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Her words put a sudden halt to his escape. He closed his lips against hers, taking a half step back.
“What? What did I say?”
Tyr breathed in a pained whimper. He reached for her face again, but this time pressed his forehead to hers, repressing the well of anger and sadness that seemed without end. “Forgive me, Nessa. I like you. And if anyone could... should... stand a chance of breaking through this wall around my heart, it’s you. But the truth is—” He winced. “I’m in love with someone else. And though she may not feel the same, it doesn’t mean my heart doesn’t belong to her.” He turned his head to the side and exhaled through a gap in his lips. “It wouldn’t be fair to you to pretend.”
Nessa slowly backed away. Through his tears, he saw her once more change, flickering between Ana and Nessa, Ana and Nessa. It was Magda all over again. He was seeing things that simply weren’t possible. Of all the trauma he’d endured over the years, none had left him hallucinating; he’d never questioned his own sanity.
“Tyreste,” she said, measuring her words. “What if I were to tell you—”
She was cut off when screams rang out from their left. They both turned toward the sound but then more came from their right.
“Someonehelp us!” a voice called from several tents over. A chorus of desperate shouts followed, and the market swiftly dissolved into chaos.
Tyr and Nessa exchanged stunned looks. Nessa shook her head.
She took off running.
When Ana returned to the main fairway of the market, it felt like she’d stepped into another reality. Men and women were screaming for help, howling for physicians, and leaning over a haphazard line of convulsing bodies. Some were covered in blood. Others had gone dangerously pale.
Some of the tents had already collapsed, and the rest were being pulled down to place under the dying and dead.Dead.Yes, she realized some had already succumbed to the unknown horror ripping through the market. She searched for signs of anything that might explain what was happening, but there was nothing.
Ana regarded them all in utter helplessness. Her legs tried to go one way, her head another.
“It’s the apples!” someone cried. The person ran through the crowd, her hands waving above her head. “Don’t eat the apples!”
Shrill, sharp pounding pulsed in Ana’s ears. The screams and cries turned into an ambient hum, like she’d been pulled away from the scene and was viewing it through the lens of a distant memory.
Several feet away, a little boy tore out of his parents’ arms and retched a spray of blood. It coated his father, who tilted his head back to the sky and begged for mercy.
A cart thundered down the road, knocking Ana into a tent. The cacophony of dread and despair climbed to a crescendo once more, and she started screaming herself, to drown out the terror that yet had no name.
But of course it had a name.
You only think you know regret.
Ana started moving through the crowd. She crouched near the boy, asking his parents for any information they had about what had happened , but the mother was incapacitated with sobs. She pulled her boy—her already-gone boy—to her chest and rocked him in the rawest grief Ana had ever witnessed.
If she’d only moved faster, she might have—
“It was the apple,” the father said, swaying on his knees with a soulless look in his eyes. Beside him she saw a honey-covered apple—or what had been one before the child had eaten it. Only the stick remained, coated in remnants of honey and dirt clumped around the discarded instrument of death. “It was the fucking apple!”
“We need physicians!” Tyreste cried, his voice rising momentarily over the din of terror. Ana couldn’t see him; her senses were too overloaded to place where he was. “Where are the physicians? The healers?”
Ana stumbled to her feet. She blinked the sweat and tears away and scanned the crowd. Magda’s words bored holes through her. How had she done it? Had she taken hold of a villager and turned them into a murderer?
She found Tyreste standing over another situation too far gone, his hands laced over his head. The helpless look on his face broke her.
“You’re a healer,” she whispered, low enough just for the two of them. “We can help people.”
“I tried... I...” He turned back toward her, wan-faced, and lowered his shaking hands so she could see them. “How do you know I can heal?”
“Does it matter?” Ana was too agitated to be concerned about the slipup. “We need to act fast, faster than whatever is killing our people.”
“I can’t. Nothing... I can’t. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Does your family have other healers?” Ana knew the answer, but Nessa didn’t. She’d already given away too much.
“My father used to, but he stopped when the arthritis set into his hands, said it was that or the bookkeeping and only one fed his family, and now...” Tyreste’s shoulders shuddered as they lifted. “It’s just me.”
