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“Can you retrieve some of it for me?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”
I had everything else I needed. I remembered the pages from Onal’s herbals well. To ease breathing. I wheezed as I collected all the required items; Zan’s infirmity lingered in my lungs, too.
I put a kettle of water on the fire and started adding the ingredients from Kate’s stores. Mint, tea leaves, turmeric, ginger. I breathed in deeply as I stirred. The relief, though small, was immediate.
As the mixture reached a boil, Zan began to waken “What is that smell?”
“It’s medicine. It isn’t quite perfect yet. Nathaniel went to go fetch another ingredient for me. But here.” I ladled some of the mixture into a mug. “This will at least help, for now. And don’t drink it. Breathe it.”
He held the mug and let the steam rise into his face. “Are we going to talk about how you nearly jumped from the tower?”
“Are we going to talk about how you almost killed yourself trying to stop me?”
He scowled and looked back into his cup.
“I wasn’t going to jump,” I said.
“No? Then what were you doing?”
I hesitated. This was the same dilemma I faced over and over with Kellan: Do I tell him, and have him doubt me? Or do I keep it to myself, another secret to guard, another brick in the divide between me and the people I care about?
“I went to the tower, after what happened to Falada, to be alone. When I saw a way to get in, my curiosity overcame me.” It wasn’t enough of an explanation, and I knew it. I cast about for a piece of truth to reshape into a credible lie. “When I was up there,” I said, “I saw the shape of the city—?really saw it—?for the first time. It was built in the shape of the Achlevan knot, with a gate at each of the points. It was beautiful. I . . . I climbed onto the battlement to get a better look.”
“A half-decent map could have revealed the same thing. You didn’t need—?” He broke into a barking, rasping cough. I crouched next to him, ready to try the spell again, to transfer his suffering to myself, but he waved me off. When the coughing subsided, he said, “I never wanted you to see this.”
“See what?”
“My weakness.”
I paused, then went to the pot and began to stir it with violence before setting the ladle down with a sloppy clang. Then I clenched my fists and leaned against the table, unable to look at him.
“You’re angry,” he observed.
“What you have is an ailment. Not a weakness.”
“It feels the same to me.”
“When I think of weakness, I think of the weak-minded, the weak-willed, the cowardly. You are none of those things.”
“I am all of those things.”
“Stop,” I begged. “What I said this morning . . . I just . . .”
He left the cot and came to lean against the table beside me, in the casual, careless way I knew now to be only a façade. He said, “Don’t apologize. There is no part of this morning that I would wish to revisit, save for one thing. When you said you were done with me. Did you mean it?”
There was very little space between us.
“No,” I breathed.
“Emilie,” he said, “I should have died today, yet I am not dead. You did that, didn’t you? You saved me.”
“You saved me first,” I whispered.
“Your eyes,” he said, “they confound me. They’re like a storm—?gray, and then blue, and then silver—?and always changing. There’s something absolutely uncanny about them. About you.”
But like a blow, I was confronted again with his depiction of me on the wall, casting a blood spell in nightmarish majesty. I was an elemental force, strange and devastating, beautiful as a bolt of lightning, terrible as the crack of thunder. Uncanny, I was. Inhuman.
