Sava whimpers. The poisoned lines across her face begin to unravel, brightening from the color of smoke to the color of freshly turned ash as it works down her throat, into her arm, collecting at the base of the stone. Fat tears roll down her cheeks and pool in her hair.
After a moment, North pulls away with a wrench of breath and I catch a glimpse of the rock, now black as night, and his fingertips, dark as charcoal. He quickly exchanges the stone for a second, knocking the others off the edge of the table with a clumsy sweep of his wrist. He flinches, eyes meeting mine with a flash of humiliation before he presses the new stone to Sava’s arm, balancing it with his palm as his fingers have become too swollen to bend. It too turns black within seconds and North recoils, dropping the stone to the table. It misses the edge and hits the floor, not with a rattle as expected, but with a dead weight that sounds leaden.
Pale, North tries to run a hand through his hair but falters, tucking the hand under his arm instead. He’s shaking. “She needs rest,” he says, not looking at anyone in particular. “Don’t take her home by horse, not tonight.” He reaches for the cup of water I poured but pain tightens across his face; the cup tips precariously under his fingers.
“We’ll just rinse it out and you’re all set,” I say, jumping in, taking over. After a moment, North nods me once in the right direction, keeping close watch as I quickly rinse the scratch and wipe it dry.
“If the symptoms return,” he says, “she’ll need to be excised again.”
“Will they return?” her father asks.
“It’s already in her blood,” says North. “Some people can fight a smaller infection. Others can’t. If it reaches her heart—”
Sava’s father makes a short bark of terror at the back of his throat.
“Siphoning the infection as needed will help,” North adds, his voice a bland, hollow monotone, “although you face the risk of the body building an immunity to the process. Each time will be harder than the last. If the infection takes root again, she’ll need a full blood transfusion.”
“Nobody’s ever survived a full transfusion,” her father says.
North stares at the floor, still cradling his hand under his arm. Muscles tense beneath his shirt sleeve, tightening along the side of his neck. “Don’t eat anything with mold or black spotting,” he says in that same hollow voice. “Boil any drinking water within a mile of the Burn.”
“Our home is within a mile of the Burn,” the man interrupts with a flash of anger. “Our entire village—”
“Leave.” North lifts his head. “Take your daughter and go somewhere safe.”
The air thickens, like the charge before a thunderstorm. “Where?” the man asks at last. “Merlock didn’t leave us anywhere else to go. When is Corbin going to start fighting for his people instead of relying on boys to do it for him!?”
North dips his chin again. Hair falls forward across his forehead, and he looks impossibly young. “One of the cities,” he mumbles. “Revnik or New Prevast. Mannon still has some defense left in the south.”
Grunting with scorn, the man digs through his pocket and I look away, embarrassed at the telltale click of coins.
“I don’t want your money,” says North.
“I pay my debts,” the man says tightly.
“Up you go,” I whisper to Sava, leaving them to argue. She’s a familiar weight pressed in my arms and I pretend like she’s Cadence even though Cadence hasn’t let me hold her like this since she declared herself a soldier—not realizing that even soldiers still needed to be held. Smoothing her hair back with one hand, I surreptitiously drop a kiss on top of her head, blushing when I catch North watching me.
The man offers a final, curt nod of acknowledgment before taking Sava in his arms. She blinks up at North, her eyes not as dim as before, her features not so sallow. A tiny fist reaches toward him, expectant.
North’s shoulders sag and he offers his hand. She tilts a glass button in his palm, the color of the lake outside. It’s a treasure to her and he stares at it, his entire body rigid. When Sava and her father duck out of the wagon, North follows at a distance and stands, framed in the doorway with his back to me.
Peeling off his gloves, I lay them across the table before running my hands through my hair.
“Please don’t do that to me again,” he says, back still to me.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I just thought—after what Tobek said, that you healed him, maybe you could—”
“What? Maybe I could heal her!?” He rounds on me, eyes flashing, his features contorted with pain. “I could have! I have the magic, Miss Locke. I have the ability! I could have healed her, but then word would get out that North has clean magic and a weak heart and he’ll help whoever comes to his door with a story!” He slams his hand on the wall, rattling the door. “Have you not heard anything I’ve told you!? Magic doesn’t come easy in Avinea and it doesn’t come cheap! I don’t have the resources, I—I can’t save everyone! To pick and choose who lives or dies is cruel!”
“She’s only a child.”
“That doesn’t matter!”
I recoil as a strange, stifling silence falls between us. North rubs his mouth before he growls, hurling Sava’s button across the room. It hits the far wall and bounces back on the top bunk, lost in the coverlet. Shaking his head, he sags in the stairwell, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes. “Saving that little girl doesn’t help anyone.”
Tears burn the back of my throat and I stare past him, toward the lake through the open doorway. “She ate poisoned berries,” I say tightly. “She wasn’t an addict, North. She didn’t go looking for a high. She was innocent—”
“It is selfish to sacrifice the whole to save a few.”
I look away, fingers tented on the edge of the table. Iron, I tell myself. Be strong, impenetrable, callous. Cadence. Nothing else matters. No one else matters. I pegged him for a mercenary long before I considered him a friend, and this only proves it.
“I’m sorry,” I say, voice cracking. “I assumed you would have wanted to help. I won’t make that mistake again.”
The floorboards crack as North moves toward me, stopping only inches away. Swallowing hard, he rakes back his sleeve. Charcoal lines seep past the barrier of his protection spell, like tiny breaks of lightning casting shadows beneath his skin. They inch toward his hands, spreading. All at once, the jars of black rocks that line the wagon make sense.
He’s infected.
“Skin is a conductor,” he says, holding my eyes, his expression fierce, unapologetic, “and the poison inside me wants to spread. I can hold it back with spells, try to bury it, excise it whenever it gets too bad, but any time I transfer magic, even through a buffer, the infection feeds off that power and moves deeper. Using magic is killing me, Miss Locke. And every time it gets harder and harder, and one of these days, the poison is going to reach my heart and I won’t be able to stop it.”
And I need these hands to conquer the world, I think suddenly, with a twist of guilt. Every night North laid down a perimeter of stone and forced a spell through them even though it had to hurt him to do it, just to keep us safe.