The queen is already there when we arrive, and I take a moment to scan the strange cellar that’s obviously been converted into a workspace.

It’s plenty like the queen’s, just darker and danker, and the vials are stained rather than pristine.

“Is your laboratory indisposed?” I ask, as this seems to me the only logical explanation for why the queen would want to meet down here.

Except now that I look at her, she’s not dressed for potion making. Instead of her usual black robes, she’s dressed in a dining gown, one with opals lining the collar and sleeves.

“My dear,” she explains in a tone that sounds suspiciously like someone trying to frame horrible news in a way that sounds like it’s a good thing, “I’m afraid that my duties as queen are devouring my time, and I would hardly want your apprenticeship to suffer for it. In the meantime, Gunter will be taking over your studies.”

There’s a faerie tied to the dais in the center of the cell. He has deep indigo eyes and scales that frame each side of his neck.

Gunter says the faerie’s a prisoner of the queen. That he was caught swindling elderly residents of Ermengarde, selling them sham potions for their ailments that ended up killing several.

I think he tells me this so that when I’m made to peel the scales from the male’s flesh while he screams, I won’t cry.

I cry anyway.

Gunter seems displeased with having me as an apprentice. Most of the time, he grunts at me rather than giving me instruction, but the few instructions he does give are more helpful than the queen’s. There are moments when he’s helping me deconstruct one of the queen’s potions where I almost forget I’m a prisoner, but then I remember I’ve forgotten my family, and it twists my stomach all in knots, and my stomach can’t handle any more knots. Not when the faerie we’ve been experimenting on keeps begging me not to take another scale. I do anyway, and when the scale comes free from his flesh, it leaves a gaping hole, out of which pours a stream of dark blood.

It takes me and Gunter an hour of compressing the wound to make the bleeding stop.

There’s another knot in my stomach today. When I entered the cell this morning, the faerie wasn’t begging and panting like he normally does. Gunter says he died during the night, and when I ask if he bled to death, Gunter doesn’t answer.

I start planning a way to escape.

CHAPTER 16

NOX

“What do you mean we won’t be monitoring the subject overnight?”

I grit my teeth, not so much with agitation at Gunter—I get why he’s annoyed, I get it to my very bones.

Gunter is a man of science, a man who lives by his processes. He does nothing on whim, nothing without carefully measured forethought.

I’m convinced that Gunter has feelings, but it took years of deciphering his grunts to pick out which ones he was experiencing in any given moment.

I know he’s taught me better than this. Better than to let emotion get in the way of progress. It’s why we’ve managed to reverse-engineer hundreds of the queen’s potions. Why we’ve been able to sit through the screams of the queen’s prisoners, why we haven’t gone mad yet.

Because we do nothing without forethought.

Well, Gunter does nothing without forethought. I do nothing without forethought as long as my stomach is full of blood.

“I promised her,” is all I can bear to answer as Gunter stares me down, an incredulous look twisting his features.

“You promised her?” He huffs, the kind that means, You and I both know your promises are as good as a human’s.

His unspoken words sting, though he doesn’t mean for them to. Gunter is as blunt as a battle-ax used to fell an acre of forest. When he speaks, or huffs, as the case may be, it is only to express what he feels is already obvious.

“I might not be bound by the fae curse any longer, but that doesn’t make my vows worthless,” I say, running my fingers through my hair.

We’re in Gunter’s bedroom. It’s a rather overwhelming place—the male burns enough incense to fund the entire trade—and I don’t particularly like to come here often. There are grimoires and scrolls stacked in heaps on the floor, the type that Gunter claims he can find anything in.

I’ve yet to prove him wrong on that front, but I don’t have to like it. The mess in the library is about as much as I can tolerate, and Gunter’s room is much worse.

There’s a spinning wheel in the corner, one that belonged to Gunter’s mother. The mother he never speaks of.

But he keeps her spinning wheel in pristine condition, and he works on it late into the evening. Not a night passes when he doesn’t spin thread on it. I wonder sometimes if he does it to feel connected to her, or if he does it for me. If the tapestries are Gunter’s silent apology for the life I’ve lost.

I don’t have the heart to tell him I despise the tapestries. That I can’t stand to give them any more than passing glances when my path crosses them in the hall.

“Of course not. Of course not,” Gunter says by way of apologizing for accidentally implying that I’m a liar by nature. “But vow or not, you must break this one.”

I close my eyes and take a breath. How in Alondria I’m going to convince Gunter not to go anywhere near the parasite tonight, I have no idea. Now that I’m here, I can’t imagine why I thought this would ever work. But then an image of Blaise flashes before my closed eyes—one of her rocking and shaking and muttering, her eyes glazed over and far, far away—and I know I must.

“Blaise is under the impression the parasite is the devious sort and will trick us into a dangerous bargain.”

Gunter narrows his eyes over his spectacles. “Well, then we shall agree to consider her bargain over the span of the next mooncycle, to provide time for consideration and insight. And to receive Blaise’s input on the matter.”

I exhale. It’s not a bad idea, but it’s still not anything Blaise will be comfortable with. “She also expressed concern that the parasite has the ability to sway minds, especially the minds of males.”

Gunter laughs, actually laughs, and even his belly shakes. “I can guarantee you, there is no such magical power that exists. We shall avert our eyes from whatever form she takes if we must, but I, for one, am not concerned.”

I rub at my temples, my headache returning with full force. When I take a swig of blood from the flask on my belt, a bit of the pain subsides. “Gunter, please. We have to find another way.”

Gunter cocks a brow at me. “I can think of no better way to ascertain information about the nature of this creature than to interview it ourselves.”

I lean back against the wall and tilt my head backward, chewing against the inside of my cheek, mulling over my words. “I think…I think something might have happened to her.”

“Of course something’s happened to her, my boy. She’s been infested with an ancient form of evil magic, tossed into prison by the male she adored, kidnapped from the aforementioned jail, and locked up and tortured in the basement of a foreign queen’s castle.”

“I don’t mean any of that. I mean, I think something happened to her that causes her to panic at the idea of being alone in a room with males during a time in which she has no control, no idea of what’s happening to her body.”

Gunter just stares at me for a moment, and in the moment our eyes lock, I know we’re thinking of the same event. The event we’ve never discussed. The secret we’ll both take to our graves, should we abandon our immortality by being subjected to violent deaths.

It happened several years ago, when I was thirteen, shortly after I arrived at the castle. At Gunter’s command, I was working on perfecting an antidote for any poisons using wormwood as their base. There had been a rattling at the door, and I’d assumed it to be Gunter—because who else would it have been—when none other but the King of Mystral had strode into our workroom cell.

It had taken only a few short words to recognize that the king was delighted to find me alone.

An alarm had sounded in the back of my mind—my mother had warned me at an early age of what some twisted adults might try to do if they ever caught me by myself.

I’d tried to excuse myself, but the king had blocked my path on the way to the door, resting his hand upon my shoulder and snaking his fingers up my collarbone, caressing my neck.

His touch had been slick and clammy, and the thought of it—the thought of what could have occurred had Gunter not arrived that moment—still haunts me.

But Gunter had arrived, and he’d barreled into the workroom as if on a mission, though he didn’t dare acknowledge what he had just witnessed. Instead, he launched into a drawn-out explanation of the necessity for better trade relations with Charshon in order to obtain the flax he needed for his thread.

The king had clearly been disgruntled, but Gunter had paid him no mind.