“She told me more about you.”
Quiet fills the chamber. His attention sharpens.
“The Abbot has been watching. Through the Bloom—it carries information as well as infection. He knows about your response to me.” I hold his gaze. “He wants me alive. He wants you converted. Maret says he plans to use your desire as a weapon.”
Fury flickers across his face. Not shame—he’s past shame now. Rage, dark and cold.
“Let him try.”
ELEVEN
ZRYNOK
The Abbot thinks he can use my desire against me.
The thought sits in my chest, burning hotter than the infection. He’s been watching. Seeing what I feel for Arwen, cataloguing it, planning how to turn it into a leash.
He doesn’t know me. Doesn’t understand what centuries of killing has made. I’ve been used before—by warlords who wanted enemies eliminated, by nobles who needed inconvenient people to disappear. I know what it feels like to be a weapon in someone else’s hand.
I also know that weapons can turn.
She applies the treatment. I hold still and let myself feel it—the burn of medicine against infection, her hands on my skin, the particular discipline of wanting something and not taking it.
“He thinks it’s a weakness,” I say, while her hands work. “The wanting. He’s been watching it through the Bloom and he sees a leash.”
“The Abbot has never felt something he couldn’t control.” Her fingers press the paste along my forearm with careful precision. “He doesn’t understand the difference.”
“What difference?”
She is quiet for a moment. Working.
“Between desire that owns you and desire you’ve claimed as yours.”
I hold that. The Bloom pulses in my blood—steadier now than an hour ago, the treatment doing its work. And beneath the infection’s demand, something else. Something that doesn’t ask permission.
“The infection should stabilize by morning.” She withdraws her hands. Steps back. “But it won’t disappear. You carry it now.”
“I know.” I’ve had time to sit with it. “How do you live with it? Day to day.”
TWELVE
ARWEN
Iwatch the information take hold in him. The way his expression moves from resistance to processing to something that looks almost like acceptance.
Most people fight this moment. Rage against the unfairness of permanent infection. Demand to know if there’s a cure, a reversal, anything to undo what’s been done. Zrynok doesn’t rage. Doesn’t demand. Just sits with it—absorbing the blow, adjusting his approach based on new information.
“By not fighting every moment.” I wipe my hands clean on the cloth I brought for the herbs. “By accepting that the hunger is part of me now and working with it instead of against it.” A pause. The next part is harder to say. “It took years to understand that what I feel is mine. Not a weapon they gave me. Not a punishment. Mine. What I do with it—that’s where agency lives.”
He’s very still. “You’ve been infected for years.”
“Since my first year here.” I let him see it—the admission I don’t usually make. “They put me in the Initiation Pools when I arrived. The water is infused with Bloom essence. After that, it was in my blood permanently.” I hold steady on his gaze. “It doesn’t have to destroy you. I’m proof of that.”
Movement from the corner. Circe, pressing against the wall, her eyes open and fixed on us. She’s been silent since we returned—but now her gaze moves between us with something approaching curiosity.
“The Bloom doesn’t control you.” Her voice is small. Uncertain. But there’s a question underneath—a desperate need to believe that what she’s heard is true. “You’ve been infected for years, and you’re still... you.”
I turn to face her. This girl who was about to be sacrificed for my escape.
