But, I counter, and it is tantalizing in its possibilities.
Grabbing the front of North’s shirt, I force my eyes open. “I’ll make you an offer,” I say.
He stares down at me. “What?”
“Anything you want in exchange for a spell.”
“A spell,” he repeats with a frown. “What kind of spell would you—?” Understanding dawns over him and he blanches as he shakes his head. “No. No! Absolutely not.”
“I saw you do it to the hellborne.”
“No.”
Taking his hand, I press it against my heart so he can feel the way it shudders in my chest. “The gods love sacrifice,” I say.
He stares at his hand beneath my own before his fingers slide more firmly through mine. “There’s another option,” he says, hoarse and uneven. He wets his lips. “It . . . it would stop your heart instantly. No pain.”
“Thank you.”
“Faris.” There’s a story framed in his mouth, a beginning, a middle, but no end, not for me. My fingertips skim the slope of his jaw and I force a smile.
“Ask for something in return,” I say.
North touches his forehead to mine and briefly closes his eyes. “An ounce of your strength,” he says.
“It’s yours,” I say, and he returns my smile with a tremulous one of his own.
“Cadence will live in the palace,” he says. “She’ll grow up, Faris. I promise.”
I nod, fighting a spate of tears, an overwhelming sense of envy for the life Cadence will have that I’ll never see. The life North will have. “She’ll fall in love with you,” I say. “But don’t give her a sword until she earns it.”
He chokes on a laugh before nodding tightly, sliding his hand free of mine. He fumbles through his pockets and retrieves a stone laced with magic before, with shivery softness, he peels back the collar of my dress.
“What is this?” he asks, tracing my scar with his thumb.
“Darjin the Second,” I joke, closing my eyes. “My mother’s greatest legacy.”
North’s weight shifts around me; his hand turns steady and his breathing evens out. When he presses harder against the serrated teeth of my scar, the scar bites back, sharp and familiar.
“There’s something in there,” he says.
I open my eyes just as the door slams open behind us. Solch swings through the gate with a screech, the bowl of soup and vomit clutched in one hand. North twists to see him, expression fraught with unasked questions.
“Iron,” says Solch, and he grins.
Twenty-Two
THROUGH THE GARDEN AND BACK inside, into pale light and sour air. Thirteen steps and through two doors before North lays me on the bed and I finally melt like water. Eyes closed, I press back against the tatty pillow that smells of sweat and darker things. I’m hot, I’m cold, I’m sick, I’m dying.
I’m not dead yet.
“Miss Locke.” North presses a hand to my forehead, his thumb rubbing the line of my brow. “Look at me.”
It takes me an hour to turn my head, another minute to meet his eyes. My heart beats slow and onerous, overworked; my words come out like graying flower petals on a windowsill. “Miss Locke again?” I ask.
North rolls his shirtsleeves higher, past his elbows and the spells inked there, and kneels beside the bed. At some unspoken order, Solch hands him a scalpel and North hesitates, the tendons in his arms corded like rope. His fingers curl through my hair and he’s a whisper at my ear, coarse and uneven. “Faris always,” he says.
My mouth dries out, starchy with the taste of fear, of desire. I want him. A greed unlike any I’ve ever felt before, fringed with dark, sulfurous thoughts: I need him. The poison responds with a roar of agreement.
North presses his thumb to the scar above my breast and I feel the pressure of his magic threading through me, tentative and searching.
“If you’re wrong,” he says over his shoulder.
“She’s dead anyway,” Solch says, his eyes on me.
Taking a deep breath, North flattens his palm against my shoulder, pinning me to the bed, and I know this moment. The way the light flashes on the blade of the scalpel, the way my heart lurches with fear. The way I lie so powerless beneath the hand of someone I know, someone I trust.
This is how good-bye begins.
? ? ?
I don’t know this place.
I stand, a shadow in a sea of light. Masked faces swing and smile past, ball gowns from a different time. Oddly colored hair totters high and higher, frosted pinks and pastel blues. The people who pass are bright and pretty things, dressed in colored fabrics that shine in the flickering light of the chandeliers.
A brooding man sits on a throne, a fist pressed against his mouth as he watches the party with disinterest. Women bow in invitation, but his eyes lock on me, on the poisonous weed in his garden of flowers. Shifting his weight, he lifts his head and his hand unfurls, summoning me closer.
Music eddies around me. When I reach the dais of the throne, I hesitate before I kneel, bowing my head, exposing my neck: a gesture of subservience to my king.
“Your majesty,” I say slowly, fighting the words, like wading through the thick bog outside Brindaigel. My words turn to salt and scrape my lips ragged.
“Look at all the liars and thieves,” Merlock says.
Frowning, I turn to the hall that stretches like a mausoleum at my back. The colors have bled from the dancers, turning them into vapor, skeletons in ribbons of rotting flesh. Their dancing turns frantic. Tiles crack beneath their feet and the walls rattle loose with the music. Marble falls from the ceiling and the glass roof shatters, while outside a fire blazes brighter than the stars.
I look back to Merlock and realize it’s actually North who sits withered and broken, crumbling beneath the weight of his crown. A hole gapes in his chest where his heart should have been, the wound ringed with poison.
“Faris,” he says, “I can’t save you.”
I bolt awake, into North’s waiting arms. He cradles my head against his shoulder, fingers digging into my back as he repeats my name like a promise. In the weepy, muddy light, my nightmare clings, sticky and terrifying. Memories begin to return, replacing the fear: Revnik, Solch, ever North at my door.
North. Closing my eyes, I strain toward the gentle pressure of his touch, the soft heat of his body, the way he’s barely there and yet everywhere, a charge of energy that snaps across my skin like lightning.
“Slowly,” North murmurs, holding me tight.
I pull back, in time to see the remorse flicker across his face before his expression turns impassive. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
He lowers his head, arms unfurling around me. “The infection got into your blood,” he says at last. “I excised as much as I could, but you’re still poisoned. I—I can’t remove it completely. There’s a possibility that your body will fight off what’s left, but . . .”
But there’s a possibility that I’ll always have dead magic hiding in my veins, ready to swell like a rising tide to flood my heart and turn me hellborne.
Guilt colors his voice. “I’m so sorry,” he whispers. “I took a vow to serve my kingdom and in a moment of weakness, I—”