Give the Dark My Love

by Beth Revis

  I was struck by how much studying diseases was like being a detective of a crime. The murderer was a plague, but the deaths were just as sure as a blade across the neck.

  “I will do what I can,” I said, but Master Ostrum was already disappearing deeper into the factory. I liked that we could work as a team. I doubted other masters would treat their students like partners, but Master Ostrum trusted me.

  I withdrew my golden crucible. It was worn now, but familiar, comfortable. I grabbed the nearest potion maker. “Take me to your supplies,” I said. She glanced at the golden crucible in my hands, then touched the three beads at her neck.

  “Thank Oryous you’re here,” she said. “We have no tincture of blue ivy. Just poppy oil. It’s not doing much.”

  “Do you have rats?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Oh, there’s plenty of those.”

  Before she could lead me away, the door opened, spilling in a blast of cool air. A surgeon strode forward, his kit in his hand, and he cast his eyes over the patients.

  “Oh, Blye, thank you,” the potion maker said, waving him over. “This is Blye. He’s a butcher by trade, but he offered to help at the factories for a morning.”

  “Thank you,” I said, offering him my hand. “Nedra Brysstain.”

  “Alchemist?” he asked, eyeing my crucible.

  “In training.”

  “Don’t worry, she’s very good,” the potion maker said. I gave her another look and realized I knew her from the quarantine hospital. Her name was Marrow; she usually worked night shifts. From the dark circles under her eyes, I suspected she’d been here since early evening yesterday. She probably started treating patients about the same time I was dancing with Grey, pretending that there was nothing wrong with the world.

  I swallowed down the bile rising in my throat.

  Blye nodded without speaking as Marrow started to tell him about the patients he’d be seeing. I could tell Blye wasn’t the kind for small talk, and as he laid out his tools on a small tray, I recognized some of them from the butcher shop in our village. Tools meant for cows and pigs and sheep.

  He’d come from one slaughterhouse to another.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Nedra

  “Five this morning,” Marrow said. “Are you up for it, Nedra dear?”

  I nodded grimly.

  “Legs or arms first?” Marrow asked, turning to Blye. Another potion maker scurried forward, presenting me with a wheeled cart holding four rats in small wire cages.

  “Arms,” Blye said.

  I pulled back the curtain for us to enter the surgery room. Room. A room would indicate walls, not heavy cloth partitions.

  “Nedra?” a weak voice said.

  My eyes snapped to the girl who’d spoken. My heart lurched as I recognized the patient.

  No.

  “Dilada.” My voice was a strained whisper, a plea, begging for this not to be real.

  She held up her left arm, exposing withered black fingers, the shadows creeping like ink through her veins, all the way past her elbow.

  “Carso would laugh,” Dilada said as Blye pulled his cart closer and took a seat above her shoulder. “He always said we had the worst luck of anyone on the island.”

  “I thought—” I shook my head, my words dissipating on my tongue. Dilada wasn’t supposed to be here. She was supposed to be on her farm, with her parents and brother, safe and sound. But her parents had died, and so had Carso, and the job in the forest—the one clearing land for graves—had ended, and she’d come here. And caught the plague.

  “I’m so scared,” Dilada confessed, her voice almost silent.

  I crouched closer to her. “It’ll be okay,” I said. “I’ve been working with my master since I started here. People live, when we catch it early enough.” Sometimes, I thought to myself.

  She shook her head. “No, I mean—I felt ill two days ago. But I came to work anyway. If I missed a day, they would have fired me . . .”

  “Oh,” I breathed. She was scared that the illness spreading through Berrywine’s was her fault. That she had brought the death here. Maybe she had; we had no way of knowing.

  Blye moved his cart, rattling his instruments, his eyes on me. He was waiting.

  Dilada swallowed. “I know what has to be done, Nedra,” she said.

  Of course she did. She’d seen the millworkers who survived the plague but couldn’t go back to work. She’d seen the beggars on the streets.

  “Will it hurt?” she asked, her voice wavering.

  “I can make it hurt less,” I promised. “At least for a while.”

  I set my crucible on the table. It was tall and narrow, about six inches in diameter. Although it was made of solid gold, it was scratched and dull. I ran my fingers along the runes. Master Ostrum had given me the chunk of gold, but I had been the one to pour the molten metal into its mold, and it had been my fingers that scored the runes onto the surface.

  I turned to the tray Marrow had given me. The rats inside were not clean like the ones we used at Yūgen. These rats had been caught on the street, and they stank of garbage and piss. I did not flinch as the nearest one snapped at me when I opened its cage. I grabbed it by the scruff of its neck and dropped it into the golden crucible. It snarled in protest, clawing against the smooth metal interior, but it couldn’t escape.

  “Do you know how alchemy works?” I asked Dilada, attempting to distract her as Blye marked her arm with a butcher’s pen.

  Dilada lifted her eyes from her deadened fingers and shook her head at me.

  “It’s science,” I said.

  “My father always said it was magic.”

  “So did mine,” I said.

  “And mine.” Blye’s deep voice startled Dilada. She’d almost forgotten he was there, but now her gaze drank in the shining scalpel to slice away her skin, the pins to hold the flesh back, the rags to mop up blood. The bone saw.

  I shifted, drawing Dilada’s eyes back to me and not the tray of tools.

  “But it’s not—not really, anyway. Alchemy exists on the principles of balance.” I was careful to keep my tone even and light. I put one hand on the crucible and quickly muttered the awakening incantation. The runes glowed white on the golden surface.

  Dilada gasped.

  “Ready,” Blye said in his gruff voice.

  I squeezed Dilada’s shoulder, then touched the crucible on the table. The rat inside screamed in protest as the feeling from Dilada’s arm left me and entered its much smaller body. Just existing caused the rat pain now, but when Blye sliced into Dilada’s skin and flesh, she would feel nothing at all. When Blye sawed through Dilada’s humerus, she would only be aware of the motion, the tugging and pulling, but not the pain.

  The rat carried her pain for her.

  “Thank you,” Dilada whispered.

  “Don’t look,” I advised, and Blye turned his scalpel to her skin. All the fear she’d kept tamped down burst through her eyes for just a moment, then she squeezed them shut and turned her face away.

  Dilada’s pulse thrummed violently in her throat. I could make her body numb, but I could do nothing for the agonizing anticipation. My grip on her arm tightened. I had to maintain the connection between her and the rat.

  “I wish—” Dilada started, but she didn’t finish. Blye made the first cuts, and although Dilada’s arm was numb, she was still cognizant of what was happening.

  Blye worked quickly. Marrow jumped in to help, siphoning off the blood even as it splattered over the floor, soaking into the sawdust. I clenched my teeth, past the point of being able to do anything but provide a link between Dilada and the rat. I felt her pain in waves, washing through me and into the dirty gray body writhing inside the crucible.

  From inside the golden vase, the rat screeched sharp and high, then was suddenly silent. Its body couldn’t tak
e any more.

  “Marrow,” I grunted through gritted teeth. With nowhere else to go, Dilada’s pain whirled inside me. I could feel myself growing dizzy with it, my grip loosening.

  Marrow didn’t hesitate to reach inside the cage and dump another rat into the crucible. The connection was remade almost instantaneously, and Dilada only whimpered once as Blye picked up the bone saw. I breathed in relief, letting the pain flood through me into the rat.

  After Blye was done, after the hand and part of the arm had fallen with a wet thud against the floor, after Dilada had slipped into a poppy oil–induced sleep and Blye had sewed up her skin to cover the shorn bone—after all that, Blye stood and moved to the next patient, a young boy who was losing his entire left leg. Blye didn’t talk; he let me distract this patient, too.

  It must be easier that way. To see only the dead limbs that must be sawn away, not the people attached to them. To have never held the hand before it was severed.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Nedra

  By the fourth patient, my body ached, my flesh burned, my bones shattered. No one could see it. Even though I transferred as much of the pain as I could into the rats, there was always a little that lingered inside me. I stumbled, my body forgetting that my feet were still attached to my legs. My fingers bent slowly, as if I had to remind the tendons in my arms and hands that they’d not been severed, too.

  When we got to the last rat—and the last amputation—I forced some of my own feelings into the creature before it died. It was easier to do this job wide awake and a little numb. It was easier to get through the day that way, too.

  “Are you okay?” Marrow asked, wide-eyed, as I fumbled with the crucible, dumping the last furry, stinking body onto the metal tray piled with the rodent victims.

  I shrugged.

  Marrow shoved the cart of dead rats and severed limbs at Blye. He wheeled them away without a word. When Marrow saw my face, she added, “There’s a crematorium on his way back to the butcher’s.”

  I was glad the amputees were all sleeping, and I was glad I’d be gone before they woke. I didn’t want to be here when Dilada opened her eyes. I didn’t want to watch her look at the place where her hand had been.

  I stepped outside to catch my breath, to not think about death and blood. Weaving in and out of my thoughts were the events of yesterday morning: the still body of the baby, the way Ronan’s father had blamed me. I slid down the rough brick wall, landing on the bare cobblestones and letting my head rest on my knees. Blackdocks was coming alive, loud and bustling. I wondered if Dilada had ever been able to sell her boat.

  The clocks started chiming. The one in the bay, at the top of the quarantine hospital, was a second behind its twin at Yūgen. The day would be starting there soon. Students waking up, eating breakfast, going to lectures.

  The thought of it exhausted me.

  Master Ostrum appeared at the door. “Nedra,” he said.

  I looked up, too tired to stand.

  “One of your patients needs you.”

  “I’m . . .” I heaved a sigh. “Can’t someone else . . . ?”

  But I knew. It was my responsibility.

  I pushed against the wall and stood, following him back inside. The black curtains on the windows that marked this place as plague-ridden made the light dim and bleak. The surgical patients were still sleeping from the poppy oil, so at first I didn’t understand why Master Ostrum had led me to Dilada’s bedside. But then I noticed the way her breathing had slowed, faint and stuttering.

  I lifted her wrist, feeling for a pulse. It was barely there.

  Master Ostrum watched me as I peeled up Dilada’s eyelid and saw the thin film of green covering her rich brown irises.

  I cursed.

  “We could remove the eyes,” Master Ostrum said in a matter-of-fact voice. “Professor Pushnil has a theory that it would be about as effective as amputating diseased limbs.”

  “Professor Pushnil is an idiot,” I snapped. “The green film indicates that the plague is in the brain, not the eyes.”

  Master Ostrum nodded once, agreeing with me.

  I dropped Dilada’s hand. “Why did you bring me back here?” I asked, not bothering to hide the hurt in my voice. “We could have gone back to the academy without my knowing. You could have spared me.”

  “Sometimes, being an alchemist means accepting the limitations of alchemy. It is a hard lesson, but one we must all learn.”

  The limitations of alchemy. The book Master Ostrum had given me, the one about necromancy . . . it talked about there being no limitations.

  I bit my lip.

  “I want to try something,” I said.

  “There’s nothing—”

  “Please.”

  Master Ostrum stepped back as I pulled out my crucible. The Fourth Alchemy spoke of life and death as if they were both temporary, and it offered incantations that touched on the space between the two. Though necromancers used iron crucibles—the metal forged in a series of dark arts—it didn’t mean I couldn’t try to implement those incantations with my golden crucible. It wasn’t quite necromancy, what I planned to try.

  But it was close.

  Master Ostrum snapped his fingers for someone to bring us a rat, but I shook my head. My crucible was empty, and that was fine. A rat wouldn’t do anything to help Dilada. Alchemy relied on fair trades of equal value. A rat’s life was nothing compared to hers. If I wanted to give Dilada any chance at survival, she required a human life force.

  Mine.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Nedra

  In all the other alchemical trades at Berrywine’s, I was the gate through which pain flowed from the patient into the crucible. But that was reversed now. Now, the crucible was the gate, allowing the plague to flow from Dilada and into me.

  I felt the sickness inside her, swirling around the center of the crucible and flowing into me, greedy, wanting to devour her and me both.

  Dilada had already slipped into the coma-like sleep of the plague’s final stages, but while she couldn’t feel pain, I was still very much awake and aware of the agony as I attempted to pull the disease from her body into my own. The crucible grounded me, enabling me to tug the strands of the plague into my palm, wrap them around the bones of my fingers, and contain them in one area. Vaguely, I was conscious of the fact that if I let myself go too far, I’d lose my hand or even my whole arm.

  But it might save Dilada’s life.

  Connecting to her through the crucible felt like trying to force hot black tar into my veins. The disease moved slowly from her to me, boiling my blood and searing my flesh, but when I forced my eyes open, I could see no signs of damage on me, let alone the disease. But I could feel it. I could feel it pooling inside of me. I could feel it clawing under my skin, trying to reach up into my brain, to kill me like it wanted to kill Dilada.

  She was just a child, really. She had just been trying to survive. She didn’t deserve this.

  “Nedra?” Master Ostrum’s voice was deep, hesitant, unsure of whether he should interrupt me. But he knew better than to pull me away. Interrupting an alchemical transfer could prove disastrous for Dilada, for me, for anyone nearby. This was powerful science, volatile and dangerous.

  Why am I doing this? The words flitted through my mind, severing the haze of pain, and I almost pulled away from Dilada at the thought. I liked her well enough, but I barely knew her. I had nothing to prove and everything to lose. But it didn’t take love to sacrifice something of yourself for someone else. It just took desperation.

  “Come on, come on,” I whispered.

  The plague slipped through my fingers like water in a sieve. I was losing ground. As much as it was against everything I wanted to do, I forced myself to pull harder, straining to entice the sickness back to me, away from Dilada.

  “Nedra,” Master Ostrum said again, his
voice stronger this time. My senses were sharper now. They should have been dulled by the plague; I shouldn’t be able to hear. I cracked my bleary eyes open, and I saw Dilada, still and motionless on the bed. I saw the potion makers gathered around me, their looks a combination of awe and fear.

  “You must know when to give up,” Master Ostrum said. He touched my arm, and I could feel his warm grip, the sensation overriding the pain that was already fleeing my body.

  “No!” I shouted, finally understanding why I could think and feel and hear so much despite the connection.

  Because it hadn’t worked.

  Dilada was already dead.

  “No,” I said again, although perhaps not aloud. I knocked Master Ostrum’s arm aside and slammed the crucible back into the table, repositioning it and refocusing my energy.

  “Brysstain!” Master Ostrum ordered, calling me by my last name, something he only did when I’d angered him. I kicked at him blindly, connecting with one of his legs and forcing him away from me as the alchemical runes lit up again.

  Not this time. Just this once, just this one time, I needed a win. I needed to know that what I’d been doing at the hospital wasn’t futile. That leaving my family behind had been worth it. I needed to know that I could make a difference.

  I needed Dilada to live.

  Power surged from me and into the rim of the crucible, flowing into my body like a wave, filling me up and draining back into the crucible’s well, over and over again.

  I could still feel Dilada. Not her life force—no, that was gone. Cold. But there was something, some small spark of Dilada still there. I reached for it blindly.

  I saw into the black behind my eyelids. I saw past the veil between life and death. I saw past myself and into the depleting shell of Dilada’s body.

  I saw Death itself.

  It was a feral thing, made of smoke and shadow. It was hollow and empty.

  And hungry.

  Starving.

  It turned on me as my soul seeped past my own body and into the connection between Dilada and me. Death swam and slid and crept and glided, its black formless being splattering darkness over my essence. It licked at my life force, and I shuddered involuntarily, feeling Death crawl inside me, slithering into the depths of my being.