What have I done?
Horror hollows out my chest. What have I done?
Blaise’s neck jerks, and I hardly have time to place my palm behind it before she slams her head against the floor.
For not the first time in my life, I’m struck immobile. I have no idea what to do.
Always have an antidote in mind for any potion you create. Gunter’s words, uttered so many times in my apprenticeship they seem permanently etched into the crevices of my brain, echo like an iron gavel in my mind.
Only once have I ever ignored that warning.
Only once.
That should have been enough to learn my lesson.
The dungeon door slams against the wall as Gunter comes barreling in. He’s out of breath from his run down the stairs, but he’s here.
His beady eyes go wide. “What have you done?”
I have no answer for that. My mouth just fumbles around for words like a fish tossed upon the frozen surface of the lake from which it was wrenched.
Gunter rushes to Blaise’s side and sticks a pair of fingers to her neck, searching for her pulse. “Alive,” he murmurs, though almost to himself. His gaze fixes on the white froth pouring from her mouth and again he asks what have you done, though not in the same words. This time he’s more technical about it and asks what Blaise was exposed to.
I rattle off the ingredients of the concoction that was supposed to save Blaise, not kill her.
Gunter’s forehead furrows. “You used her own hair for the sacrifice?”
Something like confirmation stumbles from my lips, but I can hardly hear it over the pounding in my head.
“And the antidote?”
“I didn’t prepare one.”
Gunter blinks—just once—but it’s enough to condemn me.
“Out,” he says, and when my heart stutters at the word and I open my mouth to protest, he explains, “The antidote will require her blood.”
I swallow and nod, brushing Blaise’s sweat-soaked hair off her forehead before leaving her on the cold stone floor, while Gunter rises to the counter to prepare the antidote.
By the time I’ve ascended the stairs and removed myself to the farthest end of the castle, lest I scent Blaise’s blood again, the white has consumed my vision.
CHAPTER 21
NOX: AGE TWELVE
I recognize too late the signs that I am dying: my blue fingertips concealed by my gloves, the evidence of the lack of blood flow to my toes obscured by my soggy boots.
Fae are not simple creatures to kill.
But my adolescent body is not equipped to handle this weather as it might in full maturity.
When I stumble to my knees, the pads of my wool trousers smacking against the crusty outer layer of snow, it is not by choice.
My legs aren’t listening to me anymore.
Neither is my heart, which despite my exhortation, has slowed to a rate I can barely sense, even when I press my fingers to the notch below my jaw.
But I can’t feel my fingers either, so perhaps that’s the problem.
The sun is at its peak when I fall, its gentle rays caressing the hairs on the back of my neck. Like the way my mother might stroke her fingers through the hair at the nape of my neck when she’s feeling especially affectionate.
I won’t feel her do that again, and I know it’s irrational—childish, something I should have grown out of by now, but I’m angry at the sun for shining its light today. For giving me hope. For deceiving me.
Because though the sun looks down upon me, it chooses not to warm me, and I am going to die.
I feel that twelve is an unrighteous age to die, especially since it’s my birthday.
When I snuck out of the castle this morning through a burrow I’ve been digging for weeks underneath the relatively abandoned south wall, I did not know this would be my last day on this side of the sun.
The Serpentine is only a few paces away. I’ve been skirting along the outskirts of its winding path, figuring the road is exactly where the queen will send her search party once she realizes I’m gone.
It’s still the fastest way back home, so I’ve been following it from a distance. Besides, it’s allowed me to keep an eye out for the queen’s entourage. I figure the simplest way to keep my family out of trouble for my disappearance is for them to be unaware of my escape by the time the queen’s soldiers question them.
So it’s better if the soldiers make it to my home before I do.
Then I can wait until they’re certain of my family’s innocence before I reveal myself to my parents and sister.
At least, that was the plan when I believed I would make it all the way back to Otho alive.
But now my limbs ache—down to the very bones—and I know it will not be long before the aching fades to numbness fades to the shadow of death.
I don’t think I’d mind so much if I didn’t have to imagine Father’s face—sunken with grief—when they tell him what became of me. If I couldn’t hear Mama and Zora’s screams, reaching out to me from the future, stretching themselves across time to reach my frozen ears.
When even my knees can no longer support my weight, I make sure to fall backward. At least then I’ll die with the sun on my face. Indeed, as my heart drags itself upward to knock against my chest for what must be one of the last times, the sun brushes my forehead with its rays, and I decide to forgive it for not saving me.
Then I succumb to the darkness and feel nothing for a long while.
Someone is murmuring above me, stroking my forehead with their long fingers and whispering frantic words of comfort in my ear. Those same fingers run themselves through my soaked hair, and through the fog in my mind I hear someone mention a fever.
“Mama?” The word forms on my lips without effort, though I’m sure if I tried I couldn’t speak anything else.
There’s a staccato sob in response to that one word, Mama. “I’m here, baby,” she says, but she doesn’t sound like Mama. Mama’s voice is like the thrumming of a kettle above a smoldering fire, and this voice is like the howl of the winter wind through the mountain passes.
“I’m here, baby. Mama’s here, Farin.”
I don’t know who Farin is, but I am not him and the female speaking to me is not Mama, but she sounds so worried over me, I don’t have the heart to tell her.
When I wake the second time, I don’t allow my eyes to open.
