I lower him onto the floor, one hand behind his neck, the other pressed uselessly over his sternum as though I can hold his heart in place by force. His skin is clammy. His breath comes in thin, torn pulls. Blood shines on his lower lip.
“Help!” I scream toward the window. “Mara! Mara, get Healer Tovan! Now!”
Across the lane, a shutter bangs open.
“What is it?” Mara calls.
“Get Tovan!”
She sees the blood. I know the moment she does, because her face drains white and she disappears without another question.
Corin coughs again, and this time I turn him sideways before it chokes him. Blood flecks the floor. Blood on my hand. Blood in the grout between the stones. The kitchen, my plain little kitchen with its cracked bowls and crooked shelves, becomes a slaughter room in the space of five breaths.
“No, no, no,” I whisper, though I despise myself for wasting words on denial. “Stay with me.”
His fingers curl weakly around my sleeve. “If I die before washing dishes, you must admit I won.”
“You are not dying to avoid chores.”
“That sounds exactly like something I would do.”
His smile is barely there. It trembles at the edges and fails when pain tightens his body. His eyes squeeze shut, and he makes a sound I have never heard from him before, a low animal groan that rips something open in me.
By the time Healer Tovan arrives, I have blood under my nails and terror in my teeth.
He is an old man with a stooped back and sharp eyes, carrying his satchel half-fastened because Mara must have dragged him from his own breakfast. He kneels beside Corin without ceremony and pushes me back with the flat of one hand.
“Give me room.”
“I am not leaving him.”
“I said room, girl, not the next kingdom.”
I shift just enough for him to work. Mara hovers in the doorway, wringing her apron. I want to snap at her to stop looking so frightened, as though her face has power over the outcome, but I clamp my mouth shut.
Tovan draws a brass disk from his satchel, etched with rings of old temple script and healer’s notation. He places it over Corin’s heart. Then he pricks his own thumb with a needle, smears blood along the disk’s outer rim, and mutters a pulse-reading spell under his breath.
The air changes.
The kitchen sound dulls until the rain outside becomes a hush behind thick walls. A blue-white light seeps from the brass disk, sinking through Corin’s shirt and into his skin. For a moment, nothing happens. Then faint black veins flicker across his sternum.
They are not natural veins. They branch too sharply, like ink dropped into water and frozen mid-spread. They pulse once, twice, then vanish beneath his flesh.
Tovan’s jaw hardens.
“What is that?” I ask.
He does not answer quickly enough.
“What is that?”
He lifts the disk and wipes it clean with a cloth. “Magical wasting.”
The words are too tidy for what they do to me. Too small. “No.”
“Sable.”
“No. Read again.”
