I think.”
“You can read minds?” Arsinoe asks warily.
“Sometimes. Just now it was easy enough. But do not worry. Scrying is the only reliable aspect of my gift.”
“I wasn’t worried. I mean, maybe a little. But it’s impressive.”
“I am the strongest one left now that Theodora is gone.”
Arsinoe nods and tries very hard not to think about masking her thoughts while simultaneously trying to think quietly. In the bed beside the broad wall of windows, Pietyr Renard lies motionless beneath thick white blankets. Next to the bed is a chair stuffed with gray pillows, a yellow throw slung over the arm. It must have been where Mathilde sat, all night, keeping watch.
“And there has been no change?”
“Nothing,” Gilbert replies. “He is now as he was when we laid him down.”
Arsinoe frowns. It was what she expected to hear, but just once, could not things be easy? “Maybe if I slap him across the face,” she says in a bright, quick voice.
Gilbert snorts. “Somehow I do not think so. But in his state, he will probably not mind if you give it a try.”
Arsinoe approaches the bed. She reaches out and touches his hand, folded over his other atop his chest. His skin is warm, his pulse steady if not strong. He looks pale. Though that could be the effect of all of the white, and the intense light blond of his hair.
She touches his face and tilts his head back and forth. He does not stir. No twitches or movement, even beneath his eyelids. And according to every rumor they have heard, he has been this way since returning from the botched trade for Madrigal at Innisfuil.
“I would say he was poisoned,” she murmurs. “Except how do you poison a poisoner?
“Gilbert,” she says suddenly. “Can you see? Can you . . . sense anything with your gift? Any thoughts inside his head? Or anything about what was done to him?”
“Perhaps it was only an illness. A natural illness.”
“Where my little sister is concerned, I doubt it.” She gestures to the bed. “Please.”
With a deep breath, Gilbert comes closer and lays his hands on Pietyr: one across his forehead, the other across his eyes.
“Nothing. I’m sorry. There is simply nothing there to read, he—” Gilbert’s arms stiffen all the way to the shoulders, and his words cut off so fast that Arsinoe hears his teeth clamp shut. Whatever passes through him leaves him gasping. He sinks onto the chair and wraps himself tight in the yellow blanket.
“Gilbert? What was that?”
“Nothing good,” he says, staring at Pietyr’s sleeping face. He takes a moment to swallow. “I saw a chasm. And blood. I heard the voices of queens.”
“What did they say?”
“I could not tell. It was . . . mutterings. Wails.”
Arsinoe leans back, relieved.
“This pleases you?” he asks.
“This pleases me. Because whatever happened to him was decidedly unnatural. And unnatural I can work with.” She reaches for Pietyr’s hand again and pushes the sleeve up his arm to look at the pale skin of his wrist. As she grasps him, she feels something uneven and rough across his palm. She turns it over, and clucks her tongue. “Did you notice this?”
“We did. An old wound. And an ugly one.”
“Not that old.” Arsinoe leans close to study the scars. There are so many, it is a wonder his hand did not just fall apart. Most of the palm is dark pink scar tissue. But the lines are still there, for someone who knew where to look. His scar is the mess one makes when one is trying to cover over a rune. A low-magic rune.
“Pietyr Renard,” she whispers. “You have come to the right place.”
As she hurries through the city to the apothecary shop, Arsinoe’s mind spins so fast that it forms knots. Pietyr Renard was doing low magic. And she knows who it was who taught it to him.
“Madrigal,” she whispers. “You always knew how to make the most of what time you had.”
The shop is empty this early in the morning, but she and the shopkeep have a generous understanding: she is free to come and go and take what she needs as she pleases. Quickly, she goes to the shelves and pulls down a mortar and pestle, a bottle of rose oil, and a tightly bound bundle of rosemary. Chunks of resin or amber would be best, but the herbs will have to do. She stuffs a small bag of dried flower petals into the mortar and quickly returns to Lermont House.
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