Hamon watched Daleina drift back to sleep and tried to convince himself it was normal sleepiness. He didn’t make a habit of lying to himself, though, not about medical matters. She’d had another blackout only this morning—not a complete “false death,” but she’d lost consciousness for seven seconds. The nearby spirits hadn’t reacted, which meant she hadn’t died either in a false or true sense, but her heart rate had slowed, and she had gasped for air when she woke. It wasn’t surprising it was wearing her down.
He knew precious little about cases of early onset. Ordinary cases were rare enough. It cropped up in families, but often skipped generations, and it tended to strike the elderly, whose bodies were already failing. His former teacher, Master Popol, had waxed on about it once—said it was a mistake in the brain, an interruption between mind and body, a failure of communication, and the fact of its existence had bothered the loquacious healer so much that he took it as a personal affront. Communication between body and mind shouldn’t fail, any more than communication between healer and patient, and then his teacher had moved on to discussing how best to cultivate trust between healer and patient. Calmness helped, and Hamon was trying his best to stay calm. Honesty was important, and he hadn’t lied to Daleina about her sickness, but equally important was knowledge. A healer, Popol was fond of saying, should be a fountain of facts, and Hamon wasn’t, at least not with regard to this illness.
I can fix that, he thought.
Seating himself by the window, he lit a firemoss lantern, squeezing the moss to wake its light and adjusting the shutters on the lantern so its light fell only on him, not on his sleeping queen. He then pulled a stack of blank paper from his pack and began to write. He’d say he was conducting research, in attempt to apply for admittance to the university. He’d claim he wanted to transition from healer to scientist, and his chosen topic was the False Death, but first he wanted to glean the accumulated wisdom of his illustrious future colleagues—yes, praise them, make them feel special, flatter their wisdom and knowledge. He could play the humble scholar. Seeking out more parchment, he decided he wouldn’t limit himself to the healers and scholars of Aratay. He’d reach out to those in Semo and Chell, even as far away as Belene and Elhim. Someone, somewhere, may have a scrap of information that would help Daleina. He addressed each letter just as carefully, sealed them with his own personal seal, and tied each with a ribbon of healer blue.
As the dawn bells rung, he summoned a caretaker to the queen’s door and handed the stack of letters to him with strict instructions to send them with utmost speed. While he waited for replies, he’d delve into the hospital’s library—there could be case studies that were relevant—and talk to everyone with any scrap of knowledge . . .
Everyone? he asked himself.
“You’re doing it again,” Daleina said. She’d gotten out of bed and was washing her face in a basin. She met his eyes in the mirror. She looked like her usual beautiful self, albeit with a bruiselike darkness under her eyes and a crease on her cheek from the folds of her pillow.
“Doing what?”
“Worrying so much that you’re nearly vibrating. It won’t matter how good a liar I am if anyone can read my condition off you without even knowing you.” She sounded so calm and reasonable. He didn’t know how she did it. Except that he used to be able to do it with every patient he ever had—detach himself, see the symptoms as separate from the person, project an air of soothing calmness. He’d worked hard to develop that air. It’s harder when the patient is Daleina, he thought.
“Did I ever tell you why I became a healer?” he asked.
“Your father died, and you couldn’t save him,” Daleina said immediately.
He blinked, surprised she remembered that story. He’d only told her once, and she’d never repeated it or asked any questions. It had been a highly edited version of the truth—he’d said his father had been ill, and he hadn’t been able to heal him. “Yes. And it was my mother who killed him.” That wasn’t a detail he mentioned often to anyone. Or ever.
He saw Daleina flinch—he’d shocked her. He’d known he would. Compassion welled up in her eyes, her beautiful eyes, and he looked away and forced himself to continue: “She slipped bloodwood into his dinners—he always had a roast pork sandwich, and she cured it with salt and bloodwood. Never let me have any and only ate a little herself, though in retrospect I think she must have regurgitated it afterward to avoid any symptoms. When I asked her about it, later, she said she was merely helping nature along. He’d been complaining of pains in his legs, she said. That’s it. Just pains, the ordinary stiffness that you’d develop from a life of high-altitude tree cutting, the kind that could be eased with a soak in hot water. She had no other reason, even claimed to love him, though I doubt she has the ability to love anyone.”
Daleina was quiet for a moment. “How old were you?”
“Eight.”
“And that’s when you left?”
He heard the sympathy in her voice and wished he could wrap it around him like a cloak, but he didn’t deserve it. “No, that’s when she accelerated my lessons, teaching me about plants and herbs and poisons. I left when I was twelve, after she used me to kill our neighbor, an elderly man whose snoring kept my mother awake at night.”
Glancing at Daleina, he expected to see sympathy mutate into revulsion in her eyes—he’d confessed to murdering a helpless old man—but instead there was only more pity, which wasn’t better. He looked away from her at the tapestries that filled her walls with rich greens, golds, and blues. “Hamon?” Her voice was gentle. “Why are you telling me this?”
“That’s how I knew about glory vines . . . and about nightend berries,” he said. Daleina flinched at the mention of the berries that had ended her predecessor’s life. “She knew—knows—about all sorts of obscure plants and their uses, mainly because she doesn’t feel bound by any ethics when it comes to experimentation. She may—and this is very much only a dim possibility—have some shred of knowledge that could help you.”
Suddenly, Daleina’s eyes widened, and he knew she had leaped to guess where his thoughts had taken him. “You want to ask her about the False Death.”