“My only offer,” says North. “I keep secrets too. Lacing your drugs with dead magic is illegal within city limits. If there’s an outbreak, you’ll be blamed.”
Pressing his fingers to his chin, Solch studies North with narrowed eyes. North shifts his weight, coiled tight like Darjin before he springs after fireflies or field mice.
“My counter,” says Solch, lowering his hands with a smile. He enjoys this, haggling. “Gold, poison, and one of your tricky little spells.”
“I have no spells on me.”
“If there’s an outbreak,” says Solch, “will the good Lord Inichi blame me or the man who carried the poison into the city looking to sell? Think carefully before you answer that, your majesty.”
I look from one to the other, incredulous. North trusts this man with his true identity when that trust is bought and paid for? A man’s word is the worst bargain in the world. North’s lived too long in a monastery if he doesn’t know that simple tenet of survival.
Yet North actually considers the offer. “An ounce of clean magic,” he finally says.
Grinning, Solch jumps to his feet and extends his hand. His fingernails are cracked and stained yellow. “Agreed.”
North shakes his hand once, brief and perfunctory, not long enough for Solch to send any prying needles of interest into his skin to assess what magic lies beneath, or vice versa.
Glancing toward the bed with a frown of distaste, North pulls his coat off and lays it across the soiled coverlet before guiding me to sit. Solch drags his armchair closer, perched on the edge as he takes my poisoned arm in hand, turning it this way and that. His glasses slide down his nose, eyebrows furrowed.
“There’s no entry wound,” he says. He frowns up at North. “This is a simple transferred infection. Like hell you can’t do this yourself. What else is festering in there that you’d bring her to me?”
“I didn’t sell you answers,” North says, pacing behind him, arms folded across his chest. “Just take what you can and leave me the rest.”
“Performance trouble?” Solch arches an eyebrow with a wink to me. “I’ve got something that could help with that—”
“I didn’t ask for a medical assessment,” North cuts in.
Rolling his eyes, Solch pushes the chair back with his heels and crosses the room, picking through his cluttered work space. He hums beneath his breath, and when he returns to me with a piece of bleached bone, his breath washes over my face, sour and fetid.
“Good teeth,” he says with a glance at my mouth, wiping the bone against his shirt before he presses it to my arm. “I buy them a silver apiece if you’re interested.”
Once again, I look at North. Unspoken apology darkens his eyes as he rubs the back of his head, casting a longing look to the door.
Compared to North’s earlier efforts, Solch’s transference is clumsy, heavy handed. Rather than coax the threads of poison toward his buffer, he grabs them with a fist and tears. Agony shears up my arm and I fold forward in defense, grabbing onto the bed frame as the room spins around me.
Swearing, Solch presses harder, his glasses dangling from his nose, features strained with the effort. “There’s something . . . blocking. . . . What the hell is in there!?”
“You feel it too?” North steps forward, expectant. “It’s like she’s empty. You can’t read anything inside her.”
“It’s not working,” I say, jerking back, but Solch grabs my arm and doesn’t let go.
“We’ll just try harder,” he says.
Heat spreads up my neck, across my chest: The poison is spreading, inching toward my heart. The taste of metal floods my mouth, chased by something bitter, something viscous. I cry out and North immediately intervenes, pulling Solch off my arm. “Stop.”
Solch tears off his glasses as sweat rolls down the side of his face. The bone in his hand is still bleached white, though. Still clean.
It didn’t work.
“There’s something wicked hiding in there,” he says. “I can’t reach around it. Who infected her?”
North doesn’t volunteer his name or the story, and neither do I. Still clutching the bedpost, I tip too far forward, sliding to the matted carpet below. North steadies me with one hand and grabs a bowl containing an inch of oily soup with the other. I vomit, more bile and water than anything substantial. Blood and poison flock the rim of the bowl, red and black and undeniable.
The infection’s in my blood.
Tipping my head back against the mattress, I press my arm over my mouth and fight another rise of nausea. Flakes of skin peel loose from the motion and the smell is of dead horse in the farming terraces, left to fertilize the rocky soil.
“What did you drag in here?” Solch asks.
North rubs his mouth before dropping his hand. Defeated. “You can’t help her.”
“Nobody could, not like this, not with that, whatever it is in there. She needs new blood.”
“Would the blood take?” Not a question, a demand. Steady North is starting to fray, and any hope I had buried in the secret places of my heart starts to dim. They can’t stop it.
“It never has before,” says Solch.
I won’t become hellborne, I tell myself, stern and unflinching as I stare at the ceiling and fight back my tears. The ceiling is painted pink, with cracked plaster ivy and rosettes along the molding. Beautiful despite the decay, and yet, I crave the stars of North’s wagon.
Exhaling, North reaches into his pocket and drops three black stones and a smaller white one onto Solch’s worktable, along with several gold kronets. Bending, he hoists me to my feet and I jostle like a sack of bones. “Thank you,” he says tightly, always the gentleman.
“She’s dead, North,” Solch calls after us as North barrels me through the next room, past the ghost girl. “Put a knife through her heart before it goes sour, and then find some new skin to wear to bed.”
North’s anger darkens the already stilted air in the house. He shoulders my weight down the flight of stairs, wordlessly lifting me into his arms when I stumble and can no longer stand. He slams through the front doors ahead of the mute servant, into the humid air, sticky as a second skin. I curl into his chest, listening to the thunder of his heart as North kicks the gate open and moves into the street, turning both ways in a helpless waltz. His fingers tighten around my hip before his expression breaks and he sags back against the wall, sliding down until he’s seated on the ground and I’m cradled in his lap.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, staring ahead. “You’re going to die and I can’t stop it. I’ve only made it worse.”
The truth always hurts.
His legs give slightly across the slick cobblestones as pressure begins to mount in my chest. I feel my heartbeat slow to a crawl as it sucks in the last of my clean blood. Fear floods through me, a desperate need for another day, another hour, another moment to be alive. A tiny, cowardly voice offers my choices: If I die, so does Cadence, and Bryn wins everything. But if I let the poison into my heart and accept my fate, if I turned hellborne, maybe—
No, I think, fierce and absolute.