see him lost just yet. Nor do I—I’ve always been fond of this one.”
Killian’s breathing had grown ragged. Lydia took his hand, but his fingers remained unmoving. “Can you help him?”
The old woman shook her head. “That is not my way.”
Lydia sank her front teeth into her lip to silence a nasty retort. At the best of times, she despised vagaries. This was not the best of times. “Then he’s going to die.”
“Not if you help him.”
“I’m not a physician. I don’t know how.”
The woman smiled. “It’s more a matter of will than knowledge. The question is, are you ready to take all the hardship that will come along with it?”
“Tell me what to do.” Lydia squeezed Killian’s hand, feeling the callus across his palm from what must be endless hours of holding a weapon. He was dying on the bed between them and the woman was talking prophetic nonsense. Lydia could deal with the gore; all she needed were the appropriate instructions. What to stitch and how.
“If you help him, you’ll be starting down a hard and lonely road—”
“I’ve walked a lonely road all my life,” Lydia interrupted, tired of the unnecessary chatter. “Tell me how to help him or get out.”
“Oh, there is no mistaking you. You are just like your father.” The woman beamed, and Lydia barely had the chance to register the woman’s words before she reached out, fingers brushing Lydia’s forehead.
A shock ran through her, and she staggered back, momentarily blinded by bright light. When the stars receded from her vision, the woman was gone.
And everything was different.
The air was filled with a shifting, swirling mist. It drifted toward her, clinging and absorbing into her skin. Panicked, Lydia tried to brush it away, but it only latched on to her hands. More and more of it floated toward her, like iron filings to a magnet, and the dying man was its source. It poured out of his injuries like blood, but the flow was diminishing.
It was life.
And he was running out.
Stumbling forward, Lydia clapped her hands down on one stitched wound to stop the flow.
The moment their skin touched, her fingertips burned as life seared out of them, leaving behind a growing void deep in her chest. Lydia’s heart labored, her lungs wheezing, each breath a greater struggle than the next. Exhaustion swept over her, and with a strangled cry she jerked backward and fell, joints rattling with the impact against the floor.
Lydia lifted her hand, terror clawing through her like a beast as she took in the gnarled fingers with paper-thin, age-spotted skin. Climbing to her feet, she stumbled toward a mirror on the wall, barely able to see through her clouded vision. Her outline sharpened as she approached, her image clarifying even as her stomach twisted, bitter and foul. The face that looked back was hers.
Hers, fifty years from now.
Lydia screamed.
20
LYDIA
The sun shone through the open window and Lydia blinked blearily, strange scents filling her nose, the fabric of the pillow beneath her cheek not the familiar silk of those in her own bedroom.
“Good morning.”
Lydia sat upright, yanking the blankets around her bare shoulders. Killian sat in a chair, looking remarkably hale and healthy for someone who’d been on his deathbed. He had a half-finished plate of food balanced on one knee, indicating he’d been watching her for an uncomfortable length of time. “You’re alive,” she stuttered.
“I noticed.” He took a bite from a strip of bacon and leaned back in his chair. His shirt sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, revealing a multitude of faded scars on his olive-hued skin. “Shoulder’s as good as new, though you should show more caution when healing someone who’s marked. We take a fair bit more to kill, and therefore take a fair bit more to heal.”
An image of her face, aged nearly beyond recognition, flashed across Lydia’s mind, and she jerked her gaze to her own hand. Fingers straight and slender, skin unmarked. The hand of a young woman, not an aged hag.
Had she imagined it?
No, she decided, noting that her own minor injuries had entirely healed. As improbable—as impossible—as it seemed, none of it had been a dream.
Which meant that had been no mere old woman she’d been speaking to—it had been the goddess Hegeria; Lydia was certain of it. Treatise of the Seven gave no physical description to the gods, but it did describe their nature and what aspects of the world they had dominion over. Hegeria was said to be the