“How can you help? If you will only . . .” He stopped.
He had been trying, with no apparent success, to bridge the chasm between them. But that was not all he wanted, was it? No, he was far more ambitious than even he had realized. He wanted her to . . .
“Fall in love with me.” He heard, loud and clear, the words the truth serum compelled from him. “If you loved me, everything would be so much easier.”
The transformation was horrendous, as if a hundred rodents were trying to gnaw their way out from underneath Iolanthe’s skin.
Afterward, she lay in place, unable to move—and not merely because of her physical feebleness.
The things that boy wanted frightened her.
She should laugh at such ambitions on his part: nothing about him held any romance for her, not his crown, not his black heart, not his beautiful liar’s face.
Yet she trembled inside, for what he wanted was not impossible.
It was not even improbable.
“I am not dead—or about to die,” said Titus in response to Fairfax’s gasp from the door.
She was at his side, her breaths ragged. “Then why are you on the floor?”
He had lost consciousness again after retaking most of the remedies. And it had seemed easier, after he had come to, simply to remain on the ground. “You had the nearest bed. How was the transformation, by the way?”
She did not answer, but only pulled him to his feet and half carried, half dragged him to the cot next door. “Are you sure you are not dying this instant?”
“I am very certain. I will die by falling, not lying comfortably in a bed.”
“What?”
Damn the truth serum still raging through his veins. He should have censored himself—she was no longer a bird. “Make me some tea, would you? Everything you need you will find in the repository, in the cabinet underneath the globe.”
She gave him a narrow-eyed glance but left, returning a few minutes later with two steaming mugs and a tin of everwell biscuits.
He tried to sit up.
She placed her palm firmly against his chest. “Stay down.”
“How do I drink tea on my back?”
“Have you forgotten who I am?” A globule of tea the color and translucency of smoky quartz floated toward him. “This is how you will drink tea lying down.”
Her expression was somewhere between anger and grief, but closer to which he could not tell. “I can sit up for a cup of tea,” he said.
“Don’t. I was there. I know what the Inquisitor did to you. I saw you bleed from the ears.”
He sucked in a breath. “You remember?”
“Yes.”
Before he attempted his first transmogrification, he had read all the extant literature on the subject. Transmogrification was fairly old magic, so even though it had always been frowned upon and at times outlawed, there was no lack of records and studies.
In fifteen hundred years, there had been only two accounts of mages claiming memory from time spent in animal form. Most scholars considered those mages to have been either exaggerating or lying outright.
But Fairfax was clearly not lying—there was no other way she could have known what happened to him in the Inquisition Chamber except to rely on her own memory.
“How?”
“I’m not sure. I wonder if it has anything to do with the blood oath—that I had to maintain a continuity of consciousness so that I am never in danger of betraying my word.”
He almost did not hear a thing she said as he recalled what he had said. If you loved me, everything would be so much easier.
She was still speaking, berating him for his stupidity in refusing to let the court physician treat him even though he had bled from his ears.
“I was not bleeding from the ears.”
“Don’t lie. I saw you.”
“I cannot lie to you while under the blood oath, remember? The blood came from the veins on my wrists—I had extractors hidden inside my cuff braces. The court physician would have realized. That was why I could not see him. I cannot allow word to get back to the Inquisitor that I am not as badly hurt as I appeared to be.”
The way she gaped at him, he could not tell whether she wanted to punch him or to hug him. Probably the former. He missed those brief hours when she would have hugged him. He never liked himself as much as when she had liked—even admired—him.
“How did you know you’d need extractors?” she asked, still suspicious.
“Before their minds broke, Inquisition subjects often bled from various orifices. I had hoped that when I bled, the Inquisitor would think she had gone far enough.”
She clamped her teeth over her upper lip. “Did she stop?”
“No.” He shook his head—and grimaced at the sharp pain brought on by the motion. “What happened in there? Did Captain Lowridge take it upon himself to break down the doors?”