Chapter Forty-One
I don’t remember passing out, but when I wake, I’m alone on a hillside, my cheek pressed into a bed of dry grass. Something
shadows my face. It dances away when I start to move, squawking. It’s a vulture, disgruntled by my return to life.
My skin is hot and seared, my eyelids crusted. The dragon scales of my bodice reflect sunlight in blinding waves. My head
is an anvil, and the sun is a hammer. I need water. Soon.
I start to sit up, and I scream. My left hand feels twice its usual size, and knife shards of pain shoot through my palm and
into my wrist. I lift it toward the sun and discover that my first two fingers are deep purple, with giant swollen blisters
at the fingertips.
I’ve given myself frostbite. Not even my solace was enough to counter the amount of magic I used. Then the sun cooked me all
day while my fingers died. If I don’t get water and doctoring soon, I’ll follow their lead.
When Titus and I first met, he left me on a mountainside, injured and alone. But I was not helpless then, and I’m not helpless
now.
I gain my feet, careful not to allow anything to touch my left hand. I purposely ignore the body nearby as I shade my eyes and spot the palace in the distance. Blackwind is there, hopefully eating his fill of oats in Cathira’s finest stable. I can make it.
But should I? Once a sway has died, how long will his persuasion linger? Some of the ball attendees could still be under King
Jaydeth’s influence. Others may believe I’ve started a war. After all, I just murdered a king.
In a few days, once everyone recovers and faces the aftermath, the palace will probably be safe. But for now, I must go elsewhere
for help.
I retrieve my pack from the ground. It’s delightfully cold from the magicked stone inside, and I waste a precious moment burying
my face in it to cool my skin. I sling it over my right shoulder and trudge eastward toward the city wall. My first priority
is water. Then, a surgeon.
The royal quarter is in turmoil, with people running everywhere. It doesn’t take long for me to suss out that Lady Azzeya
of the Emerald Household was the woman killed at last night’s ball, and a dragon was seen flying across the kissing moons—a
terrible portent. Shops have closed and barred their doors against looting. A crier stands on a corner, calling for the downfall
of the potentat. It might be a while before the city sorts out what happened.
Everyone gives me wide berth. I’m obviously a sight to behold, with my bedraggled hair and blackening fingers and my mantle
of monsters torn and covered with dirt.
When I reach the canal at the foot of the hill, I drop my pack, fall to my knees, and scoop water into my mouth, not caring who is watching or how I look.
It’s the sweetest, clearest water I’ve ever had, and I fill my stomach to bursting and splash it all over my burning face—before realizing that canal water is definitely not the sweetest, clearest water I’ve ever had, and in fact it just might make me sick.
But at least I won’t die of thirst today.
I rehoist my pack and head in a promising direction, following the heaviest traffic. Someone jostles my shoulder, walking
faster than me, and before he can escape, I grab his sleeve, saying, “Please, sir, can you direct me to the nearest healer?”
He looks me up and down in horror, shrugs me off, and hurries away.
A block farther, I spot a mother with two young daughters at a market stall that promises the best honey-lemon candies in
the confederacy. She’s picking out individually wrapped candies from a bin, grinning as the girls bounce with excitement.
“Please, dama, can you tell me where I can find a healer?”
She wings in her daughters like a mother hen and glares at me.
“I need help,” I insist. “Just some directions—”
“Go on with you!” shouts the stallkeeper. “Before I call for the publicans.”
I scramble away. The pain in my hand is so bad it’s making me ill. Or maybe that’s the canal water, turning my stomach to
chaos.
I nearly trip over a skinny man hunkered down on a street corner. His hair is white, his skin cracked with the sun, his clothing
in rags. A clay begging plate lies beside him, empty.
“Sir, sorry to bother you, but can you direct me to a healer?” I ask.
His eyes are rheumy, and I’m not sure how well he can see me, if at all. But he grins, revealing exactly three teeth. “Bad day?” he asks.
“The worst.”
“Eliset’s Elixirs. Two blocks that way,” he says, pointing. “Turn right. You’ll see a red awning. She sells potions, but she
does a bit of healing too. Unmagicked, of course, but she knows what she’s about.”
“Eliset’s Elixirs,” I repeat, already heading that way. “Thank you, thank you, moons bless you.”
“You gotta pay her, though!” he hollers after me. “Nothing’s free in Cathira.”
I’m stumbling from pain and exhaustion by the time I find the red awning. I need food, a salve for my skin, a place to sleep—and
I don’t know how I’ll pay for any of it. Maybe I should have taken my chances at the palace after all.
I push the door open and enter a murky room with wall-to-wall shelves filled with vials and stoppered jars, dried herbs and
oil flagons. One shelf is wholly dedicated to sun-and-stars-themed trinkets, probably used to ward off evil and sickness.
So many scents compete for my attention—sweetness and bitterness, sourness and even rot—that my stomach threatens to lose
all its precious canal water.
“Can I help you?” asks a soft voice. A Suratian woman stands behind a counter, crushing something with a mortar and pestle.
I don’t notice much else, because my vision is now swimming through the watery morass of the world, suddenly unable to determine
the outline of anything.
“I need help,” I manage.
“Oh, honey, you are badly, badly sunburned.”
I hold up my tortured left hand. “Are you Eliset? I was told you do some healing.”
She grabs my wrist, holds my hand up to the light while I try not to weep from the pain.
“Frostbite in the desert,” she mutters. “I’m sure there’s an interesting story there.” She lets my hand drop. “These fingers
need to come off. I can help. Do you have coin?”
“I have this gown,” I say, indicating the banshee silk skirt.
She frowns. “It’s in terrible shape. And I’ve no way of knowing if those bits are authentic.”
“I have rings,” I say. “My shield maiden and household rings—”
“I don’t traffic in fraudulent rings.”
“They’re not fraud—” Finally I remember. I drop my bag onto the counter. “I have a cold stone. Colder than ice. It will keep
anything cool in the harshest summer if you—”
She grabs the bag.
“Don’t touch it with bare skin!” I warn.
“Is that what happened to you? You touched the cold stone with your fingers?”
“Something like that.”
First she pulls out the canister holding Blackwind’s deed. “You own a Thordin stallion!” she says, looking at the markings.
“That’ll buy you a fair bit of healing.”
“He’s not for sale.”
Eliset shrugs, sets the deed aside, and uses tongs to carefully pull out the leather-wrapped stone.
“Oh,” she says, peeling the leather back.
“Ooooh. Yes, this will do. All right, in the back with you, girl. It’s your lucky day, because the cold stone gets you a dose of the slime instead of just a biting stick. ”
She pushes me through a beaded curtain into a smaller room with a table and a cot. The darkness is a welcome relief. Until
Eliset lights several candles as well as an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling.
“Sit down,” she orders. “Put your hand flat on the table.” She grabs a small knife and begins to sharpen it with a whetstone.
My stomach continues to roil, now with dread. I hope she’s quick with that knife. I hope her cuts are strong and sure. As
directed, I flatten my hand against the tabletop. My first two fingers no longer respond to my commands, so I push down with
my palm to straighten them and almost scream from the pain.
“Poor thing,” Eliset says, as her knife goes swick, swick, swick. “Frostbite and sunstroke all at once. It’s a wonder you’re on your feet.”
And Gift-starvation, I almost tell her, but I think better of it.
She sets down the knife and pulls a stoppered glass vial from her pocket. “Was saving this for a sad night, but it’s all yours.
Tip it back, all in one swallow for it to work best.”
The stopper comes out with a pop. She hands the vial to me, and I barely register that the liquid inside is a shiny, glowing
green before pouring it into my mouth and swallowing.
It tastes like rotten vegetables sweetened with honey, and my first instinct is to throw it right back up, but then delightful
warmth radiates outward from my stomach, filling my chest and my limbs with buzzing relaxation.
“Oh, this is your first time with the slime, yes?” she says, and I nod vigorously. Her words seem like a distant, pleasant hum. “Sun and moons, you’re going to pass right out, aren’t you?”
“This is . . . this is magic,” I mumble.
“No, just some old-fashioned alchemy. The porgu plant, when distilled . . . Maybe you should lay your head on the table?”
Everything is spinning in the most wonderful way. “Hand still hurts,” I tell her. “I just don’t care anymore.”
She laughs. “It’s working, then.”
It’s like being whisked away into Cerastes’s plane of existence. I’m here but not. A ghost of myself. Only one thing remains
clear, and for some reason, I need to tell her. “There are worse hurts. I’m never going to see him again, am I?”
“See who, my dear?”
I try to explain, but the slime robs me of my words.
When I wake, I’m lying on the cot, wrapped in bandages up to my elbow. The light is dim, but I can make out a pile of bloody
rags on the table and smell their coppery scent. My blood.
I can’t help trying to wiggle my fingers, and I feel a sharp tug where they ought to be. I can’t tell if the amputation was
successful; everything is just so different and strange, the bandages so tight, my head still swimming.
But the pain, though not gone, has been reduced to an everyday sort of agony, like the time I got my fingers caught in the