I told you. Nyx.”
“No. Your family name.”
Nyx took a breath. There it was. The Lady of Mercury had guessed her secret. If she was certain enough of her relation to Tal, she would kill Nyx; she seemed obsessed with ensuring no one else had a claim to him. Nyx knew that she was dying, but she couldn’t give in to it just yet. She had to last at least a little longer. Just long enough for her plan to work.
So she took a strangled breath and met the Destroyer’s eyes. Then she spat on her boots. Red splattered across the finely dyed leather. “Go to hell,” Nyx said, and hated that the words were half a sob.
The Destroyer stepped forward again.
he night before, tremors had wracked Nyx’s body as she hurried through the aqueducts. She’d built up enough of a tolerance to the poison that it wouldn’t kill her—the Destroyer would be the one to do that—but it was still havoc on her nerves. She cursed under her breath. She needed to be strong. By the light of the coming dawn, she would be attacking the Destroyer, and if Nyx wasn’t at her prime she could be killed first thing rather than being pursued and captured as she needed to be.
Ahead of her, a child cried out. Nyx was shepherding one of the last loads of townsfolk through the aqueducts to safety, and just in time too. Above them, an ominous rumble shook dust from the ceiling and made the bricks tremble. Flakes of mortar crumbled away and drifted down like snow.
“It’s the train,” the child whimpered. “She’s here. We won’t make it!”
One of the other Saints on the mission, a pale-skinned man with hair so red it was nearly orange, scooped the child up to comfort her. When the girl’s face was turned away, he sent a significant look at Nyx. She nodded at his silent message and then quickly helped him herd them into a side tunnel where they would be better protected from the fire that was about to rain down on the city—and on the hundred-odd soon-to-be-martyred Saints who had volunteered to take the townspeople’s place in their homes tonight. The Destroyer would know if the city she burned was empty, but she’d be none the wiser to incinerating the wrong people.
Some of the Saints would survive, though. It was all part of the plan. All Nyx had to do was her bit, and allow the toxin flowing through her veins to do its own part.
The poison had been formulated by her mother working in conjunction with a copper Smith, and was made by dissolving hemlock oil in an enchanted copper suspension. It was created to be absorbed by the body of the one who drank it—and then transmitted to anyone who channeled magic into the drinker.
Nyx was immune.
The Destroyer wasn’t.
This time, Nyx didn’t return to herself.
She couldn’t bear it any longer. Not the agony, not the smell of burning hair and skin blistering from the inside, not the contradictory planes and angles of her captor’s expression. She floated instead, drifting just below the surface of the pain, peering into the dim, distorted light of the prison in the way a swimmer sees the sun from deep underwater.
“No!” cried a voice, cutting through the haze. The word rang across the iron bars and bounced painfully inside Nyx’s skull. Distantly, she thought that it sounded like her mother.
An errant tear, or perhaps a bead of blood, slid across Nyx’s nose. Against her will she resurfaced. The distorted light turned into flickering sparks. The Destroyer was walking away, frowning down at her hands, where colorful flames wheeled about like a kaleidoscope. She must have realized something was wrong, that something was affecting her magic. If she walked away now, that was all it would do: drain her magic, weaken her until her body recovered. It wouldn’t kill her.
Nyx’s gaze slid sideways. Like metal meeting a magnet, she found the eyes of the woman in the next cell, one of the “captured townsfolk”—the one who’d cried out earlier,
