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“It is good to see you smile at last.” Her gaze flickers between us before settling back on me. “And you seem to have lost your thorns.”
Her smile turns to a wince before she begins coughing again, this time worse than before.
Her words tug at something in the back of my mind, but I force myself to stay in this moment, assisting as Einar rushes to help her sit up. He holds her through it, but he catches my gaze over her head.
We are no closer to a cure than we were before, and our time is up.
Sigrid is dying.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Zaina
My mind is racing the entire walk back to Einar’s rooms, trying desperately to make sense of everything I’ve read and researched, to put it together with what I know of Madame and this infuriating feeling that I am missing something obvious.
Which is exactly what she wants. Giving her this small victory kills me, even if she doesn’t know it.
Einar slams the door shut, his frustration as palpable as my own, and even Khijhana stalks around the room like she wishes she had something to attack. That makes two of us.
“We don’t have time to wait for another petal,” I say out loud, knowing the fight it will likely incite. We’ve had this argument before.
But instead of getting angry, Einar only looks resigned.
“Time doesn’t matter with that. The petals could very well lose their potency if we break them removing them. We know so little about them.”
I shake my head, trying to think.
“How do you know the cure is even in the petals?”
“She said the most beautiful part of the rose,” he answers. “Of course, I’ve considered she was lying, just to watch me spend years of my life working in the wrong direction.” His hands twitch toward the axe strapped to his back with a brown leather belt.
“No,” I say automatically. “She likes to win.”
I am uncomfortably reminded of myself, of all the times she has referenced our similarities over the years. Even though I would sooner be compared to a sewer rat, the feeling is there, the reason I understand the way her mind works so much better than even her precious Damian did. For the same reason I would never cheat in a game of chess, I know she has not lied about this.
“She likes the feeling of being better and smarter than the people around her. Anyone can lie, but what she does...she gives you a complicated truth and then mocks you for not being able to decipher it. So the truth is there, in the note. Somewhere.”
“I’ve wondered why she bothered giving me the cure at all.”
I laugh, but this time, there is no humor in it. “Because it puts the responsibility on you. You have the means to help your people, and you get to feel as though you’ve failed every single day you can’t manage to cure them.”
I feel dirtier, somehow, for the way I can so easily discern the motives of such a vile creature. When Einar meets my eyes, though, I don’t see the despair I am expecting, or even wariness or thinly veiled accusation.
He looks at me with a hope I don’t quite understand.
“You feel like she’s untouchable, Zaina, but you don’t realize that you already have a power over her no one else does.”
“Don’t kid yourself.” I meet his gaze steadily. “No one has power over her.”
“Knowledge is its own kind of power, and it’s one we can use to beat her. Starting with this.”
I want to hope along with him. I want to bask in the way he saidweinstead ofIoryou.But although he has suffered for years because of a single despicable act of hers, I have witnessed two decades of her cunning and her cruelty firsthand.
He quirks his eyebrow as if he knows what I’m thinking, as if he’s challenging me. Just like every time he does that, something in me can’t help but rise to the occasion.
I don’t know that anyone will ever be able to beat Madame, but I can at least try to give Einar’s people back what she took from them. She said that I was brilliant, that I reminded her of herself, and I have hated her every single day of my life for that. But...I can use it to figure this out, for their sakes.
“So back to the petals, then,” I say.
