“It was there already, sir. We thought you meant for us to use it.”
Seth shakes his head and then regrets the action immediately as his face takes on a greenish hue. “Did I?” he asks, blinking back the nausea.
“It’s willow bark, sir. For the pain?”
“No pain relief,” says Seth. Then he turns back to me. “We have to motivate you somehow.”
“Seth, please. It doesn’t work like that,” I say. I take advantage of him taking the time to put the elixir bottle away to walk past him to my bed, which has been moved to accommodate Taran’s cot. I reach under the pillowcase for the cork to cover the bottle, but it isn’t there.
Fuck.
“We’ve already given him the elixir, sir,” says the other healer.
Seth is spending an awfully long time in his elixir drawer. A wave of panic sends my heart into my throat as I realize he may notice the missing sleep elixir.
“Seth, I’m telling you. It’s not as simple as fear,” I say, trying to distract him from the drawer. “If it were, I would have summoned them when Adria attacked me in my room.”
Seth’s shoulders still as he considers what I said. “Maybe not fear for your own life, but fear for someone you care about.” He slams the desk drawer shut, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
Now to find that cork before he puts my shackles back on.
“You care abouthim,” Seth says, lifting his chin in Taran’s direction with a bit of a wobble. “An Orsa, Sylvie. Our enemy.”
I can’t decide if it will be better or worse for Taran if I admit that I do care about him despite everything that has happened between us. He’s one of Ronan’s closest friends. I can’t imagine how much it would hurt Ronan to lose him.
“Why are you healing him then, if he’s your enemy?”
“Because he’s clearly important to you or you wouldn’t have saved him. And because he’s General Taran Orinsen, Ronan’s bodyguard and right hand. You forget that I know these people better than you do. I may have never met him, but I know him by reputation. I know where he came from and how he came to be with Ronan.”
“I very much doubt you do,” I say, my words as cold as Taran’s ice. If Seth knows about the murder of Taran’s village, if he knows about the depraved things that were done to Taran’s family… “If you do know, and you’re fine with what happened to him, then there’s nothing you can say that will earn my forgiveness.”
Seth laughs, a harsh, grating sound that might have been intimidating if he didn’t hiccup at the end of it. “Earnyourforgiveness? I will give you this one thing, sister. You talk like a Verran.”
Seth pushes himself off the desk to check the healers’ work. “Clean this blood from his face. I won’t have him staining the sheets.”
Then he leans down close to Taran. “I’ve wondered for some time what you were like, Taran Orinsen. A nothing, backwoods savage elevated far beyond your station. You stand beside the throne as if you’ve earned the right.”
Taran’s voice scrapes in a way that makes my stomach sick. Please, Vayla, let the healers’ elixirs work. “And what have you earned? What do you have other than what was given to you? That was handed to you by your birth?”
Seth’s eyes flash malevolently, and then he turns to me and smiles unnervingly. “Oh, this is going to befun.”
Then he claps his hands together and turns back to his desk, withdrawing a stack of papers and a quill and beginning to scribble.
As he writes, I roam my hands under the pillow and through the sheets of the bed, searching for the missing cork but coming up empty.
Then, as the healers take their leave, I spot it as one of them kicks it across the rug towards the desk.
Godsdammit.
I look at Taran on the cot. His eyes are closed and his face is turned away from me, but I can see his condition well enough. They’ve removed his shirt to bandage his chest and draped a blanket over his lower body, which looks to be uninjured. There’s a glob of some healing elixir on his ear where it was grazed by an arrow. All in all, it looks like the healers have done a good job of caring for him.
He won’t die. At least not from these injuries.
“Now, I do hope you realize that the little show you put on earlier isn’t going to go unnoticed,” says Seth, still busy writing with his back turned. “The news is spreading through the camp as we speak. I suspect Adria will know before we get going in the morning, and she’ll likely be here to collect you by the afternoon.”
“No,” I say, my chest tightening. “Seth, she’ll kill me. I did what you asked. I showed you my power.”
Seth drops the quill and slams his hand on the desk. “No, you did not. You used your power to save his life.”
