Quicksilver (The Fae & Alchemy Series Book 1)

1

THE CLIMB

“Y’know, there’s really no need for all this violence.”

It was common knowledge in Zilvaren City that to lie to a guardian meant death. I knew this in a first-hand, painful way that most other Zilvarens did not. Almost a year ago to the day, I’d watched one of the queen’s men clad in beaten golden armor gut my neighbor for lying about his age. And before that, and far worse, I’d stood silently in the street while my mother’s throat had been split wide open, spilling jets of hot, peasant blood into the sunbaked sand.

As the handsome guardian’s hand closed around my neck now, his beautifully engraved gauntlet reflecting the glare of the twin suns overhead like a golden mirror, it was a miracle I didn’t crack open and yield my secrets like a piece of overripe fruit. His metal-tipped fingers gouged deeper into the hollow of my throat. “Name. Age. Ward. Spit it out. Low-tier citizens aren’t permitted in the Hub,” he snarled.

Like most cities, Zilvaren, the Great and Shining Banner of the North, was fashioned after the shape of a wheel. Around the city's outer limits, the different spokes—walls designed to keep people contained in their wards—towered fifty meters high above the shanti towns and overflowing sewers.

The guardian gave me an impatient shake. “Answer quick, girl, or I’ll have you dispatched through the fifth gate of hell directly.”

I groped loosely at his gauntlet, nowhere near strong enough to break his grip, and smirked, rolling my eyes up toward the bone-white sky. “How am I s’posed to tell you…anything if I…can’t…fucking…breathe?”

The guardian’s dark eyes simmered with rage. If anything, the pressure he applied to my windpipe intensified. “You have any idea how hot it is down in the palace cells during reckoning, thief? No water? No clean air? The reek of rotting corpses is enough to make the high executioner vomit. You’ll be dead within three hours, mark my words.”

The palace cells were a sobering thought. I’d been caught stealing once before and had been sent down there for a grand total of eight minutes. Eight minutes had been enough. During reckoning, when the suns, Balea and Min, were at their closest and the afternoon air shivered with heat, being trapped below ground in the festering sore that passed as a prison beneath the immortal queen’s palace would not be fun. And besides, I was badly needed above ground. If I didn’t make it back to the forge before dusk, the deal I’d spent hours brokering last night would fall through. No deal meant no water. No water meant the people I cared about would suffer.

Much as it irked me, I submitted. “Lissa Fossick. Twenty-four. Single.” I winked at him, and the bastard squeezed harder. Dark hair and blue eyes weren’t common in the Silver City; he would remember me. The age I’d given him was real, as was my pathetic romantic status, but the name I’d provided wasn't. My real name? No way I was handing that over without a fight. This bastard would shit himself if he realized he had the Saeris Fane in his grasp.

“Ward?” the guardian demanded.

Gods alive. So insistent. He was about to wish he’d never asked. “The Third.”

“The Thi—” The guardian shoved me down onto the blistering sand, and super-heated particles scorched the back of my throat as I accidentally breathed them in. I sucked my next breath in through the sleeve of my shirt, but filtering out the sand that way only did so much; a couple of grains always worked their way through the fabric. The guardian staggered back. “Residents of Third Ward are quarantined. Punishment for leaving the ward is—is—”

There was no punishment for leaving the Third; no one had ever done it before. Those unlucky enough to find themselves scraping out a living in the dirty back alleys and stinking side streets of my home usually died before they could even think about escape.

Standing over me, the guardian’s anger shifted into something closer to fear. It was then that I noticed the small plague bag hanging from his belt and realized that he, like thousands of others in Zilvaren, was a Believer. With a panicked lurch, he raised his foot and brought the sole of his boot crashing down onto my side. Pain stole my breath as he brought up his boot to kick me again. This was far from my first beating. I could take a shit-kicking as well as the next downtrodden scammer, but I didn’t have time to accommodate Madra’s fanatical followers this afternoon. I had somewhere to be, and I was running out of time.

With a quick twist and a forward lunge, I grabbed the guardian just below his knee—one of the only places he was unprotected by his heavy golden armor. The tears came in quick and hot. Believable. I gave a solid performance, but then again, I’d had a lot of practice. “Please, Brother! Don’t send me back there. I’ll die if you do. My whole family has the rattles.” I coughed for effect—a dry hack that sounded nothing like the wet, congested cough of the almost dead. But the guardian had probably never even seen someone with the rattles before. He stared down at the point where my hand closed around the material of his pants, mouth gaping open in horror.

A second later, the tip of his sword punctured my shirt, right between my breasts. A little weight on the hilt of his weapon and I’d be just another dead thief bleeding out on the streets of Zilvaren. I figured he'd do it—but then I watched as he processed the situation and realized what he’d have to do next if he killed me. The dead were left to rot in the streets of the other wards, but things were different in the tree-lined, leafy walkways of the Hub. Zilvaren’s well-heeled elite might not have been able to keep the sands borne on the hot westerly winds out, but they wouldn’t tolerate a diseased plague rat rudely decaying on one of their streets. If this guardian killed me, he’d have to dispose of my body right away. And from the look on his face, that hazardous task was one he didn’t wish to undertake. See, if I was from the Third, then I was far more dangerous than any normal, run-of-the-mill everyday pickpocket. No, I was contagious.

The guardian ripped the gauntlet and glove from his hand—the hand he’d used to half-choke me—and dropped them to the sand. The burnished metal released a sustained hum as it hit the ground. It sang in my ears, and just like that, all of my plans went up smoke. I’d been caught lifting a tiny scrap of twisted iron from a market stall. I’d weighed the odds and considered the risk worth it, knowing the small ingot would earn me a tidy profit. But this? So much precious metal, tossed to the ground like it meant nothing? This, I couldn’t resist.

I moved with a speed the guardian wasn’t expecting. In a lithe, explosive maneuver, I sprawled forward and grabbed the gauntlet, targeting the larger of the two pieces of metal. The glove was stunning, skillfully made by a true master. The tiny circlets of gold looped together to form a chainmail was notoriously impenetrable by blade or magic. But the weight of the gauntlet, the solid amount of gold that comprised the piece of armor—it was unimaginable that I’d ever hold that amount of gold in my hands again.