Neutralizing the Alkali

I didn't jump. I stood by the slate basin, the stone flagon of vinegar in my right hand, the collar of my torn tunic still pulled down past my ribs, exposing the raw, blistering redness that covered my neck and collarbone.

Vargun stood in the doorway.

He had stripped off his blood-spattered mail coif and steel bracers. His dark hair hung in damp, tangled strands around his sharp, angular jaw. His gray linen shirt was soaked through with sweat and grime from hauling the saboteurs' corpses up to the waste chute.

His forearms were bare. As he gripped the wooden doorframe, I saw the tremor.

It was worse than it had been twenty minutes ago in the deep vault. The muscles along his radius and ulna twitched in violent, microscopic spasms. His knuckles were bone-white as he fought to hold himself steady against the timber.

Fifty hours without a stabilizing draught. His nervous system was beginning to chew through its own fat reserves.

"You're making a mess," Vargun said.

His voice was rough, like two granite millstones grinding without grain. He stepped into the alcove, closing the door behind him.

The space was tiny—barely six feet square. His presence swallowed all the available air, crowding me back against the cold edge of the slate sink. The smell of him filled the stone room: woodsmoke, iron, stale sweat, and the sharp, ozone tang of a man burning from the inside out.

"Quicklime reacts with sweat," I said flatly, keeping the stone flagon between us like a weapon. "I'm neutralizing the alkali."

"You missed a spot," he said.

He reached out. His fingers caught the torn hem of my tunic at the shoulder and ripped it downward with a single, sharp jerk.

The linen tore clean to my breastbone.

Cold cellar air struck my wet, stinging flesh. I drew a sharp breath through my teeth, my hand coming up instinctively to slap his wrist away.

Vargun caught my wrist in midair.

His grip was an iron band, hot and trembling with metabolic seizure, but unyielding. He pulled my arm down to my side, pinning my wrist against his thigh. With his free hand, he reached past me, took the stone flagon of vinegar from my grip, and set it on the wooden shelf.

"Hold still, Thjora," he murmured.

"Let go of me, Vargun."

"No."

He took the acid-soaked linen rag from the basin.

He didn't ask. He didn't apologize. He stepped directly between my thighs, crowding me back until the small of my back pressed hard against the lip of the stone trough. His massive frame blocked the flickering light of the wall sconce, casting us both into deep, amber shadow.

He brought the wet rag up to the crook of my neck.

He pressed it firmly against the raw, weeping patch where the lime had burned through the epidermis.

The agony flared instantly, white-hot and blinding. My knuckles curled into fists against his hips. A sharp gasp tore from my throat before I could swallow it.

Vargun watched my face with absolute focus. His gray eyes tracked every twitch of my eyelids, every tightening of the muscle along my jaw.

"Hurts," he stated.

"Is splashing sour cider on raw flesh standard garrison field medicine," I rasped, glaring straight into his eyes, "or just your personal approach to seduction?"

A faint, humorless twitch touched the corner of his mouth. "Both."

He dragged the rag slowly along the curve of my collarbone, pressing just hard enough to scrape away the remaining white residue of the lime. The sour vinegar stung like salt in an open cut, but the deep, cooking burn beneath the surface began to cool.

His breathing was heavy, rattling in his broad chest. His face was only inches from mine. I could see the tiny beads of cold sweat dotting his forehead, the dark purple shadows bruising the skin beneath his eyes.

"Your hands are shaking, Vargun," I whispered, keeping my voice cold, clinical, and sharp. "The tremor is reaching your wrists. In six hours, it will hit your diaphragm. In twelve, you won't be able to hold a spoon, let alone a broadsword."

"Then you had better finish the boil before twelve hours," he replied without pausing.

"Thirty hours is the standard conversion cycle," I said. "If I rush the secondary fermentation, the yeast will throw fusel alcohols. Your men will drink it, vomit their own stomach linings, and butcher each other in the courtyard anyway."

"Then don't rush it," he said. He dropped the rag back into the basin with a wet slap. "Make it pure."

He reached for the jar of sheep tallow on the shelf. He dipped two scarred, calloused fingers into the white grease and brought them down to my skin.

His touch was surprisingly precise. He smoothed the thick, soothing balm over the raw blisters along my neck, working the fat into the irritated flesh with steady, circular strokes. The heat of his fingers melted the tallow, spreading a cool, protective layer over the chemical burn.

His thumb brushed the hollow beneath my ear, lingering over the heavy thud of my carotid artery.

The proximity was suffocating. I could feel the heat radiating from his chest through my torn tunic. My skin prickled, a sharp, conflicting surge of revulsion and electric memory tightening the small of my back.

"You like watching me bleed," I muttered.

"I like watching you survive," he said softly. His thumb traced the sharp line of my jaw, tilting my face toward the lantern light. "You killed two armed men with nothing but an iron flue and fermentation gas. You dragged their bodies away from your kettles so their blood wouldn't spoil the wort."

"I protected my batch."

"You protected my compound."

"This compound is a slaughterhouse," I spat, refusing to drop my gaze. "Your father built a cage, and you walked in and put the collar around your own neck."

"My father is dead," Vargun said, his voice dropping into a harsh, gravelly whisper. "I cut off his hand and fed his heart to the kennels. There is no cage here, Thjora. Only what I take, and what I keep."

"And what happens when your body burns itself out?" I challenged, leaning forward until my forehead nearly touched his. "When the Maltar runs dry, who will you butcher then?"

His fingers tightened slightly on my jaw, his thumb pressing into the soft skin beneath my lower lip.

"You won't let it run dry," he said with terrifying certainty. "Because you know what happens to this rock if I fall. Fjalar's remnants will breach the lower gates. They will breach the brewhouse. They will not ask you to brew, Thjora. They will tie you to the mash tun and pass you between fifty men until your heart stops."

"I have enough quicklime left to blind fifty men," I said coldly.

"I know you do," he murmured. A dark, possessive gleam flared in his eyes. "That's why you're still breathing."

He looked down at my collarbone.

A thin line of fresh blood had welled from a split blister near the base of my throat, where the caustic lime had eaten through the first layer of skin. The blood had trickled down into the hollow above my sternum, mixing with the melted sheep tallow and a green smear of oxidized copper dust from the edge of the washbasin.

The mixture didn't turn brown like normal blood in vinegar.

Where the drop touched the oxidized copper, it turned a vivid, luminous violet-blue.

Vargun froze.

His thumb stopped moving against my jaw. His entire frame went rigid, the metabolic tremor in his forearms vanishing behind a sudden, absolute stillness.

He stared at the bright violet bead resting in the hollow of my throat.

I tried to pull back, but his left hand shot out, pinning the back of my neck against the stone wall.

"Don't move," he commanded.

"Vargun—"

He dipped the tip of his index finger into the violet-stained bead on my collarbone. He lifted his finger to his face.

The droplet glistened on his skin, unnatural, radiant, and smelling of copper, sweet malt, and bruised metal.

He didn't wipe it on his tunic.

He brought his finger to his mouth and pressed it to his tongue.

His gray eyes went wide. His pupils contracted into tiny black pinpricks.

I watched him taste it. I watched the realization strike him like a physical blow, stripping the arrogant certainty from his features and leaving behind a raw, naked shock.

"The enzymatic catalyst," Vargun whispered, his voice trembling with something far more dangerous than metabolic withdrawal. "The master strain."

He stared at his finger, then down at the raw, bleeding hollow of my neck.

"My father spent fifteen years trying to stabilize the fourth-tier draught," Vargun said, his words coming slow and jagged. "He bought alchemists from the southern coast. He burned through three hundred slave-brewers. Every batch spoiled within forty-eight hours unless he added the private tincture he kept in the iron vial around his neck."

He looked back up into my eyes. The feral edge in his face had mutated into something terrifyingly complete.

"The tincture wasn't krov-root extract," Vargun rasped, his hand tightening in my hair, pulling my face up until his lips hovered a fraction of an inch from mine. "It was you. He brought you here at ten years old because of your blood."

The stone room felt completely airless.

I met his burning stare, my teeth gritted against the pull on my scalp, the taste of iron and vinegar heavy between us.

"Now you know, Vargun," I whispered, every word carved from ice. "You don't own the brewhouse. You don't own the Maltar."

I shoved the flat of my palm hard against his wounded chest, forcing him back half a step.

"You can kill every man in Hrafnsker," I told him, wiping the blood from my collarbone with a single, defiant sweep of my hand. "You can hang their corpses from every battlement. But if my heart stops beating, your empire rots in thirty hours."

Vargun stared at me in the dim lantern light, his chest heaving, his split lip curling into a slow, vicious smile.

"Then I will keep you alive forever, Thjora," he said.