“You’re not going to die,” she says, like she read my mind, though I suppose it’s a common question when the specter is flipped. “Death reversed is a transformation. A new life, or a new view on the one you have.” She peels my last card from the deck without looking at it and sets it so it overlaps with the King of Cups. The King of Wands. The two drawings seem to look at each other, their eyes turned inward.
She doesn’t explain the second king. Just stares at the pair with a scrutiny that deepens the wrinkles in her forehead. “In the east,” she says after a time, her gaze still downcast, “there is a tradition known as kintsukuroi. It is the practice of mending broken ceramic pottery using lacquer dusted with gold and silver and other precious metals. It is meant to symbolize that things can be more beautiful for having been broken.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.
At last she looks up at me. Her irises are polished obsidian in the moonlight. “Because I want you to know,” she says, “that there is life after survival.”
I don’t know what to say to that. My throat feels suddenly swollen, so I simply nod.
Ernesta gathers up her cards and leaves me alone to mull the reading while I drink some sharp-edged spirits Pascal gave me that’s so acidic it’s likely meant to be medicinal. I tip my head back against the railing and look up at the stars. A firefly drifts from the bank of the river and lands on my knee, throbbing golden like it fell from the sky.
Someone sits beside me, and when I look over, there’s Percy, his shoulder right up against mine. He pulls his knees up to his chest, a little stiff, like he’s still hurting, then glances over at me with his chin tucked. His lashes cast spiderwebs upon his cheeks.
“How are you feeling?” I ask, before the silence has a chance to turn uncomfortable or I say something infinitely stupider.
One of his hands strays absently to the spot on his arm where the fleam went in for the bloodletting. “Better.”
“Good. That’s . . . good.” My own hand slips into my pocket and closes around the alchemical puzzle box. The dials shuffle beneath my fingertips. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
He looks over at me. “I don’t want you to fight with me either.”
I laugh—a short, sincere burst that catches even me off guard—and the moment feels so adjacent to ordinary that I loosen. Or maybe that’s the spirits, though I haven’t had much. I hold the bottle out to him. “Do you want a drink?” He shakes his head. I take another swallow for courage, but all I can think of is, Percy is ill, Percy is going to an asylum at the end of this Tour, and he didn’t trust you enough to tell you so.
“I think we should go to Barcelona,” I say before I’ve really thought it out.
“You want to return the box?”
“Well, yes, but I was thinking about what Felicity said, and the grandmothers, about Mateu Robles. If he does work with alchemy and healing and . . . whatever that other word was.”
“Panacea.”
“Yes. That.”
He’s there before I have to explain the rest of my reasoning. “I’ve tried alchemical treatments before.”
“What if this is different? He may be able to cure you. I think it’s daft not to try, at least.”
“Monty, I’ve been promised so many cures by so many doctors—”
“But if you can find a way to be rid of your . . . illness, you won’t have to go to Holland. You can come home with me. We can go back.”
He scrapes at his bottom lip with his teeth, staring up at the stars, and I can’t fathom why he isn’t meeting me with an enthusiastic yes yes yes let’s go to Barcelona and find someone who can make me well and keep me from an asylum. “I’d rather . . .” He trails off, pressing his thumb into his chin.
“Please,” I say. His strange silence is feeding my desperation. Let me help you! I want to shout at him. I have failed you on this front for years without knowing it, so let me help you now! “What do we have to lose?”
Before he can reply, Felicity slides down on my other side, her skirts puffed for a moment before they settle on the planking. “So,” she says, like we’re in the middle of a conversation already, “tomorrow we begin the search for Lockwood. Or at least attempt to secure some sort of lodging. If we can show them a promise from the bank, even if we can’t withdraw actual funds—”
“I think we should go to Barcelona,” I interrupt.
Felicity pivots to face me, executing an eyebrow arch so precise it looks penciled on. “Excuse me?”
“Apparently it’s very important this box is returned.”
“And how will we travel? We’ve no supplies and no transport and no money.”
“We could try and get to some of Father’s.”
Felicity is already shaking her head. “No, absolutely not. We’ve nothing to do with this box or the Robleses or any of it. We need to find our company and see that the box is returned to the king.”
“It doesn’t belong to the king,” I say.
“Yes, but there’s probably a good reason he had it. Perhaps it was given to him.”
“Why give something to him in a box he couldn’t open? What sort of bastard does that? He stole the box and we should return it to its owner. And if we return it to Mateu Robles, we’ll be rid of it. Get the duke off our tail—we’re no good to him if we haven’t got it. Besides, if we find Lockwood now, we’ll be made to go home.”
“Perhaps not,” she says. “You made rather a mess of yourself at Versailles, but if we rejoin him here, he might be so impressed by our resourcefulness and so glad we survived the highwaymen that he’ll let you carry on. Which will absolutely not happen if we go gallivanting to Spain alone. That’s going to put you on his not list for certain.”
I hadn’t considered that. Bolting naked from the French palace seems like something my father might consider a permanent black mark upon my record—good news for the Goblin—but if Lockwood would consent to let us keep traveling, going home at the end of the allotted year with Versailles as a small side note to an otherwise successful Tour would significantly bolster my chances of holding on to my inheritance as opposed to being sent home because of it. Or at least I could work the look at the horrors we went through please don’t disinherit me after such an ordeal angle.
But traveling for the rest of the year isn’t going to do a damn thing for Percy. He’d still be heading off to Holland at the end of it.
“The man who owns this box is an alchemist,” I say. “And if he studies the cure-all side of it, like you heard at that lecture, he might know something that could help cure Percy. If we take him his box, maybe we could trade it for that information.”
Her brow knits, and she looks to Percy. “Is that what you want?”
Percy has this thumb to his mouth, chewing at the pad like he’s thinking hard. My heart seizes up a bit, mostly from the frustration that he isn’t entirely on my side about this. But then he says, “I think Monty’s right—we should take the box to Mateu Robles. It belongs to him.”
I nearly throw my arms around him at those words, but instead I turn to my sister. “If you don’t want to come, we’d be happy to drop you at the school. Term hasn’t started yet—you won’t even miss the first day of your social conversation class.”