Chapter Thirty
Iawake in a darkened room.
I’m lying down on something hard, maybe a table, judging by the height of the ceiling overhead. The air is damp and cool with a vague scent of rot. It’s a familiar scent, one that transports me immediately to the dripping, dreary cellars beneath Pyka.
I lift my head to look around, but it doesn’t move.
Am I restrained somehow? I don’t feel anything.
My eyes are able to dart around the room though, taking in walls lined with shelves of books and strange bottles of liquid, peculiar implements of metal and glass.
There’s a single candle burning somewhere behind me, but my head won’t budge to see it.
There’s a pain in my left arm. I reach my right arm up to see what’s hurting, but it won’t move either.
Fuck. I can’t move. I’m still breathing, and my heart is still beating, but my body won’t move at all.
“Help,” I call out, but it comes out as a quiet creak, barely audible though the room is silent.
“Sylvie,” says a comforting voice. It’s a woman’s voice, but she’s behind me, back in a place my eyes can’t reach. “Relax. You’re alright.”
“Where am I?” My lips can barely form the words, but the woman seems to understand.
“You’re back in the palace,” she says. “Someone poisoned you. We’re giving the elixir time to work. Don’t worry. You’ll feel better soon.”
She moves around the table, but I can’t see her face. All I can see is the brown robe of the Alchemists’ Guild.
The Alchemists’ Guild.
That sends alarm bells ringing through me, but I can’t quite recall why.
“Ronan?” I ask. I was with Ronan before I came here, I’m pretty sure.
“He’ll be back soon,” she says. “Just get some rest.”
The voice is familiar. There’s an accent, something foreign. Not Selaran or Nithyrian. Not the Enez Islands. It’s different. It’s warm and comforting, though, and it’s saying nice things.
So why does it feel wrong?
“My arm.” I try to lift my left arm to see what’s wrong with it, and that works, a little. There’s something sticking out of it. A tube of some kind, strange and soft like a noodle, emerging from the inside of my elbow.
“It’s the medicine,” says the voice. She moves around the table to check on it. I can’t see what she reaches for near the ground, but there’s something down there on the end of the tube. I feel it move when she pulls, just barely.
I’ve never seen medicine given like this. But then again, I’ve never been poisoned.
The woman looks up, and I recognize her.
“Zara,” I say, relaxing. She should have just said. Maybe she did say before I woke; I’m having trouble remembering much from tonight. “How did I—?”
“We found you, like I said. You’d been poisoned.”
Found me. Where? Where had they found me?
And who were they?
“You might need a different medicine,” she says, reaching into a shelf for a jar. “It’s a delicate balance, curing this poison. I don’t want you to move, but I also don’t want to stop your heart.”
An image comes back to me. Taran, collapsed on the ground. He had been poisoned too. I look around, but I don’t see another table in the room. “Taran?” I ask her.
“He’s fine,” she says. “They found him first. He’s with the king.”
At least there was that. Taran and Ronan must be trying to do something about the poisoner.
“Here,” says Zara. She lifts a spoon of something to my mouth. It smells foul and musty, like the inside of a barn.
I clamp my lips shut. It’s possible for me to do so, I realize. Whatever was keeping me from moving must be wearing off a little.
“I know, it smells awful. But it will help.”
There’s another image. This time, I’m being carried through a darkened hallway. I’m fighting with my captor, someone wearing brown robes.
My heart races. Something is wrong here.
I shake my head at Zara. I begin to push myself up, and she shoves the spoon in my mouth.
“I guess we’re doing this the hard way,” she says. Then she calls out behind her. “Hermes, get in here.”
I spit out the spoon and try to pull myself upright, reaching for whatever is in my arm. But I’m too weak. She forces me back down onto the table and holds me there, trapped under her arm.
“What are you doing?”
My muscles are seizing under me. Whatever fight I had drains out of my body as however much of the elixir that I ingested reaches me.
“That’s better,” she says as I freeze. She releases me, and though I try with all my might to move, I can’t. “Truly, I am sorry about this. It’s not how this was supposed to go.”
My eyes dart with fear.
Hermes enters the room. “Problem?”
“Not anymore. She should be finished draining soon. Start the boilers, would you?”
I look down in horror at my arm. The tube is dark inside. Dark red.
She’s draining the blood from my body.
All of it.