I get his arm over my shoulders and drag more than carry him the rest of the way. Each stair is a battle. His boots knock against the risers. My thighs burn. My spine screams. His weight is not what it should be, and that frightens me more than the struggle. He used to be solid, warm, impossible to move when he planted himself in my way and refused to let me storm out into danger.
Now I haul him like something already half-stolen.
By the time I get him into bed, my breath is ragged and his lips are colorless. I pull the blanket over him, tuck it around his sides, and reach for the cup of bloodroot infusion on the table.
His hand closes around my wrist.
“Sable.”
“Drink.”
“Do not beg demons for me.”
I do not move.
His fingers are fever-warm. “Promise me.”
The room feels suddenly too small for all the lies I have available.
“You need rest,” I say.
“Promise me.”
I sit on the edge of the bed. The mattress dips, and he watches my face with the exhausted focus of a man trying to memorize a verdict. I can hear the rain beginning again outside, soft at first, then harder against the roof.
“I won’t,” I say.
The lie tastes like metal.
He closes his eyes, either because he believes me or because he wants to. I do not know which mercy is crueler.
By morning, I have sold my mother’s earrings, the silver clasp from my winter cloak, two sets of carving tools, the copper-bottomed pan, and half our stored herbs. The city takes each piece of me with greedy fingers and gives back too little coin. Pawnmen squint. Herbalists haggle. A woman with painted lips and a Dark Elf patron’s mark on her throat tells me the earrings are unfashionable, as if grief needs better taste.
I do not slap her. This is my great act of restraint.
By noon, I am in the under-stair room of an apothecary whose shop front sells lavender soap and cough syrup while the back reeks of rotwine, grave salt, boiled feathers, and illegal hope. Shelves crowd the walls from floor to ceiling, packed with jars that glow faintly, twitch occasionally, or whisper when I pass. The apothecary herself is a narrow woman with hennaed fingertips and a cataract over one eye.
“Magical wasting,” she says after I pay enough to make her interested.
“Yes.”
“Heart-bound?”
“Yes.”
“Human?”
“Yes.”
She exhales through her nose. “That is ugly business.”
“I did not come here for poetry.”
“No, you came for a miracle with street coin.”
“I came for a name.”
Her good eye studies me. “Names cost more than herbs.”
