Adam nodded. “I brought you some from the Solstice celebration. Do you feel up to eating?”
Jenna snatched up one of the parcels and sniffed at it. Roast beef. Sharp cheddar cheese. Freshly baked bread. She was practically drooling on it. Ripping away the cloth, she took a large bite.
The healer stared at her, surprised, then loosed one of his rare smiles. “You seem to be feeling much better,” he said. “Better than I could have hoped, considering the way you looked yesterday.”
Jenna nodded, not wanting to talk with her mouth full. She swallowed, then said, “I am much better. I’ve always been quick to heal, but you—you work magic.”
“Maybe,” he said, hunching his shoulders like praise made him uncomfortable. “I’ll want to take a look at that wound in a bit.” He watched her eat for a while then said, like a dog returning to a bone, “What kinds of questions was he asking? Karn, I mean.”
“That’s what surprised me. He said he wasn’t here about the Patriots.”
“Patriots?”
“The ones in Delphi fighting King Gerard. I thought that was what it was about—that they thought I was doing spying and setting fire to things. But, no, he kept asking me about an empress.” She watched the healer carefully, to see if he knew about the empress already, but he looked as ambushed as she had been.
“What empress?”
“Someone named Celestine, from Carthis. Or the Northern Islands. Have you heard of her?”
He shook his head. “No. All I know about Carthis is, you know, pirates. And that wizards—mages, I mean—came from the Northern Islands. Besides the pirates, the storms are so bad on the Indio these days that we never get ships from there anymore.”
“Karn said this Celestine was hunting me, and he wanted to know why, and what the magemark on my neck meant, and all about my family. He seemed tweaked that I couldn’t help him.”
Adam mulled this over. “Does he think you’re the empress’s long-lost daughter or what?”
“Karn doesn’t know what to think. He knows more about the dagger than he let on, though. He says it’s the kind carried by the . . . by the bloodsworn warriors who serve the empress. He said that nobody survives a cut from those blades.”
“I knew it was magicked, I just wasn’t familiar with the enchantments.”
By now Jenna was licking her fingers, having finished off the meat and cheese. “Do I smell a peach?” She looked pointedly at Adam’s bag.
Smiling and shaking his head, Adam pulled a ripe peach out of his bag and held it out to her. Jenna snatched it and bit into it, the juice running down her chin.
“Merciful Maker,” she said. “We never get these in Delphi.”
“Save room,” Adam said. “I brought sugar cakes and wassail, too.”
“Wassail?” Jenna leaned forward, making no attempt to hide her excitement. “You brought wassail?”
The healer unwrapped another bundle to reveal fancy Solstice cakes, and set them next to her on the bed. Then he handed her the flask and a cup.
“Ah,” Jenna said. She expertly uncorked the flask with her teeth and poured, then wound her fingers about the cup and closed her eyes, breathing deeply. “Everybody makes wassail his own way. Cinnamon. Cloves. Hard cider.” She took a sip. “Rum,” she added.
“It’s strong,” he warned her.
“Good,” she said, and drained the cup. Adam stared at her as she picked up a sugar cake and bit off a corner.
“I’d go easy on that,” he said. “Poison and alcohol don’t mix.”
“I disagree,” Jenna said. “This is just what I need. My da owned a tavern. I used to make the wassail on Solstice, and on the Day of the Dead. He always said I made it best.” She paused, lost in wistful memory for a moment. When she focused in on Adam again, he seemed to be staring at her lips. Which made her stare at his, and wonder what it would be like to . . .
Stop it. You’ve probably got peach juice running down your chin and that’s why he’s staring. She mopped her sleeve across it, just in case. Now he probably thinks you were raised in a barn.
She refilled her cup, trying to cover her embarrassment. “Are you feeling better?”
“I am,” Adam said, taking a swallow from the flask. “It always takes a while to recover from a healing. Believe it or not, I’m faring better than usual, since I couldn’t use magic to heal you.”
Jenna frowned, confused. “Isn’t that what you did?”
“It’s a subtle difference. In most people, I can use magic to close up a wound or cure an infection or minimize pain—to treat disorder of whatever kind. In your case, that didn’t seem to work. But what I could do was remove the toxic magic that was causing damage, because that wasn’t part of you.” He paused, grimacing. “I’m sorry. Sometimes I don’t know when I’ve crossed the line from a conversation into a lecture.”
“No, it’s all very . . . interesting,” Jenna said. “You do seem like you’ve had a lot of practice, and some schooling, too, which surprises me. When I first met you, I took you for a soldier.”