Ink, Iron, and Glass (Ink, Iron, and Glass #1)(51)
“Is that it?” Leo said, heart in his throat.
“Only one way to find out,” said Faraz, bringing the vial over to the table where Elsa lay. “It’s the best I can do. Whether it will prove to be an antidote or not…”
Leo grabbed the vial out of his hands. “Stop stalling and hold her mouth open, will you?”
“Wait!” said Faraz, grabbing a hypodermic syringe. “Unconscious people don’t have a swallow reflex—it’ll end up down her lungs. We have to inject it intravenously.”
Faraz insisted on injecting the antidote very slowly, and in several different arteries. Leo thought he might indeed go insane from waiting. When Faraz finally set aside the empty syringe and pressed his fingers to Elsa’s throat to check her pulse, Leo let out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding.
“How is she?”
After a pause, Faraz said, “I think it’s working. Her pulse is stabilizing.”
“Thank God.” Leo scrubbed his face with his hands, relief flooding through him. But a little stream of anxiety followed quickly behind, because Elsa would not truly be safe until they knew for certain who had ordered the attempt on her life. He wrapped the dagger again, tucked it into his belt, and said, “I have to go.”
“You’re leaving now?” Faraz said, gaping at him.
Leo tapped his fingers nervously against the side of his leg. “Is she going to live?”
“I … I think so. Yes.”
He reached for the door. “Then there’s something I have to do.”
*
Elsa awoke to the feeling of a tickle against her cheek. She cracked open an eyelid to see Skandar’s huge eye staring at her from a few centimeters away, one tentacle anxiously poking her face.
With her eyes open, she grew increasingly aware of the pounding headache at the base of her skull, and the room spun around her. It took a minute to confirm that she really didn’t recognize the brown leather couch she was lying on, or the neatly organized shelves of jars and vials that lined the walls. In the center of the room, Faraz was standing at a worktable, cleaning up the detritus left over from some recent experiment.
“Hi, Skandar,” Elsa said hoarsely. And then, “Faraz?”
“You’re awake,” he said, looking up from what he was doing. “Good. Porzia will be relieved to hear it—she’s been a nervous wreck.”
“What happened?”
“Do you remember the attack? The assassin’s dagger was dipped in poison. I’ve administered an antidote, but you’re not out of the woods yet.”
Elsa picked her head up, trying to get a better look at her surroundings, and the motion caused a wave of nausea to wash through her. “Where’s Leo?”
“He … He’ll be back soon, I’m sure.” Faraz busied himself organizing a shelf of little glass vials, as if the question made him uncomfortable.
“How long was I out for?”
“A couple hours.”
Elsa dragged herself into a sitting position, her head still swimming. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, willing the dizziness to recede, but she still felt disoriented. When she opened her eyes again, the room seemed to tilt to the left.
Faraz turned, saw what she was doing, and rushed over. “Lie back,” he admonished. “You shouldn’t try to get up yet. You nearly died, Elsa.”
She gave in and let Faraz guide her back into a more relaxed position. He gave her a stern look before going back to the worktable to finish tidying up. Skandar, now content that she wasn’t dead, crawled up onto her stomach and settled there. She idly scritched the creature with one hand.
Staring at the ceiling, Elsa wondered where Leo could have run off to while she was busy surviving a poisoning. To go talk to this mysterious someone else who might be able to identify the assassin? Why go alone instead of waiting for her to recover first? She was aware in a distant, academic way that she ought to be furious with him for leaving, but in the haze of her recovery, anger would have required too much effort.
Elsa turned her head to look at Faraz. “Can I ask you … what happened to Leo’s family?”
“What, now?” he said, surprised. “You should be resting.”
“Yes, because listening is so very taxing,” she said, and then realized it was the sort of thing Porzia might say. The other girl’s sarcasm must be rubbing off on her. “Besides, if I fall asleep, Skandar will go back to poking me in the face.”
Faraz kept his hands busy with rolling up a long strip of medical gauze. “They all died. In the Venetian rebellion seven years ago. His father was an advocate for Italian unification, and they were attacked in their home during the riots. The way it haunts him, I’m fairly certain he … you know, saw it happen.”
“That’s awful,” Elsa said, trying to imagine the trauma of seeing one’s family slaughtered at such a young age. Even now, the thought of Jumi being hurt was almost too much to bear. “How did he escape?”
“A servant, I think, managed to sneak Leo out and get him to safety. I don’t know the details—he hardly ever speaks about his family.”
“So he hides things from you, too.”
Faraz shrugged it off. “Find me a person who has never hidden anything from anyone.” But the way he avoided her gaze made Elsa think it bothered him more than he was letting on.