Page 39 of Alchemised
Who would benefit from that? If the deteriorating condition of the estate was anything to go by, it was not the Ferrons.
No. Morrough must be responsible. After all, keeping the High Reeve’s identity hidden provided the High Necromancer with an exceptionally powerful tool. If the High Reeve could be anyone, people were kept paranoid, always wondering. It would also prevent Ferron from gathering his own followers or accumulating enough power to overthrow Morrough.
Perhaps Ferron had ambitions that Morrough feared. That was a tantalising possibility. Something Helena might take advantage of.
It also made Spirefell the perfect trap. If anyone tried to save Helena, they would assume they were attacking a guild heir; they’d have no idea who her captor truly was.
She read the rest of the paper quickly. There were some vague allusions to grain shortages. It was strange. The countries on both sides of Paladia were significant agricultural exporters. The Novis monarchy had historical ties with the Holdfasts, so an embargo by Novis was predictable, but Hevgoss, their western neighbour and a heavily militaristic country, had been angling for better trade agreements with the guilds for decades.
The Holdfasts had always blocked the negotiations, refusing to have alchemy used for industrialised warfare. Guilds found to be violating the trade restrictions with Hevgoss had their access to lumithium cut off, preventing them from alchemical processing on an industrial scale.
Why wouldn’t Hevgoss be pouring grain into Paladia now?
The political section of the paper was almost funny in a horrible way. The Guild Assembly, whose formation was ostensibly the reason for the war, was three weeks into negotiations over the lift fare, as if New Paladia had nothing more urgent to do before the hibernal solstice ushered in the new year.
More interesting was a paragraph mentioning that a Paladian envoy had arrived at the Eastern Empire and been permitted to cross the border. It was the first time any Paladians had been allowed into the Eastern Empire in several hundred years. Was that where that traitor Shiseo had been headed?
Helena mostly skipped the society pages, but she couldn’t help noticing how often Aurelia Ferron’s name was mentioned. Quite the socialite, it seemed.
Then an editorial caught her eye. It was almost innocuous, describing the current labour shortage and lamenting the recent loss of so many talented alchemists in the “conflict” caused by the Eternal Flame. There were statistics presented about how Paladia’s economy was expected to continue to shrink due to a multigenerational loss of alchemists. The solution, the author declared, was sponsored births. The article suddenly stopped being editorial and read more like an advertisement. The head of the new science and alchemy department at Central, Irmgard Stroud, was heading up a program to bolster the next generation of alchemists using new scientific selection methods to give them the best start.
Volunteers were wanted. Participants would be provided food and lodgings, and upon completion of the program, those with criminal convictions would be eligible for retrial.
Helena read the editorial several times, hardly able to believe what she was seeing. It was a breeding program being passed off as an economic solution. As if alchemists were dogs to mate in pursuit of economically desirable transmutation abilities.
It wasn’t an entirely new concept. Marrying into the resonance was a well-known term for the guild families’ tendency to marry those with either the same or a complementary alchemical resonance. Aurelia and Ferron were just such an example.
While an alchemist’s resonance repertoire was as heritable as hair or eye colour, resonance could also appear or vanish at random.
Neither of Helena’s parents had been alchemists. Her father had possessed a minor resonance for steel and copper, but not enough to merit training or qualify for a guild. Her mother had no resonance at all that Helena could remember. Luc’s great-aunt, Ilva Holdfast, was famously a Lapse, a child of alchemists who never manifested resonance.
Now it seemed Stroud had every intention of testing exactly how heritable resonance was or wasn’t, and she intended to use the prisoners on the Outpost to do it. After all, who else would volunteer for a breeding program because of incentives like food, lodgings, and a retrial?
She thought of Grace, starving and desperate, with brothers too young to work, willing to sell an eye. Helena could only guess how many others were like her.
All those files Stroud had been constantly going through. This must have been what she was working on, winnowing out eligible candidates from the Resistance records.
Helena hid the newspaper in her wardrobe, resolving to drop it somewhere when she next left her room. Her joints were stiff with cold, and she went to the shower, peeling off her wet clothes.
She stood under the hot water until feeling seeped back into her body and the bone-deep cold faded away. She began washing slowly, in no hurry to go back into her freezing room.
As she looked down, she discovered scars that she had no memory of.
The largest was right in the middle of her chest, running between her breasts. The roping scar was raised, slightly puckered, as if her sternum had been split open and stapled back together.
She traced her fingers across it, finding a divot in the bone, the odd sensation of severed nerves.
It didn’t seem like healing had been used. The bone could have been regrown. She could have easily knit the nerve endings back together to avoid the loss of sensation, and then arranged the matrices so that the scarring was less visible.
None of that had happened. The wound had been left to heal without any vivimancy.
Perhaps this was the extensive injury Stroud had mentioned.
No, she couldn’t have been placed in stasis with an injury like that. She began to search her body carefully and found more scars.
Her mind seemed trained to overlook them, but she focused, taking note of each one.
There were traces of a large circular wound that went straight through her calf. Hairline scars, one on her stomach and another between two ribs. Vivimancy had undeniably been used to heal them.
