Book Review: Quicksilver

Title: Quicksilver
Author: Callie Hart
Genre: Fantasy, Fiction, Romance

What It’s About: Saeris Fane is caught by the Guardian at the entrance of the city—she has someplace to be and she desperately needs to be there in order to ensure that the deal goes through, one that could be lucrative for her and the person making the deal. The Guardian demands to know the answer of who she is and where she is from, so she gives him a fake name, her real age, and then tells the guardian that she is from the Third Ward. This makes him drop her from his ever-tightening grip as the Third Ward is the poorest ward that has been quarantined due to illness. He makes to kick her, though she recognizes him as a believer and begs him to spare her. In response, he drops his gauntlet as if that will keep the infestation away from him, not that Saeris is actually sick; it’s just a myth. She runs, grabs the gauntlet (which in her mind will give her enough money to get her out of the Third Ward and save her brother) and then she scales walls far enough away until she is in the Third ward, slamming on the gauntlet once because it starts to sing to her.

She finds her way to Elroy, the blacksmith that has taken her under his wing as an apprentice in the forge. He chews her out, telling her that he stopped creating weapons in the forge to supply them to the rebellion, and that she needs to take this gauntlet out before the guardians come looking. Saeris plans to hide it away before the guardians can find it and make sure to melt it down so that it’s something that she can sell. She goes in search of her brother, and finds him laying outside of the House of Kala, a tavern, beaten up and bloodied. He tells her that he gambled with Carrion Swift—a man that Saeris has slept with once and has had the best sex ever, but he continuously infuriates her and he is the only man who runs supply lines through the underground market. Hayden reveals that not only he lost their coin that they needed for the water—something that is rationed in the third ward—but also his scarf that he needs in order to stay out in the city, which is made of sand that gets everywhere. They go in, and the owner of the House of Kala tells Saeris that her brother is banned for 24 hours after starting a brawl with Carrion, and tells Saeris to please not create another one. So, Saeris gives the bag containing the gauntlet to Hayden, and tells him explicitly to stay outside.

She sits down with Carrion, who convinces her to get a drink and they talk, where he tells her that he has heard of a girlwho grabbed a gauntlet, and that she better get this thing out of the third ward as soon as possible so no one would get hurt. He does return the scarf belonging to Hayden, and Saeris heads out on her way, trying to decide how to get rid of the gauntlet. When she comes out of the tavern, Hayden is nowhere to be seen. Saeris curses him, and starts running around the Third Ward. She hears a scream, and runs towards it, knowing that Hayden is its source. Soldiers also follow her that way, telling her to stop. When she reaches the source of the sound, she finds Hayden almost plastered against the wall, as a phalanx formation of Guardians surround him. She yells out to them that she’s the one that stole the gauntlet, though Hayden tries to contradict her and protect her, which she finds stupid. Three men break off and come towards her, and she fights them, killing two and injuring the third one. The Guardians arrest her, and Hayden moves to do something to save her, but she tells him that he’s been the most annoying brat ever, breaking his heart in hopes that he doesn’t follow her.

She waits for a while in the cells until Captain Harron comes—he’s the hard-ass that had been at the front of the Phalanx—and he takes her up through Madra’s castle all the way through ornate doors. Inside is a big hall—so large that even the sconces on the walls could not light up the whole thing, and Saeris eyes keep wanting to go to a lever in the platform, which Harron tells her to not even think about. Queen Madra, a beautiful human woman who is known as the Undying Queen, has lived for a thousand years though she looks really young. She comes to Saeris and questions her about how she learnt to fight, before asking about the fae having come for her finally. Saeris is struck dumb in shock about this as fae have been stories told from generation to generation. She tells Saeris that nothing has changed because this room has not changed, and then tells Captain Harron to make her sing before leaving. He stabs her through her stomach with his sword, and then twists it inside her gut, before using a dagger to stab her through her collar bone. He’s about to stab her with a second dagger, when she calls out to her magic and melts the dagger, the silver heading towards his skin while he begs her to call it off. As best as she can, Saeris heads to the lever, which turns out to be a sword, and pulls it out, which causes a pool of silver to come alive at her feet. Suddenly, Death comes. First, he kills Harron, after demanding to know about Madra, and once Harron is dead, he picks her up gently, putting a necklace around her while saying that she better stay alive. Then they go through the silver.

Saeris spends days hearing voices speaking around her, and when she finally wakes up, she cannot move. A girl comes in, and introduces herself as Everlayne. Saeris is in shock that she is fae, though they do briefly talk. They are interrupted by a man—Renfis—who demands the necklace back from Saeris, stating that he needs it, and that he’s not able to hide him for much longer, as they need to get him out. Everlayne seems interested to find out about him and worried about him, but she helps deliver the pendant from Saeris to Renfis, who shortly thereafter disappears with it. Everlayne helps her get dressed and styles her hair, as Saeris is to meet the king of the Yvelian Faes. They walk into a ginormous hall, where King Belikon is holding onto the sword that Saeris had held onto. He talks to her harshly, looking down on her as a human, and tells her that she is to figure out how to open the quicksilver pools to start the portals again. Then he dismisses her without any further warning and Saeris is ushered away by Everlayne to a pew. Next up, guards drag in Death, and the fae start chanting to end this guy, that he’s the Bane of Gillethrye and the King whips them up into a frenzie. Everlayne tells the crone who had been sitting at the King’s side to do something about it and eventually the woman, who is an oracle, tells Belikon that he will not kill the Kingfisher. Renfis stands up and tells him to give him to the war effort, on the front lines, and Belikon agrees with the caveat that Kingfisher has to help Saeris figure out how to make the Quicksilver work, so Renfis puts the pendant on Kingfisher, and then hauls him out of there.

Over the next few days, Saeris works in the library with Everlayne, Renfis and even Kingfisher, who continues to piss her off. At the same time, he takes her to the forge and helps her clean it, reorganize it and then another day he gives her quicksilver to speak to, which she quickly learns to do. She admires Fisher working in the forge, and he calls her Osha—short for Oshellith, a butterfly that gets born and dies in one day—and one evening she kisses him. The spark there between them burns hot, and he respects her when she tells him to let her go. Then he leaves, after she tells him to have Ren come for her, and she will wait for him. Instead, she bolts and runs down through all of the different pathways to the cavern below the castle where the pools of Quicksilver are being held, and she activates it. Onyx, the fox that she had adopted as a pet in the forge, runs off. She is about to step into the quicksilver wearing the ring that Kingfisher had shown to his sister and told her that he had the ring when she was asking why he would go through the Quicksilver without his pendant, when Kingfisher arrives and stops her. She is adamant that she wants to go home to find out about her brother and Elroy, and get them safe. Kingfisher makes a deal with her—that he will go get her brother for her, in exchange for her doing whatever he says. She agrees, and he tells her to solidify the Quicksilver as soon as he’s through and liquify it in an hour. So he goes, she follows the instructions, and Onyx comes back to her, while they wait. She reliquifies the Quicksilver, and Kingfisher comes through carrying the body of her brother—except it’s Carrion Swift. Having set out to try to get her brother and the guy smells of her, he says that the deal stands even though it’s not her brother. He leaves a message for Ren, and then they get on horses and ride for a while until they get to a tavern, where they wait for Ren to show up. He then has them step through a shadow gate that takes them to Cahlish, his estate, which his father had enchanted so only Kingfisher and those he gave permission to could enter this estate, ensuring that Belikon would not be able to come into the estate.

At the estate, Ren asks her to spend time with Fisher and she eats dinner with him, sitting on his right—which causes all of the other faes working in the estate to be in shock. They get attacked by a bunch of vampires, and she is forced to stay in Fisher’s bed. The second time they have dinner, she has Ren and Carrion join them for dinner, which gets really awkward on her side as Fisher keeps telling her things sexual in nature that have Ren paling, though Ren is pissed with him because Fisher made her do an oath, which he can use to control her with, though Fisher stops forcing her to do things. He shows her to the forge and tells her to figure out how to imbue the silver trinkets—there are at least 18,000 of them—with quicksilver to help protect his friends; in exchange, she will be free to go home to her brother and Elroy. Eventually, he takes her to the war camp, and she trains with them, being able to hold her own against Ren, when even Carrion could not. Saeris also goes to see the war room meeting, where Kingfisher has to make a presence, and one of the women, a fae name Danya, yells at him, threatening to kill him with her sword. Saeris yells to stop, and the sword splinters into thousands of small splinters, embedding into the wall behind Ren. That same night, she experiences the horror of a battle, when one night the vampires cross the Darn—the river separating their land from the land of the vampires—on the ice, and the faes have to work hard to break the ice to sink them under. Later, everyone asks her to try to get the pieces of the sword out of the wall, which are imbued with Quicksilver, but even Saeris isn’t able to remove them.

They return to Cahlish so that Danya could see Te Lena, and Saeris sits in the right hand side of the table, which pisses Danya off. Danya tells her that she needs to move as that chair is reserved for the Lady of the house, whoever that will be that Fisher marries, and it’s not appropriate for her to sit there, much less for a human to sit that close to Fisher. Ren tells her to leave it alone, and Fisher tells her off, when they’ve come through the portal, which shocks Danya. She goes off to the healer. Fisher tells Saeris that he wants to take her someplace to pick up something they need. He portals her to a small town far away from the front, and it looks happy, safe, and sound, as the villagers celebrate a festival. One of the women, Wendy, recognizes him and chastises him for not coming as she has been making his favorite sweets for all this time—the one hundred and ten years that he’s been away—and they both follow her, where they get stuffed with food. At one point after eating in Fisher’s company, Saeris hears the words Annorath Mor—she heard it before as well when Fisher has forced the quicksilver into her hand at the Winter Palace. They leave the place, and he takes her to a home, one that belonged to his mother. There he asks her why she spoke those words, and Saeris explains that she was listening to him and then she heard these words. That night they have sex in the house, and she asks him to bite her, which he does. The next morning he looks at her sadly, and she realizes that she has a lot of tattoos. He avoids telling her what they are, though some of them are fae runes for things which he does share with her. Fisher tells her that she has time to decide whether she wants to keep those tattoos or not, and he hides them.

Saeris is in the forge yet again, this time throwing glass beakers at the mountain in anger. Carrion comes by and asks her if she has tried to speak to the Quicksilver and ask it to do her bidding, since she claims it seems to be laughing at her. Saeris and Carrion go to the war room, and she speaks to the Quicksilver in the wall—it tells her that it will happily come to her, if she reforges it into a new blade, sings it a song, and it will decide whether it’s next owner is worthy of their ability to channel magic, by tasting their blood. Saeris agrees, and they all come out. Lorreth is in the room, and she asks him to help her create a hilt for the blade in the shape of a wolf. She works on the blade, forging and folding the metal upon itself, and Lorreth creates the mold for the hilt. When it’s finally done, the blade is stunning, and Lorreth comments about how sharp it is. Fisher had come by and waited outside, until the sword was almost done, and once it was done, he tells them that the Northern lights are outside. Lorreth sings a song, and the sword thanks her for it, saying that he’s it’s new owner, bestowing the Angel’s Breath as a power.

As they fight off another horde of vampires—this time Fisher gives Saeris the sword she had picked up—Solace—which had originally belonged to his father. Saeris is able to keep her own, in the midst of the fight—hacking off the heads of the vampires and not getting scratched. Lorreth uses his Angel’s Breath power to destroy many of the vampires. What stops them all in their tracks is that Everlayne is on the wrong side of the Darn, with the Vampire King’s, Malcolm’s, son. Taladius tells them that Everlayne is under Malcolm’s thrall and that they have to come get her at the place where Kingfisher made his last deal with Malcolm, and that he has to also bring the Alchemist. When they return to the tents and mull over the implications of this, Danya comes in screaming at Lorreth about her sword. They let her pick it up, knowing that only the rightful owner will be able to pick up the imbued sword without harm, and she ends up blowing her arm off. Lorreth, Renfis, and Fisher cut their palms, and put their blood on her, while thanking Saeris for her valiant efforts, bringing her into their tightknit group. Te Lena comes to check on Saeris and that is when Saeris notices her tattoos and ask them about them. Te Lena tells her that these tattoos replicate the god-given mate bond, though one hasn’t existed in many years, and there are no such things as real mates—they are nowadays chosen and usually it is recommended that they wait at least 5 years before they get these kinds of tattoos.

Saeris finds Fisher and he tells her that yes they are mates—his mother had been an oracle and she had left him a book knowing that she would be killed soon. In it, she had foreseen Saeris for him, but she was supposed to be Fae. He tells her that they can still reject the bond, and that he is most likely going to do that because his life is not going to end well; his mind is going mad due to the quicksilver that is already in him—the remaining bit in his iris—and he doesn’t wish that on anyone else. Saeris is pissed at him, because he is willing to give up but she is not, and she will do the research it takes to figure out how to save not only Everlayne from the thrall, but also him from this quicksilver. She sleeps on the couch. While she is at Cahlish this time around, she is able to imbue quicksilver around one of the rings, and she puts it on to test it, hearing a ton of voices. She also does research in the library. Fisher disappears with Danya, Lorreth and Ren to find the witches that may be helpful in breaking the curse of the thrall—which means that Everlayne will be beholden to Malcolm and will want to do anything to appease him—but Danya pisses the witches off, so he sends Lorreth and Ren back to Cahlish, and Danya back to the war camps before going to the witches to smooth it over. He does return with one, Iseabail, the daughter of the Balquhidder High Witch, who may be able to help. Everyone wants to go get Everlayne, and Fisher agrees.

Fisher comes to see Saeris that night, and tells her to let’s just take the moment for the moment. They talk and he portals them back to the house-apartment, where they have sex, and Fisher accepts the mate-bond. Saeris is shocked, because she is human after all, but he tells her that he would not be ashamed of it; rather, he’d be honored to be her mate, which is why more tattoos have appeared on his body. Saeris’s own tattoos are a lot more prominent, though eventually Fisher hides it to give her more time to think it through and not have to look at them.

The next morning, Saeris wakes up in bed, finds a shadow portal but does not find Fisher. Instead, she finds a letter from him telling her to go through the Shadow Portal to Cahlish, and to be ready to restrain Everlayne when she comes through the portal to them, and get her under so that Te Lena and Iseabail could work on removing the poison form her. Saeris realizes that he’s gone on his own to face Malcolm, and left his own sword, which is one of the few swords still imbued with magic, behind as it could be used to close down portals and trap her if it fell into the wrong hands. Saeris portals back into Fisher’s own bedroom in Cahlish, startling Carrion. They go to the library and she shows Ren and Lorreth the letter. They all wonder what to do, fuming at Fisher’s action, and Carrion asks them how long that portal that she came through was opened, to which they realize that they can use it go to through once it opens, as there are no quicksilver pools in Gillethrye to get them through to there. They prepare by making an imbued blade for Carrion Swift, and are ready but are not ready when Everlayne comes flying through the portal—at first it confuses Saeris. But then Carrion gets shoved through the portal, while Saeris grabs Solace, and then she goes through when Everlayne shouts something about the water. Suddenly, Saeris is plummeting and hits the water, hurting her ribs. Lorreth comes through next and saves her, then goes out and gets Carrion out of the water.

They realize that they do not have any other choice but to go up a cliff face to where Fisher is, only once they are at the top, they are intercepted by none other than Captain Harron. He forces them through a portal, and they find themselves by Malcolm, who happens to also be sitting with Belikon and with Madra. They call each other brother and sister—showing that at the very least they have been working together all this time, and it appears that Belikon and Malcolm were well aware that it was Madra that had plunged the swords into Quicksilver. Fisher feels defeated that Saeris had come, and even more so when Carrion and Lorreth show up. The kings are talking and they have the bodies of the fae in the amphitheater make the decision on who tells the three of them the truth—including Carrion who had been knocked out for speaking. They release Kingfisher from his oath, and he reveals that they had been fighting the vampires, and he had taken his 8 to save the village, only to then have to make it on his own as they were overrun. He had made a deal with Belikon that a toss of the coin flip would determine what would happen to the remaining fae that have not been turned. Except when Belikon threw the coin, Malcolm had caught it, and the deal did not go through, causing the remaining faes to get killed and turned into vampires. Fisher decided to barricade and burn the village as a result. So Malcolm had a labyrinth built to house him—ever shifting underneath him—and if he could find the coin, toss it and it landed, he would be free. Fisher spent at least 55 years trying to figure out his way through the labyrinth, only to never find the coin. And then the quicksilver pool reactivated, so he went through that instead.

Fisher manages to lunge for solace and starts killing them, including maiming Malcolm. He tells his friends to run down, and they all make it into the labyrinth, where he explains that the walls keep moving and changing every time after the first 10 turns, so he needs Saeris to find the quicksilver and lead it to them. They encounter the Morthil, a spider looking demon without a face that is able to sense movement. Carrion has to crawl forward, while the rest of them make their way around the arena being part of the wall. Unfortunately, the Morthil senses them when the walls move, and lunges for them. They manage to kill it, but Fisher tells them that it respawns every so often. They run through the changing paths, and finally they come across the coins. But they are all fake, and Malcolm comes out of them. Fisher and Saeris talk mentally, and he tells her that she should be able to find the coin because it will contain a little bit of quicksilver as the locals thought it good luck. Malcolm is talking quite a bit and then he decides to bite and eat Carrion Swift, which Carrion does nothing to protect against. Saeris cries out begging that they do something about it, but neither Lorreth nor Fisher move to do it because it would only do more damage. Suddenly, Malcolm staggers back, and Carrion tells him that he hadn’t let him finish introducing himself, but he was once known as Carrion Daianathus and his blood is poisonous for Malcolm. Saeris uses her connection to the quicksilver in the coin, and she follows it back to the Morthil—it’s inside its mouth. She grabs it and pulls it out, but Malcolm comes to her, and there’s a bit of a fight, though he takes the coin from her. She does steal it back, but she is now dying due to the wound in her gut, and despite Malcolm’s cries, she lets the coin drop, ending the trapped souls and also uses Solace to kill Malcolm once and for all. Fisher finds her, but she is dying, and Taladius comes up and offers to turn her into a vampire after she tells Fisher that she will never speak to him again if he gives a part of his soul to save her, like with did with Lorreth. She passes out, wakes up and cycles through these phases a couple of times, before she wakes up and hears a voice speaking to her, asking her if she wants to have a life with Fisher even knowing that it could result in lots of suffering, to which she says yes. She gets yanked out of Fisher’s arm and pulled to the pool of quicksilver.

Saeris wakes up in a field looking at the sky, with two girls chattering. The girls turn out to be the goddesses Bal and Mithin, and she speaks politely to them so they’re so happy with her. They tell her that their father wants to speak with her, and they take her to him. She meets him, Zareth, the God of Chaos, and he explains a lot of things to her, telling her that Fisher is his champion and he came here once as a child; that he’s tried to change fate to ensure that she does not meet Fisher. She was originally supposed to have been born in Yvelia and been a fae, but he switched her to the human realm, though she retained her powers, being one of the strongest Alchemists in a while. He offers to create her into something new, something that none of the gods will be able to meddle with as her future would be unchartered and unseen. Saeris agrees to it.

She wakes up in a bedroom that she is not familiar with, and stumbles out into the floor, where she retches into a bucket. Taladius comes to her and tells her that this will pass though it is different for everyone. He tells her she is a half-vampire/ half-fae mix, and that the process to change is very difficult for people so he had blocked her memories of it. She asks him to unleash them, and he does, so she’s able to remember everything. Saeris asks him why she bit him, and he tells her that it’s better if he leaves it to Fisher to explain it to her. She sees Renfis, Lorreth and Carrion before she sees Fisher. Carrion tells her that he’s been passed down along the family line, ever since Fisher’s father brought him to her realm, and that he hardly thought it would be wise to tell anyone who he really was—he is over a thousand years old. Fisher tells him that he remembers Carrion’s parents and is happy to share stories about them. Fisher then talks to Saeris and she realizes that the quicksilver in his eye looks a lot weaker than before, to which he responds that Te Lena has been working on weakening its effects on him. He then reveals to her that Saeris is going to be coronated as the queen of Sansroth, as is their custom since she was the one who actually killed Malcolm, and he had not announced an heir before his death. Fisher tells her that Belikon and Madra had both fled when they realized that they were out of their depths.

My Thoughts: Ok first of all, I actually do not like the name Kingfisher as a name—it really bugged me throughout this book to see that as a name for the main male character in the book, and I truly hope that in the next book there’s some kind of revelation that it’s not actually his name, but how he’s been called ever since his mom had to marry King Belikon. It is mentioned in the book that they also have true names that only their mothers know, and second names that they are given upon birth, and I really just hope that Kingfisher is neither one of those names. Having said that, the book is obvious that it draws inspiration from various series out there, but the author’s combination of these different elements (no, I’m not going to say) makes this book have its own unique spin.

Overall, I loved the story—the pace, the development of the characters, and holy cannoli I was not expecting some of those twists and turns. I found Carrion to be funny, providing some comedy by how frustrating he is for Saeris, and Kingfisher to be a little bit annoying because he keeps hiding things, avoiding saying things even when asked a question. Both dudes need to work a bit more on their communication skills—it ceases to be a mystery at some point when you don’t answer question after question after question. Obviously, understanding that Fisher cannot reveal certain things because of the blood oath forced upon him by Belikon, there are times though when he just shrugs in answer to a question and avoids the question—especially when it feels inconvenient to him or uncomfortable. Interesting that he’s fine at growling and making things uncomfortable, revealing uncomfortable truths about others and somehow about himself (to an extent), but when it comes to actually explaining things, he just tucks tail and hide. He’s fighting for others, but giving up on himself when Saeris talks to him about having a life together, which is just annoying. Of course, there comes a point where you just get tired of fighting and he’s been fighting the quicksilver for a while, but I would think that having someone you love suddenly come into your life, would make you actually want to fight to have a life with them.

Looking forward to the second book in this series, though!