His hands twitch.
This can’t be from the blow to the head.
“Elias,” I say. “Did you get cut anywhere? Did the Commandant use a blade on you?”
He grabs his bicep. “Just a scratch. Nothing seriou—”
Understanding dawns in his eyes, and he turns to me, trying to form words. Before he can, he seizes once. Then he drops like a stone, unconscious. It doesn’t matter—I already know what he’s going to say.
The Commandant poisoned him.
His body is frighteningly still, and I grab his wrist, panicked at the erratic stutter of his pulse. Despite the sweat pouring off him, his body is cold, not fevered. Skies, is this why the Commandant let us go? Of course it is, Laia, you fool. She didn’t have to chase you or set an ambush. All she needed was to cut him—and the poison took care of the rest.
But it didn’t—at least not right away. My grandfather dealt with Scholars maimed by poisoned blades. Most died within an hour of being wounded. But it took several hours for Elias to even react to this poison.
She didn’t use enough. Or the cut wasn’t deep enough. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he still lives.
“Sorry,” he moans. I think at first that he is speaking to me, but his eyes remain shut. He puts up his hands, as if warding something off. “Didn’t want to. My order—should have—”
I tear off a piece of my cloak and stuff it in Elias’s mouth, lest he bite off his own tongue. The wound on his arm is shallow and hot. The moment I touch it, he thrashes, spooking the horse.
I dig through my pack with its vials of medicines and herbs, finally finding something with which to cleanse the wound. As soon as the cut is clean, Elias’s body grows slack and his face, rigid with pain, relaxes.
His breathing is still shallow, but at least he is not convulsing. His lashes are dark crescents against the gold skin of his face. He looks younger in sleep. Like the boy I danced with on the night of the Moon Festival.
I reach out a hand and place it against his jaw, rough with stubble, warm with life. It pours from him, this vitality—when he fights, when he rides. Even now, with his body battling poison, he throbs with it.
“Come on, Elias.” I lean over him, speaking into his ear. “Fight back. Wake up. Wake up.”
His eyes fly open, he spits out the gag, and I snatch my hand back from his face. Relief sweeps through me. Awake and injured is always better than unconscious and injured. Immediately, he lurches to his feet. Then he doubles over and dry-heaves.
“Lay down.” I push him to his knees and rub his broad back, the way Pop did with ill patients. Touch can heal more than herbs and poultices. “We have to figure out the poison so we can find an antidote.”
“Too late.” Elias relaxes into my hands for a moment before reaching for his canteen and drinking the contents down. When he finishes, his eyes are clearer, and he tries to stand. “Antidotes for most poisons need to be given within an hour. But if the poison were going to kill me, it would have already. Let’s get moving.”
“To where, exactly?” I demand. “The foothills? Where there are no cities or apothecaries? You’re poisoned, Elias. If an antidote won’t help, then you at least need medicine to treat the seizures, or you’ll be blacking out from here to Kauf,” I say. “Only you’ll die before we get there, because no one can survive such convulsions for long. So sit down and let me think.”
He stares at me in surprise and sits.
I pore over the year I spent with Pop as an apprentice healer. The memory of a little girl pops into my head. She had convulsions and fainting spells.
“Tellis extract,” I say. Pop gave the girl a drachm of it. Within a day, the symptoms eased. In two days, they stopped. “It will give your body a chance to fight the poison.”
Elias grimaces. “We could find it in Serra or Navium.”
Only we can’t go back to Serra, and Navium is in the opposite direction from Kauf.
“What about Raider’s Roost?” My stomach twists in dread at the idea. The giant rock is a lawless cesspit of society’s detritus—highwaymen, bounty hunters, and black market profiteers who know only the darkest corruption. Pop went there a few times to find rare herbs. Nan never slept while he was gone.
Elias nods. “Dangerous as the ten hells, but filled with people who wish to go as unnoticed as we do.”
He rises again, and while I’m impressed by his strength, I’m also horrified by the callous way he treats his body. He fumbles at the reins of the horse.
“Another seizure soon, Laia.” He taps the horse behind its left front leg. It sits. “Tie me on with rope. Head straight southeast.” He heaves himself into the saddle, listing dangerously to one side.
“I feel them coming,” he whispers.
I wheel about, expecting the hoofbeats of an Empire patrol, but all is silent. When I look back at Elias, his eyes are fixed on a point past my head. “Voices. Calling me back.”
Hallucinations. Another effect of the poison. I bind Elias to the stallion with rope from his pack, fill the canteens, and mount up. Elias slumps against my back, blacked out again. His smell, rain and spice, washes over me, and I take a steadying breath.
My sweat-damp fingers slide along the horse’s reins. As if the beast senses I know nothing about riding, it tosses its head and pulls at the bit. I wipe my hands on my shirt and tighten my grip.
“Don’t you dare, you nag,” I say to its rebellious snort. “It’s you and me for the next few days, so you better listen to what I say.” I give the horse a light kick, and to my relief, it trots forward. We turn southeast, and I dig my heels deeper. Then we are away, into the night.
Voices surround me, quiet murmurs that remind me of a Tribal camp awakening: the whispers of men soothing horses and children kindling breakfast fires.
I open my eyes, expecting the sunshine of the Tribal desert, unabashedly bright, even at dawn. Instead, I stare up at a canopy of trees. The murmuring grows muted, and the air is weighty with the green scents of pine needles and moss-softened bark. It’s dark, but I can make out the pitted trunks of great trees, some as wide as houses. Beyond the branches above, snatches of blue sky darken swiftly to gray, as if a storm approaches.
Something darts through the trees, disappearing when I turn. The leaves rustle, whispering like a battlefield of ghosts. The murmurs I heard rise and fade, rise and fade.
I stand. Though I expect pain to shoot through every limb, I feel nothing. The absence of pain is strange—and wrong.
Wherever I am, I shouldn’t be here. I should be with Laia, headed toward Raider’s Roost. I should be awake, fighting the Commandant’s poison. On instinct, I reach back for my scims. They aren’t there.
“No heads to lop off in the ghost world, you murdering bastard.”
I know that voice, though I’ve rarely heard it so heavily laced with vitriol.
“Tristas?”
My friend appears as he did in life, hair dark as pitch, the tattoo of his beloved’s name standing out in sharp relief against his pale skin. Aelia. He looks nothing like a ghost. But he must be. I saw him die in the Third Trial, on the end of Dex’s scim.
He doesn’t feel like a ghost either—something I realize with abrupt violence when, after considering me for a moment, he slams his