Fifteen
We journeyed to the emperor’s city, taking a winding route that meant we didn’t go back through my village. We had ample gold, which meant that at the first mountain village we traded our mule for a horse and our sleeping mats in the dirt for a room at a caravanserai.
The caravanserai was a large white mud-brick building in the shape of a square, with painted blue doors and a relatively large stable for an obscure little village. It wasn’t particularly populated, which was good because we didn’t have to worry that someone was about to rob us. Nonetheless, I rented the biggest room for what we were about to do.
“You’ve done this before, right? Transfigured someone into another person entirely?”
The clay-packed walls of the caravanserai were painted white on the inside too, and our room even had a large mirror. I looked at my reflection, memorizing my face, tracing the lines of my stubborn mouth and wide dark eyes.
Soon, different eyes would be looking back at me.
“A few times,” Noor said, picking out some zoraat seeds from the sack. “But it’s really just about tweaking the blend and knowing what you want. You had an odd reaction to touching the seeds, so let’s start small for now.”
She had separated the colors of the zoraat into a few small piles—deep turquoise, bloodred, turmeric yellow. Then she placed the separate colors into small stone bowls she’d pilfered from the kitchen, with a heavy pestle to grind them. Noor began grinding each pile into a fine powder. She took a pinch from each of the different colored piles and prepared a brownish substance on a tin plate. She looked up at me with trepidation above the little pile of the zoraat powder.
I stared back at her.
“What am I supposed to do, exactly?”
She exhaled and lifted a small spoon to the powdered blend she made. “You don’t need to do anything. Not yet.”
I bit my bottom lip. “If you’ve never ingested this, how do you know what the right combination is to make it effective?”
She hesitated a second before lifting the spoon to my mouth. My nails bit the inside of my palms as I took in the reddish-brown powder.
Even though Noor had saved my life, trustinganyonewas difficult after one of the closest people in my life had condemned me to die.
I chewed the inside of my cheek, tamping down the urge to throw the zoraat in her face and run out of the caravanserai.
But if I didn’t trust her, if we didn’t trust each other, we’d never get justice for what was done to them.
For what was done to us.
I inhaled and let the air flow through me, calming all the voices in my head telling me to stop.
It was too late for that.
“At the apothecary, Souma would have me try different blends, experimenting on the healers and spies the emperor had deemed privileged enough to consume the zoraat. The other assistants at the apothecary would cause unimaginable suffering. Their subjects would be in agony—their insides going black, their eyes melting, their skin peeling off.”
“You are being so inspirational right now,” I said as I gestured to the powder on her spoon. “I’m really excited to see what color my insides will turn.”
She shook her head. “What I am trying to say is that I dreaded inflicting that kind of pain on anyone—and many of the subjects died from those experiments. But when I blended, it was as if there was something guiding me to choose the right amounts. I felt connected to the zoraat in a way the others didn’t.”
“Something?” I thought again of the voice in the cave, that whispered growl that seemed to come from the earth itself.
“A… feeling. A hand? I’m not sure.”
“And you didn’t kill anyone with your mixtures?”
“Better than that—whatever Vahid wanted them to do, I could make happen. It took apothecarists years to master the techniques and amounts properly, whereas I seemed to have an affinity for it.” She shrugged. “Needless to say, I’ve done this before, and if your skin peels off, I’m really very sorry.”
I arched a brow and looked down at the spoon again.
Words met my lips and I felt the gravity of them before I even spoke. “I trust you.”
We hadn’t come this far for me to lose faith in her now.
The zoraat powder coated my tongue and thickened like oil in my mouth.
