Page 389 of Alchemised
She could see his silver eyes in the darkness.
“If you want me to.”
In the quiet, she went and pulled out her arrays, all her notes, studying them, altering certain components of the design she’d developed, squinting as she ran her fingers along the patterns, trying to feel the energy and remember if it felt right.
There were no books, no sources to reference for alchemical arrays designed for animancy. She had to rely on fragments of information and her own experience.
Arrays could take years, sometimes decades, to perfect.
At best, she’d have only one chance to get it right.
“SHISEO WILL REACH EASTERN NOVIS in a few days,” Kaine told her. They were walking in the hedge maze, because they couldn’t be seen there from the house and it was far away enough that she couldn’t hear the sudden screams. “He’ll be here within the week.”
Helena’s stomach dropped. “Oh.”
She knew he was telling her to brace her for what was so soon to come, but it didn’t feel like being braced—it felt like being struck.
Her throat worked several times. “Do you think there’s any chance I could go to the library with you? I just want to see if I’ve overlooked anything.”
“If that’s what you want.”
In the library, she could feel the weight of his gaze as she made her way slowly through the aisles, looking for old histories and commentaries on the qualities of alchemy. When he watched her, there was such visible grief in his eyes, she didn’t know how she hadn’t recognised it sooner.
She knew that to him, what she was doing was stealing time from them. If she found nothing, it was all wasted. Moments they could have had together, she had spent searching for a solution that did not exist.
Still, she pulled another book down from a shelf, fingers trembling, and added it to a stack.
“These too.”
“I THINK—I’VE FIGURED OUT THE array and all the materials I’d need to restore your soul,” she said when Kaine came the next day. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, empty-handed, her meal untouched.
He paused, shutting the door. “Oh?”
Her left hand kept spasming uncontrollably, and her heart was beating like a fist inside her chest.
“If we alter the base of the array, I could use the inner components of it to hold the energy while I use my animancy to separate your soul from the others.”
“But?”
She swallowed. “When Luc died, it happened slowly. Cetus—Morrough had damaged him so much, his soul couldn’t hold on once Cetus was dead. I didn’t know how to—Your soul was ripped out of your body. If I can get it back in, with time maybe it might reintegrate, but we’d need to secure it at least initially, like—like the servants’ souls are doing now, to the phylactery.”
“You’d need a sacrificial soul.”
She nodded. “They’d have to be willing. It wouldn’t hold together, it wouldn’t work if they weren’t.”
“Ah,” was all he said.
She swallowed hard, jaw trembling. “Maybe if I start over, I can find something else. I might have come at it from the wrong angle.”
He was silent.
Her chest convulsed. “Or—I was thinking, what if we prioritise just getting the phylactery first, and go. Then I’ll have another month to study it, right? I could build a bomb—we could—you have an old forge here. It wouldn’t be high heat or a large detonation. If we used nullium, once Morrough was injured—you could get the phylactery and then we’d run, and—and I can figure something out then.”
Kaine’s expression was closed, his gaze infuriatingly patient as he walked over to her. “Can you safely handle explosives while pregnant?”
Her throat closed. “We could work together—I could tell you how to—”
Kaine picked up her hand and laid it against his. His fingers twitched several times, and Helena’s entire hand spasmed.
