made a flower bloom with a flick of her fingers. You and me.
Now there was no one to call upon to save her. Jesper did not know how. If she’d been conscious, if she’d been stronger, she might have been able to heal herself. Instead she slipped away into some deep dream, her breath becoming more and more labored.
Jesper slept, his cheek pressed to his mother’s palm, sure that any minute she would wake and stroke his cheek and he would hear her voice say, “What are you doing here, little rabbit?” Instead, he woke to the sound of his father weeping.
They’d taken her back to the farm and buried her beneath a cherry tree that was already beginning to flower. To Jesper, it had seemed too pretty for such a sad day, and even now, seeing those pale pink flowers in a shop window or embroidered on a lady’s silks always put him in a melancholy mind. They took him back to the smell of fresh-turned earth, the wind whispering through the fields, his father’s trembling baritone singing a lonely kind of song, a Kaelish air in words Jesper didn’t understand.
When Colm had finished, the last notes drifting up into the cherry tree’s branches, Jesper said, “Was Ma a witch?”
Colm laid a freckled hand on his son’s shoulder and drew him close. “She was a queen, Jes,” he said. “She was our queen.”
Jesper had made dinner for them that night, burnt biscuits and watery soup, but his father ate every bite and read to him from his Kaelish book of Saints until the lights burned low and the pain in Jesper’s heart eased enough for him to sleep. And that was the way it had been from then on, the two of them, looking after each other, working the fields, bundling and drying jurda in the summers, trying to make the farm pay. Why hadn’t it been enough?
But even as Jesper had the thought, he knew it could never be enough. He could never go back to that life. He hadn’t been built for it. Maybe if his mother had lived, she would have taught him to channel his restlessness. Maybe she would have shown him how to use his power instead of hiding it. Maybe he’d have gone to Ravka to be a soldier for the crown. Or maybe he would have ended up right here anyway.
He wiped the stain of the jurda from his fingertips and placed the lid back on the tin.
“The Zemeni don’t just use the blossoms,” he said. “I remember my mother soaking jurda stalks in goat’s milk. She gave it to me when I’d been out in the fields.”
“Why?” asked Matthias.
“To counteract the effects of inhaling jurda pollen all day. It’s too much for a child’s system, and no one wanted me more excitable than I already was.”
“The stalks?” repeated Kuwei. “Most people just dispose of them.”
“The stalks have a balm in them. The Zemeni drain it for ointments. They rub it on babies’ gums and nostrils when they’re burning jurda .” Jesper’s fingers drummed on the tin, a thought forming in his mind. Could the secret to the antidote for jurda parem be the jurda plant itself? He wasn’t a chemist; he didn’t think like Wylan, and he hadn’t been trained as a Fabrikator. But he was his mother’s son. “What if there’s a version of the balm that would counteract the effects of jurda parem ? There still wouldn’t be a way to admin—”
That was when the window shattered. Jesper had his guns drawn in less than a breath, as Matthias shoved Kuwei down and shouldered his rifle. They edged to the wall and Jesper peeked outside through the smashed stained glass. In the shadows of the cemetery he saw lanterns raised, shifting shapes that had to be people—a lot of people.
“Unless the ghosts just got a lot more lively,” Jesper said, “it looks like we have company.”
A t night, the warehouse district felt like it had shed its skin and taken on a new form. The shantytowns at its eastern edges crackled with life, while the streets of the district itself became a no-man’s-land, occupied only by guards at their posts and stadwatch grunts walking their beats.
Inej and Nina moored their boat in the wide central canal that ran up the center of the district and made their way down the silent quay, keeping close to the warehouses and away from the streetlamps that lined the water’s edge. They passed