well. "Tell us what we can do, Lady Queen," he said to her, wrapping her hands around the cup with his own.
You can tell me what you saw, she responded mutely to the kindness in his eyes. No more lying. Just tell me!
Runnemood came in next. "What's all this?" he demanded at the sight of Thiel and Rood on their knees beside Bitterblue's chair.
"Just tell me," Bitterblue whispered.
"Tell you what?" snapped Runnemood.
"What you saw," said Bitterblue. "Stop torturing me and just tell me. I know you were healers. What did he do? Just tell me!"
Rood backed away from her and found a chair.
"Lady Queen," said Runnemood grimly, squaring his feet. "Do
not ask us to call those things to mind. It was years ago and we have made our peace."
"Peace!" Bitterblue cried. "You have not made your peace!"
"He cut them," Runnemood said through gritted teeth, "often until they were dying. Then he brought them to us to mend. He thought himself a medical genius. He thought he was turning Monsea into a land of medical marvels, but all he was doing was hurting people until they died. He was a madman. Are you happy? Is this information worth forcing us to remember? Worth risking our sanity and even our lives?"
Runnemood went to his brother, who was shaking and crying now. Runnemood helped Rood up, then practically carried him out the door. And then she was alone with Thiel, who had turned into a shell after all, still kneeling beside her, cold, stiff, and empty. It was her fault. They'd been talking of something real and she'd ruined it with questions she'd never meant to ask. "I'm sorry," she whispered to him. "Thiel. I'm sorry."
"Lady Queen," he said after a moment. "These are dangerous topics to speak aloud. I beg you to be more careful in what you say."
TWO WEEKS PASSED and she did not go to see Saf. There was too much, with the embroidery, with her mountains of work, with Po ill. Also, she was ashamed.
"I've been having the most wonderful dreams," Po told her when she visited him in the infirmary. "But not the kind that are depressing to wake from when you realize they're not true. You know what I mean?"
He lay on sheets soaked with sweat, the covers thrown back, fanning himself with his own open shirt. As Madlen had instructed her to do, Bitterblue dipped a cloth in cold water, wiped his sticky face, and tried not to shiver, for the fire was kept low in this room. "Yes," she said, lying, because she didn't want to burden her sick cousin with the terrible dreams she'd been having, dreams of Ashen being shot in the back by Leck's arrow. "Tell me your dreams."
"I'm myself," Po said, "and I'm as myself, with all the same powers and limitations and secrets. But there's no guilt about my lies, no doubt, because I've made a choice, and it's the best choice available to me. When I wake, everything feels a bit lighter, you know?"
His fever lingered; seemed to improve; then flared up again worse than it had been before. Sometimes when she checked in on him, he shivered and thrashed and said the strangest things, things that made no sense whatsoever. "He's hallucinating," Madlen told her once when Po had grabbed Bitterblue's arm and cried out that the bridges were growing and the river was swimming with the dead.
"I wish his hallucinations could be as pleasant as his dreams," she whispered, touching Po's forehead, stroking his sweaty hair, trying to shush him. And she wished for Raffin and Bann, who were better at sickbeds than she. She wished for Katsa, who would surely lose her anger if she saw Po like this. But Katsa was in a tunnel somewhere, and Raffin and Bann were en route to Sunder.
"It was Randa's order," Po cried, bundled under blankets this time, violently shivering. "Randa sent Raffin to Sunder to marry Murgon's daughter. He will come back with a wife and babies and grandbabies."
"Raffin marry the Sunderan king's daughter?" Bitterblue exclaimed. "Not in a million years."
A tsk came from the table where Madlen was mixing one of the vile concoctions she liked to make Po gag down. "Let's ask him about it again when he's not raving, Lady Queen."
"When will that be, Madlen?"
Madlen added a sour-smelling paste to the bowl, mashed it in with the rest, and didn't answer.
HELDA, IN THE meantime, had employed Ornik the smith to make a replica crown. He