Belle Révolte

by Linsey Miller

  “The problem with alchemistry is that it relies too much on other people not understanding it,” the executioner said, stepping over the remnants of our paltry defense. “And it’s useless when there is no hydrogen or oxygen to burn.”

  He reached for Yvonne and opened his mouth. Yvonne spat a small white pastille into his mouth. The little ball shone with stored magic, and gagged, jerking away. The magic he’d channeled broke. I sucked in a deep breath, blood in my mouth. Yvonne coughed and kicked him away. He spat it out.

  “What—” The words died in his throat. He croaked and narrowed his eyes at Yvonne.

  I lurched, arms catching him about the knees. We fell, and I scrambled to grab his arm, his face, any part of him that would let my magic in. My fingers curled around his wrist.

  The midnight arts flowed between us, a river of illusions and scrying, and dragged the man who had killed Estrel into the deep, dark past. He twisted and fought, like Alaine beneath the ice. I made him think he was choking. Made him gag. Made him scratch at the skin of his throat. Tear through the flesh and muscle and ash-white sinew of his body like his sword had torn through Estrel’s.

  Alaine died drowning, and so did he.

  I didn’t need their magic or power to change the world.

  “No!” Isabelle slammed into me, knocking me from my seat on the executioner’s knees. I hit the floor hard. Coline screamed.

  Isabelle, Henry’s sword buried in her right shoulder, whimpered. He hummed and wrenched the blade free. A stomach-rolling snap sounded as it tore from her, and she fell forward, still. I scrambled to catch her, and a thick hand took me by my throat. I grabbed Isabelle’s dress, desperate to stay with her. There was supposed to be an after.

  “This is unfortunate,” Henry said, yanking me to my feet.

  Winter had come and gone, and there was nothing left in me.

  “You are truly more trouble than you are worth,” he said to Coline, not even looking at me. He lifted me higher and higher until I hung from the gallows of his grasp. “Surrender to face justice, or I will kill her now.”

  Twenty-Nine

  Emilie

  No one would save me. No one could save me.

  There was freedom in knowing the closeness of death.

  I channeled more magic than I ever would have dared through his hand holding me, raking it across the muscles of his hands as I would if I were debriding a wound, and he pushed me away, the leftover magic creaking in my aching bones. A soldier tried to attack Waleran. The chevalier waved his hand, power leaping between them. Smoke curled from the soldier’s nose and mouth. He gagged and fell.

  As did the five soldiers around him.

  Beneath the bright noon sun of a blue Demeine autumn day, Waleran was at full power. The soldiers couldn’t touch him, and he needed only to channel a small gathering of the noonday arts to down five at once. I tried to reopen his old wound, and Pièrre’s magic ripped me away from it. Charles looked from Pièrre to Waleran and then down at his own hand, his face inscrutable. I knew that look.

  Charles had an idea.

  I picked up a soldier’s knife. Waleran’s back was half to me, his face turned to stare at the soldiers. I sprinted to him and buried the knife in his shoulder. Waleran roared and flung his arm back, catching me in the face. I went flying and fell. He stalked after me.

  Charles crept up behind him.

  “You can’t kill me,” Waleran said. “What part of that statement doesn’t make sense to you?”

  I gathered magic so he wouldn’t feel what Charles was doing, and Waleran laughed.

  “I wasn’t trying to kill you.” I laughed and pushed myself up to my feet. “I was distracting you.”

  Waleran pulled the knife from his shoulder. The skin of his newly repaired throat reddened and swelled. He coughed, blood dripping from his nose, and threw the knife away. His breath caught in his chest, and he stumbled, fingers scratching at the scarlet rash seeping across the skin of his neck. The wound oozed, and behind him, Charles released the last of the healing arts he had been channeling. I laughed again and doubled over. Waleran fell.

  Charles hadn’t undone his healing.

  Charles had healed him—altering Waleran’s body alchemistry until his natural defenses recognized the new pieces as someone else’s and attacked them. Charles had turned Waleran’s body against him.

  Waleran, again, for the final time, bled out in the grass.

  A soldier whooped, and I fell back into the dirt. Madeline, healed, crawled until she was sitting next to me. I wanted to laugh or cry, but there was nothing left in me to fuel the movements. All I could do was stare at the sky.

  Pièrre and his one remaining hack didn’t surrender. The soldiers that were still standing surrounded them, keeping a good ways back after Pièrre stopped the heart of one. Still, he channeled through his hack. He wasn’t worn down at all.

  Charles sunk into the grass, legs crossed like a tailor, and nodded. “Let’s heal the soldiers. We can deal with him after.”

  “Or during, if he tries anything,” Madeline muttered, twirling the sliver of metal that impaled her between her fingers. “He knows he’s lost. There’s no telling what he’ll do.”

  We walked through the field and healed the injured. Louis worked on a particularly complicated injury from Waleran’s spear, his years of experience more useful than the other three of us combined. Charles finished healing a downed soldier and rose to his feet, knees shaking with effort. I hooked an arm through his, and we leaned against each other. He was a marvel of nuance.

  The healing he had channeled was so well controlled and powerful that it held together the torn edges of a lung without wearing away at the rest of the soldier’s body.

  “He’s good,” I said, knocking the soldier out with alchemistry. I was certain that I would either be awake for days or sleep for weeks when this was over. “Next.”

  “Madeline, you’ve dealt with a liver laceration before, yes?” Charles cleared his throat and spat out blood. “There’s a soldier to your left.”

  Madeline nodded and finished the soldier she was with before heading to the liver laceration.

  “Head wound.” I touched the cheek of a different soldier and checked his spine. He was unconscious, but he would live. “I would heal this, but I might miscount the number of bones and forget to fuse some.”

  Charles chuckled. “Do you need help?”

  “No, rest a moment.” I repaired the fracture skull, replenished the soldier’s blood, and made sure he was set before turning my attention to Charles. A fever burned beneath his skin. He was exhausted down to his very bones where he had altered his own alchemistry too much to induce blood production in others. “Did you know that the majority of deaths for hacks are due to blood loss despite them rarely suffering a single injury?”

  His head lolled forward. “Sounds like someone smart told you that.”

  “They’re all right,” I said. “A bit too close to death for my tastes.”

  “Really?” he asked. “I think I’m bitter enough right now to suit them fine.”

  My magic slipped beneath his skin and into the cracks of his bones, urging his body to work faster at repairing itself and funneling power from my body to his. “Charles…”

  The words stuck to my tongue like bone.

  I didn’t love. That was it, wasn’t it? What mother hated so much—I didn’t love her, I didn’t love our traditions, our history, or her love for me. I rejected all of it, cast it aside as easily as leaves shrugged off water. If I loved my mother, her hatred of me would have hurt me more.

  But this wasn’t about me. Charles couldn’t die, not when he had so many things left to do—his assistantship, his family, and all those lives he could save. The world was better with him in it, and he deserved a long, happy life. It would be an honor just to live it with him, lover or friend
.

  “Please,” I said finally. “Whatever happens with Physician du Guay and the rest of Demeine, survive.”

  The world shifted. Magic gathered behind me, too powerful for a single body to hold, and I stood.

  “Get your filthy hands off me!”

  We both whipped around. Pièrre flailed against the outstretched hands of one of our soldiers, who was weaponless and exhausted. There was nowhere for Pièrre to run now. Even his hacks, the one left awake and the ones asleep, were safely tied up. But still Pièrre channeled through them as if their mere existence as hacks were consent to use their bodies. Blood dripped from the ears of one.

  Six of the soldiers trying to capture Pièrre fell, old wounds reopened at once. The three hacks on the ground groaned. The heartbeat of one flickered out.

  Charles rose and sneered. “They were unconscious.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Madeline. “They’re nothing more than extra scalpels or bandages to him.”

  “Fuck this,” I said. “They used everyone else. Let dear Physician Pièrre du Guay bear the burden of his arts for once.”

  I moved before they could stop me. The soldiers around Pièrre writhed, and I leapt over them, body ready for one last stand. Pièrre turned at the last moment, his eyes wide, his hands raised, and I felt the crack of his arts before I saw it. I had broken my arm when I was twelve, and Pièrre rebroke it, the twin bones grinding together with each move. Old cuts and accidents reopened, slowing me down as I healed the worst of them. My arm snapped back into place. He paled.

  “Break me all you want,” I said, body so worn down already that snow spotted my vision. “You’re done breaking down others to build yourself up.”

  I tackled him: no magic for him to counter, no wound he could heal. Let him try to kill me. He still had his back to the dirt, and my corpse would make a poor shield.

  The soldiers grabbed his arms and legs, and we sat him in the middle of the field next to the bodies of the hacks and soldiers who had once trusted him to save them. He had used them and hurt them, and even now, their slow deaths didn’t seem to bother him at all. He refused to heal them even when one of the soldiers threatened to kill him.

  “You didn’t ask their permission,” I said, nodding to the hacks dying behind him. “I’m not asking yours.” I turned to the others. “If we all channel and share the burden of wearing down, it might not kill us, and we might be able to channel enough power to save them, but we would have to use him as a hack.”

  “If we just channel through him,” Charles said, “he won’t do what we need him to.”

  “Then I’ll do it.” I leaned over Pièrre’s form and grinned. “All those people who you hate and tried to use and kill? You’re going to sacrifice yourself for them.”

  A sickle of a smile spread across Madeline’s face. “Excellent.”

  “A hack must be willing,” Louis said. “He isn’t. If you direct the magic, you’ll wear down as quickly as him.”

  “Then we save everyone quickly.” I shifted next to Pièrre. “I can do this. Let me do this.”

  Let me save the people my legacy would have had me use and toss aside like Pièrre had.

  We sat in a circle around Pièrre. Louis talked Madeline and Charles through the process, and I could see the magic slip through their bodies. They channeled it through Pièrre, the power reddening the skin it touched on him, and I pulled all that power into me. The world withered, and I bloomed. I could see everyone. Everything.

  Lightning in a beautiful, bloody bottle.

  The soldier nearest me had a broken ankle and torn ligaments, and Louis led me through how to heal it completely. I moved from person to person, Madeline setting a broken arm through me and Charles scouring the acid and damage from a ruptured stomach in a soldier’s chest. We forced bodies to regrow bone and blood and flesh until no one else lingered at the edge of death and life, and when the solders’ bodies couldn’t stand it, I used Waleran’s corpse. The grafts were living things of alchemistry to make sure the new bodies accepted them, taking far more out of me than alchemistry normally did. We changed Waleran’s donated parts at an ethereal level till his blood was not his blood and the new bodies wouldn’t reject it. My own skin burned feverish with the power.

  The soldiers Waleran had injured were harder to heal. Pièrre had worn down their bodies, their missing bones and muscles bleak holes. It was better I did this; I had no qualms about using the healing arts for such violence. The others were better than me, and Demeine would need them no matter what came next. I was doing something a physician should never do.

  I used a few pieces of Pièrre to heal the hacks he had abused, and he fell forward, unconscious. It was what he had done to Gabriel.

  The bones in Pièrre degraded, not enough to kill him but enough that he might never be the same, and the ones in the hacks rebuilt. Clean white edges reconnected. Muscles spread across the bone. We were only pieces. Everything was only pieces.

  This regime had to be broken down and the pieces used to rebuild a new, better Demeine.

  “I love you,” I whispered to Madeline and Charles. “Goodbye.”

  Madeline sighed. “You are so dramatic.”

  Lightning ripped through me. I screamed, the shock yanking me out of the magic. My chest burned, smoke curled around the edges of my nose, and I couldn’t smell anything but ash. I was on my back staring up at Madeline and Louis. Charles cradled my head in his lap.

  “I can’t believe that worked,” Madeline said.

  “I can’t believe you did it right on your first try.” Louis stared at her with an open mouth and something akin to fear in his eyes. “It took me three to get it right the first time.”

  “What?” I asked, and the words bubbled in my throat. I twisted and heaved into the grass.

  “You were dead.” Charles pulled back my hair and helped me sit up. “Your heart stopped, and Madeline restarted it.”

  I lifted my head. The ache rolled from my temples to the back of my head, a concussion in the making. The field around us looked razed, as if someone had come while I was out and set fire to everything, and the trees in the distance had shed their leaves. I ran my fingers through the black grass and groaned. Everything hurt.

  Louis whistled. “We’ve got company.”

  With the grass dead, we didn’t have to stand to see the faces on the other side of the river. Silver wolves and gold foxes, the steel beak of a hawk—Kalthorne’s artists in their odd masks had come to see the commotion. One in the mask of a wolf whose hood was braided fur approached. The sword at their side was shaped like a talon.

  The soldiers, all alive, all well, all shockingly energetic, closed in around us. Charles settled me on the ground and stood. Kalthorne was still a monarchy, and it might not take kindly to its neighbor upsetting that order. The wolf stopped a few paces from us.

  “Sit, artist, before you fall,” the wolf said. “Am I correct in assuming Demeine meant to attack us today? The divining arts have been unclear for weeks.”

  Charles sat back down next to me. One of his hands gripped my calf, the bite of each finger warm and sharp against my skin. I settled my hand between his shoulder blades.

  “You would be correct.” Charles bowed his head to the wolf.

  “I am Hanne,” the wolf said and removed her helm, the mask slipping away with it. I knew there must have been magic in her armor, but I could sense nothing. “Who are you?”

  “He’s the duc des Monts Lance,” I said, and by the way he flushed, I knew he had forgotten that advancement. “And the vicomte des Îles Étoilées.”

  “Why did you stop them?” Hanne’s lips twitched, and she ran a hand over her closely cropped black hair. “We could not have held back them and your army.”

  “His Majesty Henry XII of Demeine lied about why he wanted to go to war with Kalthorne.” Charles glanced at
the soldiers around us. “The army didn’t want to fight.”

  Hanne’s eyes crinkled as if she were laughing, but her face didn’t change. “We will talk more later, Charles. We will hope for peace but prepare for war, as your last kings have taught us. Rest. Let us wish your court agrees with you.”

  Hanne touched her chest and bowed, and she slipped the helm back over her face. Charles bowed as much as he could while sitting down.

  “We did it,” Madeline said, her disbelief painfully clear. “Maybe?”

  “Good enough for now.” Charles leaned into me. “A war stopped and only twelve dead.”

  “Only twelve?” I had thought for sure more were mortally wounded.

  “Emilie,” Charles whispered, “some of the soldiers you healed I’m fairly sure were dead, and there’s nothing left of Waleran. Also, you ran out of pieces and got a little bit creative.”

  Louis held up his once-injured hand. Red lines like veins snaked through the leather, and when he pulled the glove away from his skin, they clung to him, leeches feeding the leather of their bodies.

  I shuddered. He nodded.

  “We shouldn’t tell anyone that part,” said Madeline. “Let’s not give anyone bad ideas.”

  Charles wrapped his arms around me and pulled me into a tight hug, tucking his face into the curve of my neck. His nose brushed the shell of my ear. Tears pooled in the gap between us.

  “You were dead.” Charles’s voice cracked. “You were very dead.”

  The pitter-patter of his heart was loud against my cheek, and I turned my head till my lips brushed his jaw as I spoke. “I’m sorry.”

  I tried to gather magic and channel it to heal the small cut on his jaw. It was little more than a paper cut and should have been easy. Nothing came to me.

  Nothing lived in me. A sick pain rolled through me.

  “We did it.” Charles pulled away and helped me up, so we could walk back to camp. “We’re alive and we did it.”

  I leaned against him. He smelled of rot and sweat, the earthy mixture of downed, wet trees and dead deer. He’d rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, and welts like freckles spotted his hands and forearms. When he moved, they wept a red that might have once been blood. I wiped his arms with my shirt. We were alive.