The Shadowglass (The Bone Witch, #3)(98)
The azi was also eager to be off, its wings braced for flight. Once we had loaded the rest of our belongings on its back, it was quick to take to the air, and I watched as Kance stared up after us, an indecipherable expression on his face until he disappeared in the distance.
? ? ?
“There’s something on your mind,” Kalen said once we had set up camp. After much discussion, we had decided that time away from the Odalian-Kion-Yadoshan continent was needed, and when Likh had proposed staying overnight by the Sea of Skulls while we planned our next moves, we found little to protest. Khalad and Likh had caught enough fish for dinner, but I spent most of the evening staring into the campfire, lost in thought.
“There’s something I’m missing,” I confessed. “It’s been nagging at me ever since we left.”
“You need to give your body time to heal, Tea,” Likh said with a smile, stirring a small pot.
I wrinkled my nose. “That doesn’t smell like soup.”
“It’s some herbs Althy gave me before we left. My supplies were running low, and she offered some of her share.” Likh blushed and lowered her voice. “She suggested that you take some. She mentioned that it was good for, ah…for preventing…when men and women have relations. It’s for the woman to not…”
I blushed in turn. “I have my own herbs for that. But I’m not sure how you would benefit from, um…”
Likh was bright red. “O-of course not! She says it’s also good for keeping up one’s strength, and I thought I could brew you some as well.”
“Thank you.” I accepted a cup, breathing in the slightly bitter aroma. Althy had always favored quality over taste. Wryly, I recalled the terrible-tasting concoctions she had administered to me over the years, though they did a good job of healing me quickly enough, whether it was coughs or—
I froze, staring down at the herbal drink. The steam rising from the brown liquid felt hot against my face. Fallowroot and winter ginger, I thought almost absently, mixed in with juniper berries and lacrow flowers…
“It’s not quite the cha-khana,” Likh sighed, raising her own brew to her lips. “But this is better than nothing.”
My arm whipped forward, dislodging the cup from her hands. The earthen bowl fell to the ground, shattering into pieces.
“Tea?” Khalad rushed forward at the sound, and Kalen turned from his cooking. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t drink that!” I staggered to my feet.
“What—”
I delved. The rune stood, bleeding red, in the air. Likh’s jaw dropped.
“All this time we’d wondered if the Blight rune affected silver heartsglass worse than it did others. We thought we were watching what we ate and drank. We were wrong.” Shaking, I upended the contents of my bowl on the ground, liquid sloshing everywhere. I felt sick to my stomach, my appetite gone. “Likh, how long have you been drinking this?”
The poor girl was shaking. Khalad pulled her closer, and she all but collapsed against his chest. “Ever since we left Kion. Althy told me to take it every day, that it would be good for long journeys, especially now that I’d been blighted…”
I remembered Kance, the headaches and pain plaguing him in the days before his engagement to Inessa had been announced. How his father’s death gave him the peace to chase them away; how he stopped drinking the herbs after that. Who had brewed his tea, during those long months?
Hadn’t I been drinking her concoctions as well? Strange dreams and visions had swirled my days together. Dreams that made me want to jump from high Isteran towers, that taught me how Kion should burn. Nightmares that drew my knife into my hands and stabbed my sister with my anger. Those nightmares had lessened after leaving Kion, but I had prepared my own herbs by hand since then.
Had Kance been blighted during those months as well? Was it a last resort, an unfulfilled threat?
I was wrong. I must be wrong. I would give up almost everything, not to be right.
“Tea.” Kalen’s face was strained. “Surely you don’t think…”
“I don’t know what to think. But you need to take the runic wards off me, Kalen. We need answers, and there’s only one person I know who can give us them now.”
The Compulsion dissolved around us, but the soldiers had learned their lessons and dared not approach.
“You didn’t believe me about Daisy,” the bone witch said, breathing hard. “You would not have believed me had I told you the truth about Altaecia. Why would you? I had no proof. Khalad knew then, but Altaecia only arrived back at Kion after he had left for Daanoris. She claimed to have visited Odalian villages, it seems—a deliberate ploy. It was my word against hers, and of the two of us, she was not the known kinslayer, not the renegade bone witch. Altaecia was clever, treating my mind with ills and humors until I questioned even myself.”
“I was stunned when I saw her at the port,” Khalad murmured. “I’d told no one about what had happened to her. I kept silent—I had no way of reaching you with this new information, Tea, but it seemed you knew all along.”
“Not for a long time, no. But who would you side with—the highly respected asha of the Willows, or a poor bone witch who’d slain her own sister and showed every indication of losing her mind? In your places, I would have sided against me. Poor Likh could not have testified for my sake. Only Khalad believed me.”