“How is she?” someone asks from out of sight.
My head is too muddled to place her voice right away, but I recognize her long red braid when it swishes past the door. Master Cymbre doesn’t come in. Instead, she draws Danial into the hallway, and I don’t have the strength to wonder why.
With Simeon’s arms around me, I lie back and listen to his heartbeat, to the vibrant rhythm of life, until I slide into the nothingness of a dreamless sleep.
*
The sun still rises and sets, like it always has. It seems cruel that it wouldn’t stop, just for a little while, to show how much darker the world is without Evander in it.
I stop looking at the sun.
Without it, one day blurs into the next, until two or three or five have gone by.
*
Walking alone down the palace corridor that leads to Jax’s room, to my room, and a few doors beyond that, to Evander’s former room, I have no destination in mind. Nothing to fill my days.
I’m always alone now, even when someone is right beside me.
Footsteps jar me out of my drug-induced daze long enough to recognize Danial striding toward me, wearing his sturdy cotton healer’s whites and the gold pin with double turquoise gems that signifies his master status. He opens his mouth to say something, but my head spins violently and the polished marble corridor becomes a blur as I sink to my knees.
The sixth dizzy spell in as many days.
Cool, gentle hands smooth my hair back from my forehead.
“Evander?” My heart skips as I gaze into the bluest eyes in all of Karthia.
“No,” he says, frowning, but I’d know that voice, that face, those eyes anywhere. He kneels beside me, his forehead lined with concern, trying to get a better look at me. But I fling my arms around him, frantic, knocking the breath from him.
“How is this possible?” I laugh. “It’s you . . .”
“Odessa.” Evander frowns harder still, leaning away from me.
I pull him near, surprised by his resistance. “I thought you were dead!” I whisper fiercely into his neck.
“Odessa!”
Evander gives my shoulders a sharp shake, and suddenly in his place is Danial. He’s kneeling on the floor beside me, gazing into my face with so much worry. “I’m not him, Odessa. You’re having delusions.”
I cross my arms and shake my head. I know he’s right, but I don’t want to believe him. If delusions are the only way to see Evander, then so be it. I’ll take what I can get.
“I can heal your body again and again,” Danial says distantly, like he’s talking to someone else even though he’s looking right at me, “but I don’t know what else to try for your mind—you look dead on your feet, Sparrow!”
Tears slide down my face, seeping onto Danial’s fingers. The look he’s giving me shifts from one of worry to something worse: pity.
Lost girl, his eyes say. Broken girl.
He bows his head like everyone else does when they see me lately. It’s like they’re scared that if they hold my gaze too long, if they look too deep, they’ll lose something that matters to them, too.
“Danial.” I don’t recognize the cracked voice coming out of my mouth as I tug on his shirtsleeve. “I need more of that calming potion. To keep the nightmares at bay.” They aren’t just happening at night, but Danial doesn’t need to know that. He also doesn’t need to know how much they dull my mind, or he might take them away, and then I can’t say what I’ll do with myself.
Danial nods reluctantly. “I’m glad it’s helping.” He hauls me to my feet, keeping an arm securely around my waist. “But if you have any more of these . . . delusions . . . let me know, will you, and we’ll find you a different tonic.”
“Right. Sure.” I shrug him off. “I can still stand on my own, see?” There’s that stranger’s voice again.
“Okay,” Danial says softly. He gazes down the hall, like he was headed somewhere, then looks at me again. “Let me help you back to your room, at least.”
I shake my head. “I’m actually going for a walk.”
“Sparrow, please tell me how you’re really—”
Turning my back on him, I continue down the hall, slower than normal but moving just fine without anyone’s help. I pass my room, taking my time as I head toward Evander’s, until I hear Danial’s boots clicking down the hall in the opposite direction.
One twist of the cold doorknob and I’m inside Evander’s empty palace quarters. There’s a wardrobe, a desk and chair, a tall painted vase full of fake and very dusty black poplar branches—their flowers are his favorite, a symbol of courage—and a bed with a basic blue quilt on it. There’s not even a hint of his sandalwood, cut-grass, and leather smell in here. None of his silly drawings or maps scrawled on the bare walls. In all our years together, I think we’ve used this room maybe a handful of times, including after the recent festival.
As my fingers touch the quilt, a memory springs to mind: Me, sitting on this very bed. Evander, facing me, armed with what seemed like an entire closet full of bandages. Patching me up after sparring practice, mending a small cut beneath my eye as I tried to rub ointment on his bruises. We were both too proud to see a healer after Master Cymbre showed us how a real warrior fights.
Shaking my head to clear it, I stagger to the desk and pull open the single drawer there, searching for a distraction.
There’s nothing inside but a dead fly. I don’t know what I thought I’d find. Letters, maybe, which Evander had written to help me through this difficult time. But no one expected this, least of all him.
I sink into the rough wooden chair by the desk. I shouldn’t have come here. This room is as Evander-less as the rest of the world, a world I’m stuck in without him.
So when I turn to face the bed, a tremor of cold runs through me as I meet the midnight-blue eyes of the young man sitting on it. He looks more polished than the Evander I knew, not one dark hair out of place or a hint of stubble on his jaw. He doesn’t say anything, but he appears real enough.
Real or not, I need him.
“Since you’ve been gone, I don’t even feel right in my own skin anymore,” I tell him, breaking the silence. I wonder if he can speak. After a long silence, I go on, “It’s like I’m missing a part, a lung or a kidney, and the rest of me can’t figure out how to work together without that one piece.”
My throat tightens, but I force more words out somehow. “I finally spent the whole night lying beside you, without having to run back to some other bed before sunup so your mother wouldn’t know. It wasn’t like I imagined it would be, though. You were just a cold shell, but I guarded you until it was time to prepare for . . .”
The fist of grief wrapping around my neck silences me for a moment, and the shadow of Evander on the bed flickers beneath my gaze.