“You think the slavers can’t reach you here?” he’d asked one night, pacing back and forth in their cabin as Jesper huddled in his blankets, pretending to sleep so that he could listen. “If word gets out there’s a Grisha living here—”
“That word,” Aditi said with a wave of one of her graceful hands, “is not our word. I cannot be anything other than what I am, and if my gifts can help people, then it’s my duty to use them.”
“And what about our son? Do you owe him nothing? Your first duty is to stay safe so we don’t lose you.”
But Jesper’s mother had taken Colm’s face in her hands, so gently, so kindly, with all the love shining from her eyes. “What kind of mother would I be to my son if I hid away my talents? If I let fear be my guide in this life? You knew what I was when you asked that I choose you, Colm. Do not now suggest that I be anything less.”
And like that his father’s frustration was gone. “I know. I just can’t bear the thought of losing you.”
She laughed and kissed him. “Then you must keep me close,” she said with a wink. And the argument would be over. Until the next one.
As it turned out, Jesper’s father was wrong. They didn’t lose Aditi to slavers.
Jesper woke one night to hear voices, and when he’d wriggled out from under his blankets, he’d seen his mother putting her coat over her long nightgown, fetching a hat and her boots. He’d been seven then, small for his age, but old enough to know the most interesting conversations happened after his bedtime. A Zemeni man stood at the door in dusty riding clothes, and his father was saying, “It’s the middle of the night. Surely this can wait until morning.”
“If it were Jes who lay suffering, would you say that?” asked his mother.
“Aditi—”
She’d kissed Colm’s cheek, then swept Jesper up in her arms. “Is my little rabbit awake?”
“No,” he said.
“Well then, you must be dreaming.” She tucked him back in, kissed his cheeks and his forehead. “Go to sleep, little rabbit, and I’ll be back tomorrow.”
But she didn’t return the next day, and when a knock came the following morning, it was not his mother, just the same dusty Zemeni man.
Colm grabbed his son and was out the door in moments. He pushed a hat onto his head, plunked Jesper down in the saddle in front of him, then kicked his horse into a gallop. The dusty man rode an even dustier horse, and they followed him across miles of cultivated land to a white farmhouse at the edge of a jurda field. It was far nicer than their little cabin, two stories high with glass in the windows.
The woman waiting at the door was stouter than his mother, but nearly as tall, her hair piled in thick coils of braids. She waved them inside, saying, “She’s upstairs.”
In the years after, when Jesper had pieced together what had happened over those terrible days, he remembered very few things: the polished wood floors of the farmhouse and how they felt nearly silky beneath his fingers, the stout woman’s eyes, red from crying, and the girl—a child several years older than Jesper with braids like her mother’s. The girl had drunk from a well that had been dug too near one of the mines. It was supposed to be boarded up, but someone had simply taken away the bucket. The winch was still there, and the old rope. So the girl and her friends had used one of their lunch pails to bring the water up, cold as morning and twice as clear. All three of them had taken ill that night. Two of them had died. But Jesper’s mother had saved the girl, the stout woman’s daughter.
Aditi had come to the girl’s bedside, sniffed the metal lunch pail, then set her hands to the girl’s fevered skin. By noon the next day, the fever had broken and the yellowish tinge was gone from the girl’s eyes. By early evening, she sat up and told her mother she was hungry. Aditi smiled once at her and collapsed.
“She didn’t take enough care when extracting the poison,” the dusty man said. “She absorbed too much of it herself. I’ve seen it happen before with zowa.” Zowa. It simply meant “blessed.” That was the word Jesper’s mother used instead of Grisha. We’re zowa , she would say to Jesper as she made a flower bloom with a flick of her fingers. You and me.
Now there was no one to call upon to save her. Jesper did not know how. If she’d been conscious, if she’d been stronger, she might have been able to heal herself. Instead she slipped away into some deep dream, her breath becoming more and more labored.
Jesper slept, his cheek pressed to his mother’s palm, sure that any minute she would wake and stroke his cheek and he would hear her voice say, “What are you doing here, little rabbit?” Instead, he woke to the sound of his father weeping.
They’d taken her back to the farm and buried her beneath a cherry tree that was already beginning to flower. To Jesper, it had seemed too pretty for such a sad day, and even now, seeing those pale pink flowers in a shop window or embroidered on a lady’s silks always put him in a melancholy mind. They took him back to the smell of fresh-turned earth, the wind whispering through the fields, his father’s trembling baritone singing a lonely kind of song, a Kaelish air in words Jesper didn’t understand.
When Colm had finished, the last notes drifting up into the cherry tree’s branches, Jesper said, “Was Ma a witch?”
Colm laid a freckled hand on his son’s shoulder and drew him close. “She was a queen, Jes,” he said. “She was our queen.”
Jesper had made dinner for them that night, burnt biscuits and watery soup, but his father ate every bite and read to him from his Kaelish book of Saints until the lights burned low and the pain in Jesper’s heart eased enough for him to sleep. And that was the way it had been from then on, the two of them, looking after each other, working the fields, bundling and drying jurda in the summers, trying to make the farm pay. Why hadn’t it been enough?
But even as Jesper had the thought, he knew it could never be enough. He could never go back to that life. He hadn’t been built for it. Maybe if his mother had lived, she would have taught him to channel his restlessness. Maybe she would have shown him how to use his power instead of hiding it. Maybe he’d have gone to Ravka to be a soldier for the crown. Or maybe he would have ended up right here anyway.
He wiped the stain of the jurda from his fingertips and placed the lid back on the tin.
“The Zemeni don’t just use the blossoms,” he said. “I remember my mother soaking jurda stalks in goat’s milk. She gave it to me when I’d been out in the fields.”
“Why?” asked Matthias.
“To counteract the effects of inhaling jurda pollen all day. It’s too much for a child’s system, and no one wanted me more excitable than I already was.”
“The stalks?” repeated Kuwei. “Most people just dispose of them.”
“The stalks have a balm in them. The Zemeni drain it for ointments. They rub it on babies’ gums and nostrils when they’re burning jurda .” Jesper’s fingers drummed on the tin, a thought forming in his mind. Could the secret to the antidote for jurda parem be the jurda plant itself? He wasn’t a chemist; he didn’t think like Wylan, and he hadn’t been trained as a Fabrikator. But he was his mother’s son. “What if there’s a version of the balm that would counteract the effects of jurda parem ? There still wouldn’t be a way to admin—”
That was when the window shattered. Jesper had his guns drawn in less than a breath, as Matthias shoved Kuwei down and shouldered his rifle. They edged to the wall and Jesper peeked outside through the smashed stained glass. In the shadows of the cemetery he saw lanterns raised, shifting shapes that had to be people—a lot of people.
“Unless the ghosts just got a lot more lively,” Jesper said, “it looks like we have company.”