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“Well, there are only so many parts of the rose. The stem is fairly ordinary, and the thorn is hardly beautiful.”
Thorn.That’s what had tugged at my memory.Sigrid had said,“You don’t seem to have as many thorns.”
You don’t recognize beauty when you see it,Madame had told Einar.
Beauty is power, Zaina. Power is beauty.
I gasp. “Not the most traditionally beautiful...but power is beauty.”
His eyes are narrow, like he’s caught on but isn’t quite sold. But I am close to positive. It’s exactly something she would do. She was furious that he had power, that she could have given him more, that he didn’t appreciate that about her.
Everything comes down to power with her.
“If you rewrote her sentence,” I tell him. “If you look in the mostpowerfulpart of the rose.”
And then I see it. The same excitement and sense of possibility I feel lighting up the shadows in his eyes. “You truly are brilliant, Zaina.”
It’s an echo of what Madame had told me more than once, but I don’t get the same sinking feeling when he says it. For the first time in as long as I can remember, it feels like something that could begood.
Chapter Forty
Zaina
We’ve been in his study for hours, poring over every nuance of this thorn and comparing its attribute to the petals, his notes, and every book on botany and alchemy in his vast collection.
Khijha has long since fallen into a bored sleep by the time we are ready to cut into the thorn itself. He cautiously removes it from the stem, and we both hold our breath, waiting to see if it will wither and crumble before we get a chance to do more.
When it remains intact, he takes a small, sharp knife and makes a tiny incision. Black liquid oozes up from the cut like rivulets of blood, as though the thorn is protesting our invasion. There is something inherently evil about this flower that is only meant to kill and trick and maim, something that feels like the essence of Madame herself.
Carefully, he pours the black extract into a small vial of wine. The notes he’d shared with me had extensive information on the emulsification process of using it with the petals. It’s what Madame had used for poison the first time, and whether it has to do with its specific properties or was mere coincidence, it seems like the best solution now.
As soon as the thorny mixture hits the wine, it bubbles and swirls until it seems as though the burgundy liquid has completely absorbed every last oily black particle, but it’s hard to say whether that’s a good sign.
Einar wordlessly takes out a vial that appears to be a container of blood and places a single drop of the thorn mixture into it.
I wait for him to explain but am completely distracted by the sight of the black droplet coming alive and darting through the blood like a spark igniting and multiplying again and again.
Einar’s face contorts into something unreadable as he studies the vial, but then I see a glimmer of what looks like hope.
His mouth stretches into a wide, surprised grin, and he stares at the vial with wide eyes. Whatever just happened has to have been a good thing.
“Let’s go give her the good news,” he says with more hope than I could’ve thought possible.
When we getto Sigrid’s room, she is already worse. She can’t speak through her wheezing, and there is hardly a single feature on her that’s recognizable as human anymore. It’s like the transformation sped up once it got its final foothold.
“Zaina has come up with a new idea for a cure,” Einar says, sadness and hope warring in his tone. He pulls the vial out of his pocket. “This one already looks different, mixes differently, so we have cause to believe it might be the one, if you can just hold on for a few more days.”
My head snaps up to his. “Why would we wait a few more days?”
He isn’t blind. Surely, he knows it’s anyone’s guess as to whether she will survive that long, and hardly something within her control.
“To see how it reacts with the poison.” He says it like it’s obvious. “That’s what I was doing before we left.”
It makes sense, or, it would make sense if Sigrid weren’t actually dying.
“And that’s excellent work from a scientific standpoint, Einar,” I try and fail to keep the edge out of my voice. “But at this point, it could hardly hurt to try it out in the meantime. It’s not as though we have anything to lose.” I gesture subtly at Sigrid’s prone form.
His eyes flash with frustration, and he takes a deep breath, like he’s trying to inhale the patience to explain instead of storming out like he normally would. “She’s in pain right now, but it’s not excruciating, not like I’ve seen happen as a result of some of our other attempts. Not to mention the fact that if we’re wrong, it could kill her faster -- immediately, even. Whereas, if we wait to be sure, we have a better chance at saving her.”
