Give the Dark My Love(42)

“He’s not wrong,” I said gently. “It was his books that brought you to me.”

She bit her lip but didn’t say anything for a long moment.

“I have one year,” she finally said. “One year to learn as much as I can. That’s all the scholarship I was given allows for. Maybe I’ll get another one, maybe not—I’m not sure. But I have to make this one year count. I have to learn all I can, so I can do . . . something. Help. Somehow.”

I studied medicinal alchemy because I wasn’t good enough at math to study transactional alchemy, and government work bored me, and I wanted to avoid politics in an effort to purge any remnant of my father from my future. I liked the idea of being a top alchemist at the Governor’s Hospital. I liked the prestige and the gold that came from it. I’d chosen my area of studies for myself.

I lowered my head. I couldn’t be more different from Nedra.

“It’s not on you,” I said finally. “Maybe we were slow to recognize the problem, but the top alchemists in the city are working on the Wasting Death now. You don’t have to do it all yourself.”

Nedra just shook her head, her chin bumping along her knees. “They don’t really care,” she muttered. “The only sick people are those this city doesn’t mind disposing of anyway.”

I took a deep breath. “I’ll help,” I said. “You’ve been volunteering here during almost all of your free time, and I haven’t pulled my weight. Let’s work together. I’ll come with you. I’ll volunteer, too.”

“I’m going with Master Ostrum to the factories tomorrow,” she said.

“I’ll be there.”

Nedra turned to me. I tried to read her eyes. Did I see hope? Or defeat? Or . . . or something else? I could feel the tension coiling between us, the questions unasked.

I leaned forward, giving her time to pull away.

She didn’t.

My lips pressed against hers, hesitant, wary. She reached up, her body turning toward mine, her hand snaking up my arm, around my shoulder, to my neck, pulling me closer. Our kiss deepened. My fingers tangled in her braids; hers grappled at my back.

And then she broke away, turning her face, struggling to stand up and move away from me. She wrapped her arms around her body, facing the wall.

I stood, too. When I touched her shoulder, she jerked away from me. “I can’t,” she whispered.

“You said before that the people of your village don’t dance like we do,” I said, trying to sound casual, as if her words hadn’t just sliced me open. “Show me.”

She looked back at me, a hint of a smile on her face.

“It’s just a dance,” I added, but we both knew this was the moment where everything would change.

She held out her hand to me, and I took it. We had no music, just the ticking of the clock, moonlight streaming through the milky glass. She showed me the careful, rhythmic steps, guiding my body so it was perfectly timed with hers. She spun away, then back again, my arms encircling her.





TWENTY-THREE


    Nedra



“Are you waiting for someone?” Master Ostrum asked as I lingered by the iron-clad statue of Bennum Wellebourne the next morning. The sun had barely risen, and everything seemed cast in gold.

I looked back at the boys’ dormitory, but the door didn’t open. “No,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Master Ostrum was not one to talk in the morning. Instead, he chewed on coffee beans and walked too fast. I thought about asking for some, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle the bitter taste.

Last night had been long.

The anger of the other students, the ones Master Ostrum had dropped, felt a million years away. So did my day at the hospital, where everything had gone wrong and everyone I touched seemed only to hurt more. And the party. And the letter. It all felt blurred, pushed aside by something else. Grey. Dancing under the illuminated clockface, dancing along the edge of a choice I wasn’t prepared to make.

I pushed it all out of my mind. I had work to do today.

Almost all of the workers at Berrywine’s furniture factory had fallen ill, so it made more sense for a handful of potion makers, aides, and an alchemist to go to them rather than find another ferry to cart all the workers to the hospital.

“Have you had a chance to read the book I gave you?” Master Ostrum asked when we were several blocks downhill from Yūgen.

I noticed he didn’t speak the title aloud.

“Yes,” I said simply.

For a few paces, he left it at that. But then he said, “And?”

I thought about what I’d read. “It is . . . dangerous,” I finally said.

“Mm,” Master Ostrum grunted. But I didn’t think he understood what I meant. The book wasn’t dangerous just because it was about necromancy—it was dangerous because it was giving me ideas.

Master Ostrum didn’t speak again, and soon we arrived at the factory.

The smell hit me first. A foul, sour stench mixed with the mustiness of sawdust and a sickly sweet odor too close to rot. I recognized potion makers from the quarantine hospital, rushing from cot to cot to distribute painkillers or offer comfort, but there were no alchemists other than Master Ostrum and me.

Berrywine’s factory was mercifully small. Only one level, with about thirty or thirty-five workers. A dozen or so were partitioned off to one side—they showed only moderate signs of illness, the early stages of the plague. Fatigue, headaches, sore muscles. They huddled on the floor, their eyes wide and scared.