Chapter 56
THE JOURNEY’S OBLIVION doesn’t bother me, but it helps steady my too-fast breaths. I don’t notice where we materialize. I’m locked in my own agony.
I’m only really conscious of anything when he presses a hot cup in my hand and the bitter smell curls into my nostrils. Skull-flower tea.
“You heart. It’s erratic. I’ve watched you make it before, I know I have the dosage right.”
It’s almost funny. He’s so careful with the quantity of poisonous tea when my parents have been filling me with iron and aconite for years.
A slow creeping death.
I stare into the fire and drink.
The cup is cold when he takes it from my cradled hands. That’s the only concept I have of time.
My mind keeps looping over and over everything they said. It seems like something that isn’t real. A passage from a book I keep reading because I can’t understand it.
But it buries under my skin in a way nothing fictional ever has. A barbed thorn that I can’t pull out, only work through to the other side.
I rake my hands through my hair, finding Drystan in the armchair opposite, hand clenched in front of his mouth as he watches me.
“Was that all a lie?”
He blinks, head canting to one side.
“Did you make them say that?” I nod, encouraging, eager to follow this idea, since it’s so much better than any other possibility. “So I’d come back with you.”
“No.” His gaze lowers. “Though you make me wish I had.”
I spring to my feet. “It has to be.”
Hands spread, he stands slowly.
“You wanted me to stay here.” I seize on the idea, clinging to it like a lifeline—like my father clinging to The Morrigan’s hand in that storm, despite his savior’s bitter cost. “You tricked me in the labyrinth—I wasted a whole afternoon with you. You did this too. You tricked them… controlled them… You did it.” Something else tugs on my mind, some other detail aligns with this version of events, but it lies just out of reach.
“Avellan, I swear to you on all that I am, I had no part in this, only that I witnessed it.”
He can’t lie. Not even a comforting lie. I know it. He knows it.
“No. Please. You had to.” My voice breaks and I break. “You had to,” I wheeze between sobs as his arms come around me.
I lose myself there. Try to lose the terrible truth.
But it’s a barb working its way through my heart.
I don’t know if it’s day or night. I just know I’m in Drystan’s bed, in his arms. The cat is lying on me purring furiously.
And nothing is the same as the last time I was here.
The conversation in the garden haunts me. Over and over, I replay it. I turn over each word. I try to make it all sink in. It doesn’t.
None of it damn well makes sense with the shapes I’ve already made of my life. None of it fits. It’s like being given a boulder and told to make it fit in a wooden puzzle cube.
These things are not the same.
At some point, Drystan gets up. There are soft voices out in the main living area and he returns. I bury myself under the covers and lose track of whether my eyes are open or shut.
Later, he summons me food and drink. I gulp down water, eyes gritty from crying too much. They’re so swollen, they barely open. But the water helps my body feel better at least. He tempts me to eat one of the amazing ginger biscuits, but it isn’t the same.
Nothing is the same.
The Collector died for a foolish idea I had of home and family. A lie.
The only thing softening the blow is that I got to speak to Lowen. I know they would’ve wanted that.
It’s a pinprick of comfort as I live that whole scene again and again.
I don’t know how long it is before I realize the detail that was tugging on my mind. Something Drystan said. The idea solidifying, I curl up against the headboard, hugging the blankets to myself, watching him pour us both coffee.
“How long?”
He stills. My coffee almost brims over. Just in time, he jerks the pot upright. With a long, defeated exhale, he returns it to the bedside table.
“Since the Apothic analyzed your medicine.”
I huff out my surprise. “That long. I expected it to be a secret the labyrinth whispered in your ear or something you heard through the mirror I assume is still in my… in the cottage.”
“I have no interest in that place now you’re not there.”
“Hm.” I frown at the coffee cups, searching for shapes among the steam.
Plumes of it spread and snap, like cut strings on a puppet.
I touch my chest, trying not to think about the threads between me and my parents that I thought were so unbreakable.
I felt them when I broke the Gauntlet of Despair’s arches.
I feel nothing now. Just tired.
“When I discovered the ingredients, I suspected the medicine was blocking your magic, but I didn’t realize that was the reason your parents had given it to you.
Despite my anger at you being fed poison, I thought—hoped—it was helping your symptoms alongside harming you.
After all, you take deadly nightshade for your heart, don’t you? ”
He gives me this odd look, like I’m unfathomable but if he just looks hard enough, deep enough, he might be able to understand.
“When I saw your father’s reaction and heard your mother it confirmed my worst suspicions. They knew about your gift and had fed that stuff to you, poisoned you, under the guise of medicine, when really it was their tablets that were making you so ill.” His brow clenches, desperate.
My throat tightens in response. The truth. The awful, awful truth.
“Nothing cuts deeper than kin,” he says softly.
I hug my knees to my chest. “How did the Apothic make more of the stuff? I thought the dark metal wasn’t allowed in the Underworld.”
“It isn’t. He… didn’t. I ordered him to make you tablets that looked the same but contained harmless herbs.”
I thought there wasn’t room in me for any more shock. Turns out I was wrong.
“Huh.” I work my tongue around my mouth, searching for a response. “So you… you just changed my medicine without even thinking to involve me in the decision?” I sound remarkably calm. “What if I’d got worse?”
The bed shifts as he leans toward me, gaze intent, earnest. “I wouldn’t have let that happen.”
“Not all things are in your control!” I’m shocked to hear my voice raise at him, but who I am is broken. I’m just pieces, smaller, less real than when I travel with him as feathers and shards of darkness. Rhiannon is truly no more.
“I was keeping an eye on you. I would’ve made sure.” His hands clench in his lap and he straightens. “I knew that ‘medicine’ was making you worse, if not ill in the first place. And I knew you’d get better without it.”
I squeeze my coffee cup. Should I be surprised that a king—a demi-god would be so self-assured that he wouldn’t hesitate to play with a mortal’s life?
Not surprising. But also not excusable.
“Avellan.” He hangs his head, frowning at the dark surface of his drink.
“I should have told you when I found out. But I didn’t know how or if you’d even believe me.
And when I thought about it, I figured it wouldn’t matter, because you would never see them again.
You’d be here with me and I would protect you for all time.
There would be no more poison. No more harm.
You never needed to know what they’d done to you. ”
My family was meant to protect me. How could I need protection from them?
This time it isn’t pieces of me falling away, but pieces of my world. If I can’t rely on them, how does the universe even work? Who am I meant to turn to? There has to be more than just me.
“I’m sorry.” He looks up, expression tight as he gives a small, emphatic nod. “I’m sorry.”
Death just apologized to me. The man who warned me never to apologize in his unseelie realm for fear of being beholden to the other person. And he’s now beholden to me.
But I find my head shaking. The steam from my coffee, the blanket and my knees form a wall around me.
His jaw clenches. “That’s the first time in my centuries that I’ve apologized, and all you can do is shake your head?”
“This isn’t just about not telling me, Drystan.
” He flinches when I say his name, like it’s a curse.
“It’s about making a decision about my medicine—my body—without even thinking of getting my consent.
You decided and you made it happen, and I was none the wiser.
” My chest feels like it’s caught in the slowly squeezing jaws of a vice.
“My health. My trust. My body. All of it has been broken. Taken. By people I thought cared about me.”
“But you needed—”
“No. Listen to me. Hear what I’m saying.” I pause, seizing control of myself, making sure he’s paying attention. “It wasn’t your decision to make. It was my body. My choice. Not anyone else’s, no matter how good or bad their intentions. My choice. Mine.”
He frowns at me a long while, thinking, and gradually the expression eases.
“I can’t pretend to understand. But I know I’d rather cut my own heart out than hurt you.
Yet it’s too late, isn’t it? I’ve done it.
” His frown tightens like he knows there’s something broken between us but he doesn’t know how to fix it.
His apology is a start.
It isn’t a full acknowledgment of his part—I’m not sure he can do that if he doesn’t understand—but it’s something. And right now, sitting here with nothing and no one, I will take something.
We remain in silence for a long while, drinking our coffee.
At least if I’m no longer being poisoned, then that means I’m not ill. I don’t need a cure, just to stop taking the tablets. I’ll get better on my own. Even taking a half dose during my first couple of weeks here, I started putting on weight.
But…
“If I haven’t been taking poison for over a week and it’s cleared my system enough for my magic to awaken, why do I still need belladonna and skullflower?”
He swallows and looks away. I swear he grows even paler than usual.
The hesitance, so unlike him, has me on edge.
Eventually, he stands, goes to his bedside table and pulls a book from the drawer.
“I was wondering the same. I couldn’t ask the Apothic without revealing your secret, so I consulted this—it’s the only book we have on human physiognomy, but it’s advanced.
I had it stolen from a dark place.” At my questioning look, he elaborates: “An ancient surface-dweller who experimented on your kind.”
My gut twists.
“I don’t approve of her methods, but her records were thorough and tell us this…” He flicks to a bookmarked page and hands it to me, his lips pressing into a flat line.
Smooth, cursive handwriting states:
An excess of iron in the subject causes a variety of ailments.
Excision on the living specimen reveals a gathering of the element within the joints, causing stiffness and aches.
These symptoms appear to lessen over time, supported by blood-letting.
I must admit, it’s amusing that such a primitive practice recommended for anything and everything by human so-called doctors actually confers some benefit in this instance.
Hypothesis: iron circulates in the blood.
This would explain the red color, not unlike rust. Since our blood is also red, posit we are able to synthesize a small amount of iron, but anything more leads to acute poisoning in our kind, not unlike the chronic poisoning observed in the subject.
Eyes shut, I swallow back nausea. She fed someone iron and then cut them open while they still lived.
And blood-letting—the one treatment that might’ve actually helped. I thought it was old-fashioned quackery. Dismissed the doctor as a fraud. If I wasn’t so wrung out, I’d laugh.
I skim back over the text. My aches have lessened, like her poor subject’s. But nothing here explains my continued symptoms. “Which part, specifically?”
Drystan trails a long finger over the page, stopping at a paragraph toward the bottom.
Subject is still complaining about heart episodes a year after the last iron exposure. Recovery appears to have halted. The experiment has run its course.
Post-mortem Dissection Results
Cessation of excess iron consumption has cleared the element from the joints—consistent with decreased complaints from the subject in their final months. However, closer inspection reveals damage to the muscles of the heart, which normal iron levels have failed to reverse.
I stare at the final sentence. Blink. Swallow. Read it again and again until the words look like nonsense scribbles.
“I’m sorry,” Drystan says softly.
My eyelids flutter as stupid tears gather in my gritty eyes and the full depths of this truth open beneath my feet.
I’ve felt better since coming to the Underworld. Maybe there’s still poison leaving my system. But the damage is done. My heart won’t recover.
There is no cure.