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I stare back at him. I stood in front of Wes and said the time had come for revolution. I said we should step out of the shadows. Now I’m out of the shadows. I’m right in front of the king—and he’s asking for the truth.
So I give it to him. “Your dosages are too high,” I say. “You’re taking more than you need.”
“You cannot possibly know that.”
“I do know that. My father was an apothecary, and I learned to measure doses myself. The people we are treating stay just as healthy as people taking six times as much.” I’m saying too much, but now that I’ve begun, I can’t stop. “My father used to say that too much medicine could be as harmful as too little. I sometimes wonder if you could heal all your people by virtue of regulating dosages more stringently. If you add a bit of roseseed oil to the elixir—”
“You and your father steal together?”
“I—what? No. My father—my parents are dead.” I swallow. “They died two years ago.”
To my surprise, he looks startled. He draws back in the chair. “You have my sympathy.”
“Do I?” I say recklessly. “They were killed by the night patrol. Your night patrol.”
“So your father was a smuggler? An illegal trader?”
“No!” The king might as well have slapped me across the face. I grip the edge of the table. “My father—he—he was a good man—”
“He was doing what you were doing?”
“Yes.”
“Which, at its base, is stealing, yes?”
I glare at him. “It’s not the same.”
“It’s the same to the night patrol.” He takes a sip of tea.
I want to knock it right into his face.
Corrick might not have cut my hands off, but I have a feeling the guards standing by the wall would do it.
“My intention is not to upset you,” says King Harristan. “But if you are to hold me in low regard for what happened to your parents, I would suggest that you consider the choices they made. Every smuggler has a story to justify their actions. The penalties are well known. How can I turn a blind eye to one type of thievery and not another?”
My fingers are clutching the edge of the table so tightly that my knuckles ache. He’s wrong.
But . . . ?he’s also not. I had this exact argument with Wes from the other side. It’s all the same to the king and his brother.
“What choice do we have?” I snap. “People are dying.”
“I know.”
I freeze. That note is in his voice again. He does know. He does care.
“It might be all the same to the night patrol,” I say roughly, “but it’s different when someone just wants to survive.”
“I believe the people who buy the medicine lawfully want to survive as well.”
“If someone is starving and they steal a loaf of bread—”
“It is still stealing.” His tone doesn’t change.
“Have you ever been starving?” I say boldly.
Silence falls between us, sharp and quick. He hasn’t. Of course he hasn’t.
His eyes don’t leave mine. “If you had this theory about Moonflower petals, about dosages, why did you not make it known?”
