Smoke and Iron (The Great Library #4)(29)

Nothing seemed right. Not the light, which broke into rainbows around her. Not the heat, which seemed as thick as a blanket on her sweating skin. Not the sound of Gregory’s quiet laughter, as much nightmare as reality.

When he touched her, it might have been gentle, but his fingertips seemed made of hot coals and rough as granite, and she flinched back. What is it? What’s wrong with me? She struggled to piece thoughts together; they wanted to fly apart, spin into broken colors and sickening shards. The tea. He put something in the tea. Something to make her vulnerable, make it harder for her to access her power. She felt the suffocating, deadening effects of the Iron Tower, and the collar weighing her down, and for just a moment she felt a gray wave of despair. I can’t. I can’t do this. I’m going to die in here.

She reached out. Not for Gregory. Nothing so obvious. She didn’t need to destroy him, even if she could manage it. She just needed to be sure she could defeat what he’d dosed her with.

It hurt like ripping away a piece of herself, and she gritted her teeth on a scream as the pain built, and built, echoing from the walls of the Tower and the collar, and then a fresh red rose blooming just behind Gregory caught her attention.

She pulled and felt a hiss of energy flowing from the rose. The bloom faded, shriveled, and the life pulled out of the stem, the leaves. Tempting, to pull more, faster, destroying the entire bush, but she stopped with just the one stem.

The petals drifted down, wrinkled and dead. Blackened.

The power she’d taken in broke through the drugs. She was still trapped. Still at Gregory’s whims and mercies.

But she was not helpless.

Because he seemed to expect it, Morgan allowed her eyes to roll back and let her body go limp. Gregory caught her on the way to the ground, and she felt herself being lifted, carried, and the hissing, buzzing complex web of life inside the garden faded away into iron and stone and the bright, burning shadows of other Obscurists and servants.

Let go, she told herself. Let him think he’s won. Unless he believes it, he’ll just put you right back in that locked room. Let him win.

She rolled into the dark and found it a welcome shelter.





CHAPTER TEN




Waking was a painful process that came in a rush of headache, nausea, and an ache that went so deep she wondered if she might truly be ill. The light filtering red through her closed eyelids seemed far too bright, and she groaned and rolled over, trying to hide from it. Failing miserably.

“Oh hush,” said a strangely familiar voice. “Open your eyes, Morgan. You’re not the first to ever have a hangover.”

The voice had the lingering traces of an accent—Scots, Morgan thought—that gave the woman’s Greek a lilting, teasing sound. Morgan didn’t respond for a second or two, and then carefully opened her eyes a slit. Quickly shut them again. “Close the window?”

“No.” That voice was far too cheerful. “I like the light. And since we’ll be sharing this room, you’ll just have to make do, won’t you?”

Annis. The voice finally fell into the proper place, and Morgan opened her eyes wide this time, blinking until the glare resolved into a bright aura around a woman with gray-threaded red hair, a rounded face, and a tilted smile. The lines near her eyes and mouth showed she laughed often and deeply.

Annis was one of the least-talented Obscurists confined to the Tower—someone who had barely passed the threshold of entrance and was capable of only the most rudimentary of alchemical work. It had never put a dent in her happiness. Born happy, others said of her. She’ll laugh when she dies.

She was certainly smiling, if not quite laughing, at Morgan’s pain.

“I’m not hungover,” Morgan said. It came out as a feeble, annoyed protest, which she hadn’t meant. “I was drugged.”

One of Annis’s eyebrows rose sharply. She was braiding her long hair in quick, efficient swipes, and now she neatly tied off the end and began coiling the waist-long braid into a crown atop her head. She slotted in pins to hold it without so much as glancing in a mirror. It was impressive. “Drugged?” she repeated. “I suppose you drank Gregory’s special tea, then.”

“He does this often?”

“Often enough,” she said. Not smiling now, and in no way amused. “When he thinks he might not get his way. Funny thing: give the man all the power he wants, and he still feels weak. Almost as if there’s a hole in him that can’t be filled.” Annis’s look had turned sharp now. Assessing. “Feeling better?”

“Some. Don’t suppose you have any headache remedies?”

“Of course.” Annis turned to a cabinet and came back with a glass of water and a single pill. “This should settle you.” When Morgan hesitated, Annis made a face. “I’m not one of Gregory’s lackeys. I was Keria Morning’s friend. And I’ll not be loyal to the man who all but jumped into her still-warm shoes.”

Morgan took the pill and chased it down with the water. “Then we might be friends,” she said. Through the pain of her headache, she sensed a very definite hiss that defined the presence of alchemical scripts near her. No, around her. She could see them, when she concentrated, though it nearly split her skull in two: bands of symbols that ran in spirals up the walls of this room. Expertly done, but not expertly enough to be hidden from her.