Chapter 12
t’s late afternoon, a fortnight after the incident, and Daisy and I are high on the rocky cliffs flanking the north side of the castle.
“Let me get this straight,” Daisy shouts into the wind. “You chased the fox into a war meeting, met the princess of Ursandor, blew off work with Prince Finneas, and started a brawl?”
Daisy offered to accompany me to find cliffcrow feathers for the omnidraught. They are the last ingredient I need, and the queen’s soldiers have yet to bring me any. I agreed, mostly so that she’d stop pestering me with questions.
I cringe. “I didn’t start a brawl. It was one punch. And Cygnus and Finn already have a history; I just got wedged into the middle of it.”
Daisy sits with Dante on the rocks far below me.
I’m currently clinging like a spider between two walls of a slot canyon.
I learned the method from Mother. She taught me how to look at walls of stone like riddles to be solved, finding the footholds, the finger-wide ledges, the narrow pathway forward and up.
I can vividly picture her scooting up a canyon like this one, shouting encouragement for me to follow. The memory makes my chest ache.
“What I don’t understand is why Cygnus was so invested,” Daisy muses. “Do you think he’s in love with you, too?”
“What do you mean too?”
“I mean in addition to the prince.”
“Finn’s not—”
“Whatever you want to call it.” Daisy rolls her eyes. “Infatuated, interested, trying to get into your pants—”
“No.” I cut her off. “Definitely not.”
A massive bird lands near Daisy and caws.
She shrieks, “Is that one of them?”
“Yep.” I grin. I admire the cliffcrow as he takes flight, flapping his jet-black wings. The iridescent streak down his back glints in the sun. I’ve made it halfway, but the slot narrows the higher I go, and my muscles are starting to cramp. I shift and brace, catching my breath.
“You good up there?”
“I’m fine!”
I pretend every muscle in my body isn’t screaming. Starting again, I wriggle up to what looks like a perfect foothold. I reach up to seize it…
And my fingers close on a moist handful of cliffcrow shit.
“Aaaaaauggggggghhhhhhh,” I groan.
People are going to die if I don’t make this draught. People are going to die….
There’s not another foothold. I grimace and try not to think about the squish as I reach again for the same ledge. I haul myself over a ridge and at last come face-to-face with three baby cliffcrows.
Two are sleeping. The other opens slitted eyes and lets out a tiny peep, widening a red diamond of a mouth to be fed. I grin in wonder at their fuzzy little figures. There’s plenty of feathers in the nest, so I pick four or five. “Got it!”
Daisy cheers.
As we head back to the castle, she chats eagerly about the upcoming midsummer celebration. I stop listening when she starts speculating about the fruit tarts. There’s just too much else on my mind—notably, Finn and his job in the Frumentari.
All along, I’ve known he’s my enemy, in principle.
He’s the descendant of Verdin the Vanquisher.
His kin slaughtered thousands of mine. But I somehow managed to convince myself Finn is separate from these crimes, or at least the ideology.
When he said he has different ideas from his father and doesn’t think magic makes someone evil—was that a lie?
Was he just tolerating Verdish oppression, or actively upholding it?
And why did it take me so long to ask?
My thoughts are interrupted when Daisy yelps. She’s ahead, with her back to me.
“Daisy?”
She stumbles backward, clutching her hand as the yelp vaults into a scream.
“DAISY?” Now I’m running. “What happened? What did you do?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know!” she howls. “I was grabbing onto a rock, and I got bitten. Or stung—”
“Let me look at it!”
She extends a trembling hand, revealing a swollen red lump on her pointer finger. I press my hand on it, sweeping with my Talent, but for some reason I can’t sense the wound. I hiss with frustration.
“Is it poisonous?” she asks, echoing my own thoughts.
I should know. Mother would know. “I haven’t seen a bite like this before,” I admit, trying to keep my voice calm as panic floods me. “We should get you back to the East Wing as fast as possible.” I rummage in my belt and tug out the grizzlefoot potion. “Take this for the pain.”
Daisy downs it, wincing at the taste.
It’s a long hike back, and it feels like hours later when we finally reach the castle gardens.
By that point, she’s staggering. Her eyes are unfocused, and her hand has nearly doubled in size, turning a nasty shade of purplish red.
There’s something wrong about her life energy, like rot spreading from a blemish.
Halfway through the gardens, she collapses.
Cursing, I scoop her up and start running.
I barrel through the hospital doors. “Help! Please! Somebody help us!”
A few nurses hurry over, eyes widening in alarm.
“Is that Daisy?”
“Daisy! What happened?”
I try to explain, and my voice chokes. “I think she was bitten by something…a spider, or some kind of snake.”
“Here, lay her down.”
“Get her some water—”
“Lyria.”
The sound of my name cuts straight through the chaos. I spin, and when I see Cygnus approaching, my stomach plummets through my shoes.
I haven’t seen him since I healed him, and this is about the worst possible reunion I could imagine.
He’s going to kill me. That’s my first thought.
The second: No, he’s going to fire me.
He does neither.
“I have the antivenom in my office,” Cygnus murmurs when he reaches us, lifting Daisy’s swollen hand. “It’s a narrow blue bottle labeled skakabri. You’ll find it in the left cabinet, at eye level.”
“Is it a snake bite?”
“Please do as I say. Time is not our friend.”
I hurry and retrieve it. When I return, I find the nurses gone and Cygnus carefully making an incision. Dante has hopped onto the bed and curled up by her ankles like he’s keeping vigil.
“Can you put her to sleep?”
“What?” I’m too disheveled to process Cygnus’s question.
He takes the antivenom and loads a syringe. “Give her something to make her sleep, please.”
“Yes…yes, of course.” I pull the nocturn from my belt.
He injects the antivenom while I administer the nocturn.
“She was stung by something called a skakabri,” he explains calmly.
“The Daskish call them ghost scorpions, since they burrow in desert caves. They can grow to be ten or fifteen feet long. Fortunately for Daisy, she was probably stung by a newborn. Otherwise, the venom would work much faster.”
I let out a long exhale. “I can’t believe I’ve never even heard of them.”
“You won’t find them in Verdinae often. The skakabri are full-blooded daemons straight from the Demeridian. Creatures that adapted to survive in the underworld instead. They have magic flowing through them.”
I understand, then, why my Talent couldn’t properly perceive the venom in Daisy’s wound.
Unlike the Moragorion, skakabri didn’t originate in this world.
I ponder this while Cygnus stands. “The antivenom works quickly, but it will take time for the swelling to subside, and it’s going to hurt like hell in the meantime. We should keep her sedated.”
I nod numbly.
Cygnus pauses. “It’s not your fault, Lyria.”
I look at him in surprise—really look at him. I haven’t encountered him since the incident. His features are as hard and unreadable as usual, except for the faint violet bruises around his eyes.
My throat tightens, and I struggle for a response. I almost can’t believe he’s not screaming at me.
Cygnus opens his mouth, and I think he might say something else. But he shuts it again quickly. “I’ve got other patients. Keep an eye on her. But you did fine.”
I stay at Daisy’s side all night and most of the next day.
The swelling gradually reduces, just as Cygnus promised, and when she finally rouses, Daisy reports cheerfully that she can hardly feel the pain anymore. I’m beyond relieved.
“Respectfully, you look like shit,” she observes, swinging her legs off the side of the bed and then standing. Daisy pauses and sniffs. “You sort of smell like it, too.”
I laugh wearily, glancing down at the cliffcrow dung that’s still smeared all over me.
She blinks. “I’m fine, Lyria. Go sleep. And bathe. Seriously.”
After Daisy declines my several offers to escort her back to her room, I finally concede and trudge back to my tower with Dante.
Sleep hits me the instant my head touches the pillow. I’m out like the dead, and when I finally wake, it’s to sunshine streaming through the window. I leap up, muttering a string of curses—I’m hours late for work.
I hurry to the hospital, bracing for the Head Healer’s wrath. But I arrive to find his office door closed, and I don’t see him or Daisy on the staging floor. When I ask around, I’m told Cygnus is busy in surgery—thank the Gods—and that Daisy got the day off.
So I trudge down to the storehouse alone.
There’s one good thing about the ordeal—I now have all the ingredients I need to complete the omnidraught.
I followed Ragglestaff’s recipe to the letter.
The blossoms have been distilled, I’ve added the dragon scales and unicorn hair, and everything has sat under the full moon as instructed.
All that remains is to powder the feathers and add the Ironwood sap.
Then I should be able to activate the mixture by stirring it with a pewter spoon.
If it reacts like all’s-cure, I’ll know the draught is complete when it starts steaming and turns gold.
My mood picks up as I complete the final tasks. I’m so close, and the prospect of seeing Mother again soon makes my chest swell. But after I add the sap and start stirring…
Something’s wrong.
I know it immediately. The mixture’s too viscous. I keep stirring, but the mix just grows lumpier and then starts to congeal. Panic heats my neck, and I start cursing. Weeks of work crash around my shoulders in slow motion.
It’s wrong. It’s all wrong.