Silas works with me for the next hour, painstakingly cleaning the man inch by inch, uncovering multiple lesions and bruises. He doesn’t flinch, or gag, working stoically and silently, helping me wash, treat, and then dress the wounds as best we can. Ugly, vicious bruises have turned the skin across the man’s chest and stomach dark purple and that’s not a good sign. His skin is cold to the touch, and doesn’t get any warmer, no matter how much we pile the fire. When we wash the blood and dirt from his hair I see it’s white like Silas’s, and when I peel back his eyelids to check his pupils his irises are gold. I look at Silas but he says nothing.

Finally, with nothing left to tend, we stop, covering him with as many blankets as we can.

“Now what?” Silas says, his already husky voice raw with tiredness or pain.

“Nothing. I’ve done all I can. Now it’s up to him. If he’s bruised inside …” I trail off, and Silas nods sharply. “The arnica and the willow bark will hopefully bring down the swelling on the outside. We’ll know more if—when—he wakes up.”

Silas rests his head in his hands.

I stand and check the bucket, using the little water left to make two weak cups of tea. I hold one out to him. He takes it, wrapping both hands around it.

“What happened?” I ask. “Who is he? Is he … is he related to you?”

“Yes. He’s a distant cousin. But I knew him well. He …” Silas stops to sip his tea. “Do you have anything stronger?”

I raise my eyebrows at him.

He takes another sip. “He’s been the go-between. He’s the man you saw me with yesterday. We have a chain, across Lormere. People stationed at various points passing items along from my mother’s temple, until they get over the border to me, and I move them on to safety. He was the border runner, crossing the woods. He was the best. It was him I was supposed to meet earlier, but he didn’t show up. I knew something was wrong and …”

I’m ready to interrupt and ask what kind of items he’s smuggling, but then a chill creeps up my spine. Attacked in the woods … I rip the blankets from his friend and start to examine him again, looking for the long, jagged scratches that had covered my mother’s arms.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing, just … checking.”

“For what?”

I don’t answer, relieved when I don’t find anything. “And there was no sign of what—who—might have done this?”

Silas shakes his head. “I’m sorry to bring this upon you,” he says. “I know you have your own troubles.”

“Where else would you go?”

He shakes his head and hunches over, his arms resting on his knees. I find myself staring at the top of his head, noticing his hair is double crowned. It makes me think of Lief, whose hair was the same, and I remember when my mother cut it and the whole left side of his hair stuck out for moons until the weight dragged it flat. After that he grew his hair long and never allowed it to be cut. I wonder if Silas knows he has a double crown. I wonder if he cares.

I stand and pick up my cloak, draping it over his shoulders.

He flinches as it drops around him. “I’m not cold,” he says.

“That’s not why,” I whisper back.

Our eyes lock and I forget how to breathe. That’s how it feels; suddenly my chest doesn’t remember how to rise and fall, and my lungs don’t know how to fill themselves. I don’t realize that he’s standing, too, until I feel his breath on my cheek and it kick-starts my own, shallow and rapid as white-hot heat burns through my skin. I look up at him and want to reach out and smooth away the crease between his eyebrows. There’s a moment when he looks like the Sleeping Prince from the book, with his high cheekbones and his generous mouth. Then he doesn’t look like a prince at all, but a sad, lost man, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to step forward, reach up, and wrap my arms around him, linking my hands behind his neck and pulling him against me.

He stiffens briefly, then relaxes, but makes no effort to touch me in return. It’s as though my embrace is nothing to do with him. My skin heats with the familiar flush of shame and I unclasp my fingers and pull away.

Then his long arms fold around me and pull me back toward him. His head nestles into the hollow between my neck and shoulder, his face pressed to the skin. I feel the warmth of his breath on my neck.

It goes on and on, long past the moment we should have let each other go. He clings to me as though I’m the last safe port in a storm and I try to be that for him. My feelings flit between concern and something else, something that makes my heart skip tellingly. I’m dreading the moment this ends, because some instinct tells me that when he’s gone from my arms, something vital will be missing from me.

When he sighs I lean my head against his and he turns his slowly, until his mouth brushes my jaw, and I hear him inhale sharply, his fingers tightening for a split second on my waist. He stays there, his lips an inch from mine, and I tilt my head until the corners of our mouths rest against each other’s. I close my eyes, waiting for him to move, to kiss me, but he remains tantalizingly still, holding me to his chest, where I can feel his heart pounding as violently as mine.

And then he pushes me away. Again.

“Errin,” he says, and my ears ring with the rejection. “I can’t, please.”

“I won’t, I’m sorry,” I stammer.

“I thought I made myself clear before,” he says quietly and I nod, reddening again as a new wave of humiliation hits me. “It cannot be,” he says, his voice pleading as he walks away toward the door and my traitorous heart lurches when I see him reach for the latch.

“Stay,” I blurt and he pauses, head tilted, his back still toward me. “It’s late.”

“I can’t.” He shrugs the cloak from his shoulders and places it gently on the bench. “I’ll come back, when the sun comes up.”

And then he’s gone, leaving me alone with a dying man.

I tidy away the bloodied water and throw the cloths onto the fire to burn, watching them hiss and pop. The man’s eyes are shadowed on the pallet, his complexion dangerously wan. When there’s nothing more for my hands to do I take my cloak and pull it around me, sitting on the bench. And I wait.

*  *  *

“Silas?” It’s spoken so quietly that I don’t realize I’m awake, hadn’t known I’d fallen asleep. When the voice comes again, I open my eyes and look at the man in my bed. Who returns my gaze, one eye swollen shut, but the other fixed on me.

“Silas?” the man says again and I scramble from the bench to his side.

“Hush, rest,” I say. “I’ll get him. I’ll get him for you.”

I’m halfway to standing when the man weakly raises a hand.

“You know him?”

“Yes, he brought you here. He—”

“I need you to pass on a message.”

“I’ll get him—”

“No!” The man coughs, and his spittle flecks the blankets, dark and glistening. He closes his eye and I worry it’s already too late. Then he speaks again. “Tell him she’s already passed.”

“She’s passed?” Who? Who’s passed? Does he mean Silas’s mother? Is she dead?

“She’s the reason he’s here; he’ll understand. Tell him she’s gone to Scarron—” The man pauses to cough again and it’s a thick, wet sound. Blood bubbles from the corner of his mouth, and I know, then, that he’s not going to recover. I take his hand and the faintest smile graces his bloody lips. “She left there before … before he came. She’s safe, for now.”

“All right,” I say, taking his hand. Not Silas’s mother, then. Someone else.

The man takes a sharp breath. “He needs to find her.” There is a rattle in his throat. “And get her to the Conclave. Fast. He doesn’t have much time.”

“The Conclave?”

“Everyone … It’s the safest place. He has to get her there. They have to stay there. The prince is coming. He knows about her …”

“I’ll tell him. I promise.”

Then he dies. He just dies. One moment his eye is bright and focused and the next … I see him die, I see the change. Indefinable, but something in him is gone, something permanent. I remember then that I don’t know his name; I never asked, and Silas never said. And now he’s dead, in a stranger’s house, miles from home.

I close his eye, hoping it will make it look as though he’s sleeping, but it doesn’t. There’s a slackness to him that makes it clear he’s dead. I sit back on my haunches, staring at him. I’ve never seen anyone die before. I saw my father, but afterward. I didn’t see it happen.

Long, strange moments pass and I feel numb, removed from it. I try to think of something to do but do nothing, staring at the dead man. It’s only when something in the fire shifts and crackles that I snap out of it, standing up. I need to tell Silas the message, to get her, whoever she is, to the Conclave.

I’m reaching for the latch when I stop, a wave of understanding flooding me. Silas knows where the Conclave is.

Before the last war, our alchemists lived openly in the towns, but after Lormere defeated us and demanded we handed them over, as though they were property or assets, we hid them away in a secret community known as the Conclave. It’s recorded on no map, and outside of the Conclave two anonymous members of the Council in Tressalyn know where it is. Or so I believed, until tonight.

On rare occasions the Conclave can be visited, by prior appointment, but the visitor must consent to being placed in a drugged sleep before arriving and leaving, so they can’t find their way back. They’re guarded by an elite force during the visit, they must not speak to the alchemists except by invitation, and no more than two persons can visit at any one time. Prince Merek visited once, and even he—especially he—was put to sleep and guarded.

There aren’t supposed to be alchemists living outside of the Conclave, let alone in Lormere.

He said his ancestors were Tallithi. His eyes and hair …

And like that, it all slips into place. The white hair, the golden eyes. Tallithi family. Not any Tallithi, royal Tallithi, the alchemist line. Silas is an alchemist. A Lormerian alchemist.

I lean against the table heavily, knocking the vial over, the last precious drop sliding along the side of the glass as I reach to stop it rolling off.

And then I have to grip the table with both hands to keep from collapsing under the weight of revelation.

A mysterious remedy that cures my mother of being the beast, wakes her from her grief, and that I can’t hope to replicate. Given to me by an alchemist.

I don’t need Silas to tell me what’s in his potion. He’s right, I’ll never be able to make it.

It’s the Elixir of Life.