Chapter Seven

I FIDDLE WITH the vial, hidden in the pocket of my beige non-style trousers. I adjust the off-white, open-throated tunic, so similar to the one I normally wear, but without an opening for my wings. I twist my neck around as far as possible, making sure that the only thing making a dent in the shirt are my muscles, not my wings. The disguise is good; no one should notice a thing. But I toss a non-style cloak over my shoulders for good measure. I’m glad I brought it because even though the snow’s been melting rapidly, it’s still cool during the days and the nights are even colder. The white clouds of my breath aren’t as defined as they were earlier in the season, but they’re still there. I pull the cloak tighter around my body.

An amused thumping sound interrupts the calls of the nighttime Forest creatures and makes me jump and spin around. “Trying to check yourself out? Hasn’t the Controller been doing that enough for the both of you?”

“Osley!” I whisper-shout, looking around us nervously. I drop to one knee in front of quer. “What are you doing all the way out here? I thought you hated being this close to all those nons in Lethe,” I ask quer with my body.

“You really think Kashat was going to send you on a mission without a scout? Without anyone to call for help if you fly into trouble?” I just stare at quer. “Don’t worry, I’m not planning to tell your moms. I haven’t told them about Evelyn and Iema, have I? Even though that’s what got you selected supposedly at random to go through that awful Dreaming test.”

“Shhh!” Even though que’s not communicating in a language most nons would understand, sometimes trees and shrubs, let alone insects and birds, let alone groundlings, slip information to the wrong people.

Quer beady eyes look around, quer ears raised, alert. The left one twitches slightly. “You’ve gotten so jumpy you might have some rabbit in you too, Sadie. And don’t roll your eyes at me like that. It’s a compliment.”

I sigh exaggeratedly and push my hands into my thighs, rising to my feet. “All right, fine, come. But stay out of sight, yeah?”

Osley’s ears tilt back so far they almost touch quer body. I catch a whiff of quer bemused irritation when I breathe in. “Did you even know I was following you? I’m good at staying out of sight, Sade.” And then, with sadder movements, a sadder scent. “The only reason I’m still alive.”

My heart sinks and I grimace at quer. I didn’t know Osley back when quer family was around, but I know que had a big one. Non hunters took them all out when the palace decided that eating grown food made it too reliant on fae magic. When they started to hunt.

Osley hops forward, nudging quer head into my ankle. “Come on, then.” I nod in the human fashion, trying to get myself into formation.

We set off silently, continuing my path toward the edge of the Forest, where the Tread spills out into more open terrain at the border of the Grovian Forest and the non settlement of Lethe. We cross an old bridge carefully, the river rushing underneath us, Osley shivering as we go. The Lethean Inn, where I was supposed to have my dinner—meeting—date?—with Evelyn, isn’t too far away. I can see its soft lights and the smoke from burning tree flesh spilling out of the two chimneys from the gaps between the last few Forest trees. The steady rush of the river behind us calms my nerves somewhat.

I sigh deeply and set my shoulders, making sure they have none of the pinchedness of most faeries. I wiggle my face around to wipe the tension off of it. I swing my arms back and forth, pumping my neck from side to side, like I’m getting ready to tackle some feat of great physical strength. Osley and I exchange glances. I nod at quer curtly.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be,” I tell quer softly in the most widely used non dialect around these parts, adjusting easily to the accent I grew up with, that of the working people of the Highlands. When Mom and I first arrived in the Grove after we fled, that non accent was the first thing the other young ones noticed and hated about me. Then, it was the fact that I grew up so much slower than they did. The young ones I was age-mates with when I got to the Grove went through their choosing and became nears before I had even moved on from their old learning pods. It was easier than it could have been, I guess, because Jax hadn’t accepted another healing partner since Idrisim died, but he accepted Mom as his new co-healer. So the others had to accept it too. They didn’t blame Mom for me. But they came to blame me for looking like a non, came to call me slow, stupid, ugly, because that’s how I grew.

I sigh again and shake my head like I’m trying to get water out of my ears. Usually on spying missions, I know my moms are close by. Now, if Kashat did his job right, they’re sleeping comfortably deep in the Forest, content with the lie that I’m helping him with Lunamez preparation and am going to be up all night in the Underland with him and Lerian.

Better to just jump in, like I do into the Flowing when the water is cold. Get the shock over with in one go.

“See you soon,” I mutter to Osley, and, after receiving permission from the grass ahead of me, I limp out of the Forest and into Lethe, toward the inn. My fingers toy with the vial in my pocket, and I grind my teeth slightly.

I loosen my stride as I approach the inn, seeing a group of young non men standing around outside with flasks in their hands. They nod at me without seeming to really think about it. With my short hair and small chest, a lot of non men not only think I’m a non like them, but a man too. I nod back, eager to keep it that way, at least with these ones. They’re all too young to be my mark, and dressed in typical Lethean laborer garb. Their trousers are stained from days of work, and their tunics are casual. The head Slicer certainly wouldn’t be caught traveling in such unrefined clothing.

I yank open the door and pause as warmth, light, and scent from the inn’s two tree flesh fireplaces hit me like a wall. My eyes swivel quickly around the room. It’s a big place, with a three-sided bar in the center, surrounded by tree flesh tables and benches, and four exits, counting the one I’m walking into. One, I know from past experience, leads to the kitchens; one to the outside; and one to the rooms people can rent upstairs. The walls, all made of tree flesh, are supposed to give a homey feeling even though it seems to me like I’ve just walked into a den made of body parts. I remember growing up in buildings like these, though, and a small, ashamed part of me feels somewhat comforted.

No one really reacts to my entrance beyond a few scattered glances that quickly return to games of darts, conversations at full tables, or the bottoms of mugs. I scan the room and the pit in my stomach loosens a bit; this is too easy. A tall, reedy man who looks like he’s never seen the sun in his life is sitting alone at a fully serviced table across from the quiet side of the bar. He’s wearing a royal white robe with—my stomach swoops in relief—the orange stripes of the head Slicer. I shove my hands deep into my pockets and sidle over to the table next to him.

“Anyone sitting here?” I gruffly ask the two non girls at the other end of the tree flesh table I’ve chosen. They giggle and one looks me up and down. I cock an eyebrow.

“Go ahead,” the one with reddish hair says, and I nod my thanks. I thrum my fingers on the tree flesh absently after I sit down, offering a silent apology to the trees whose lives were ended and bodies dismembered to make this table.

“What’ll it be, sherba?” a soft voice asks. I almost jump at the Grovian faeric term of endearment, pressing my wings deeper into my wing sleeves. But I remind myself sternly that in Lethe especially, our languages influence each other. No matter how hard the palace tries to prevent it.

The barmaid, whose name I remember from my last mission is something like Ruth, is balancing an empty, circular tray on her fingertips in front of me, her eyebrows raised. Her red and white dress is super short and the top of it barely covers her chest. I swallow hard and nod my head toward the head Slicer at the next table.

“What he’s got over there looks good,” I tell her, my voice low-pitched but loud enough, hoping he’ll hear it over the dart game on the other side of the bar. He does, and raises his steaming mug at me in acknowledgement. I grin at him, trying not to picture his hands covered in newly born blood.

Ruth chuckles, leaning her hips onto my table and bending over me conspiratorially. I force my eyes onto her face, which turns out not to be a problem; her eyes are a stormy kind of gray that proves nice to look at. “Sherba, are you even old enough to have what he’s drinking?”

The Head Slicer chuckles, but not meanly. “Oh, get the kid some mulled mead, Ruth. Looks like he could use the warmth.” He winks at me and I’m mildly surprised. Usually men of his rank take longer to warm up to me than this, probably because of my darker skin and my lower class accent. But who knows, maybe he’s already been drinking a bunch of that brew. Maybe he thinks I’m a man and am trying to pick up the girls at my table, and he’s trying to help me out, or pick me up himself. Or maybe I really do look cold and he’s just not a bad person. Except for the fact that it’s his job to slice open our newly borns’ skulls.

But I don’t think about that now. I can’t. I grin up innocently at Ruth as the girls giggle beside me. Ruth screws her face into a mischievous grin and spins off to the bar to pour me a mug.

“He’s right. You do look like you could use a little something to warm you up,” one of the girls tells me. She has the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen. “Or someone,” she throws in as an afterthought, and I hear the Head Slicer chuckle nearby.

“You volunteering?”

“Do you want me to be?”

I grin lopsidedly. The girl with the reddish hair rolls her eyes. “You two wanna be alone?”

I shake my head, but don’t take my eyes off those green ones. “Nah. Just getting to know each other. What brings two beautiful ladies like yourselves out to an inn like this, huh?”

“Oh, nothing much. The chance of finding a man like you.”

Part of me feels dirty and the other part is flying. They’re nons and they think I am too. But being looked at like maybe I could be…attractive? It only happens when I’m spying and my wings are tucked away.

But they also think I’m a man. Evelyn knew I’m not, even with my wings tucked away. We were supposed to meet here for a date. Or something.

Because she looked at me like I could be attractive too.

It should disgust me, that thought. The Controller, of all people. And it does disgust me. For the most part.

But the small part of me that wonders what could have happened if she wasn’t the Controller and I met her here like she’d asked me? That part of me sings, and I wish it were a limb so I could hack the traitorous feeling off of my body.

I swallow the thought down and slide over to the girls’ side of the tree flesh table.

“So you’re on the hunt for someone strong, sensitive, and dashingly good-looking?”

The head Slicer chuckles over at the next table. I let him catch my eye and he winks at me. I grin even as I swallow vomit.

Everything’s going perfectly.

“On the hunt?” Green Eyes arches an eyebrow. “With that accent? What are you, one of those new hunting parties the king’s putting together?”

I nod my thanks at Ruth as she puts a steaming mug in front of me. I drink deeply before I answer, and I sigh into the warmth flooding into me. “Maybe.”

“Oh come on, he’s playing us. He’s too young to be on those squads. Look, he hasn’t even started growing a beard yet.”

The girl with reddish hair lifts her fingers to my face, and I can’t help it. I jump a bit. It’s too close for comfort. My knees slam into the underside of the tree flesh table, and Green Eye’s drink tips over onto her dress.

“I’m sorry!” I stumble, trying to rise but making it worse. “I didn’t mean to, I—”

“No, it’s fine, it—”

“It’s not fine, Maeve, you’re drenched! Ugh, how could you look like a hunter but move like a filthy faerie?”

Maeve’s friend drags her up and toward the bar to dry her dress off, glaring over her shoulder at me as she goes. I don’t hear Maeve’s protests even as her friend pulls her away, nor do I see the men on the other side of the bar laugh when she tells them the story of the loser with the smooth words but no moves to match. I don’t feel anything except like I’ve flown top speed into one of Harlenikal’s tail spikes. I just stay there, pathetically, half standing, my hands still pathetically half-outstretched. Mouth pathetically half-open.

Pathetically half-human.

Ruth bustles over with a rag in her hand and clicks her tongue at me. “No need to get your feet in a trap, sherba. It wasn’t your fault. I keep telling my boss he’s gotta get these damn tables raised.”

I straighten up and nod, remembering Tamzel’s training. I bring myself out of myself, out of Sadie, and into the person I become when I’m on a mission.

I let the head Slicer catch my gaze again and raise one shoulder at him.

“Doesn’t look like it’s your night,” he says. He raises an eyebrow when he notices my limp, but doesn’t comment on it.

I force an easy grin. “Just when I thought I’d found someone to talk to.”

“Well, you can talk to me. Not as attractive as a pair of girls your age, I imagine, but I promise I won’t storm off if you spill my mead. And hey, I’m the one who convinced Ruth to let you have it to begin with.”

“Never forget a favor,” I throw out a Lethean phrase as I raise my mug at him. I slip over to where he’s sitting. “Sure you don’t mind if I sit? I can’t guarantee the safety of your drink.”

The Head Slicer glances over my shoulder as I sit down. “As long as you can guarantee my safety from those girls—the redhead still looks like she wants to smack you—no, no, don’t turn around—then we’ll be fine.”

“Thanks.”

He waves me away like it’s nothing. I take a deep breath. “You in the province for some palace business?” I nod toward his robes, trying to inject my voice with the undercurrent of awe that a lot of Highlander nons from outlying settlements like Lethe get when they talk to an official from the Highlands proper.

“How could you tell?”

I laugh a little, actively pushing down the swirling anger in my stomach. I don’t want him to be funny and self-effacing. I don’t want him to invite me to sit with him and say things that make me feel like less of a hybrid freak.

I want him to be terrible. I want him to be sadistic and evil. The job of framing him as the one who sabotages the Slicing, not me, will be much easier if he’s a horrible person.

“I’m excited they sent me out here, actually,” he goes on, gesturing for me to come sit directly across from him.

Good, I think. He’s probably excited because he loves hurting newly borns.

“It’s so much more peaceful out here. You can actually see the sky and smell the air rather than all those poisons they’re pumping into everything these days.”

Damn it all. Not because he loves hurting newly borns, then.

I nod. “Yeah, it is nice out here. Oh, uh, thanks Ruth.” Her smile accompanies my refill and the head Slicer lifts his mug toward me once more. I do the same and we both drink deeply.

Too deeply. I cough slightly and squeeze my eyes shut, careful to close both eyelids so he doesn’t notice my second pair. “Well,” I wheeze, “that’s one way to get rid of the chill.” He laughs and half stands up so he can lean over and thump my back. My stomach seizes, but he touches me high enough up so he can’t feel the slight bulge of my wing sprouts.

“So what brings you out here alone tonight…?”

“Jayden,” I tell him smoothly, my fallback name for spying missions.

“Jayden,” he repeats. “Artem.”

I nod and hold my mug up to him again. “Thanks for the drink, Artem.” We sip in silence for a few minutes, me turning on my tree flesh bench to watch the nears and growns on the louder side of the inn, across the bar. They’re getting a bit raucous this late, dart games and the heady melodies from an old woman’s lute joining with the mead to make everyone that much louder, that much braver, that much closer to each other.

“Looking for some quiet time in a not so quiet space,” I finally answer his question, and he smiles indulgently.

“A near beyond your harvests, it seems,” he says approvingly.

I shrug. He drinks deeply from his mug and signals Ruth for two more, and I’m grateful that I swiped a serum that suppresses intoxication before I left the Grove. “I have some business in the Forest in the next week or so, and I’m due to arrive tomorrow. An unpleasant matter, I’m afraid. So you’re right. Some quiet time in a not so quiet space. Seems just right tonight.”

I clench my toes together under the table, the only thing I can clench without him noticing me tensing up. “Unpleasant?”

“Mmmm. That’s great, thank you, Ruth. You know about Initiations, of course.” He gestures with his new mug at my Slicing scar. “I always feel terribly about those your age, the ones who were Initiated as children rather than as newly borns. I fear scalpels get scarier, not less frightening, with age.” He sighs. “I’ve just been promoted to Head Initiator for the Grove, you see.” He says it as a statement of fact, not as a matter of pride. “At least now, all the operations are on newly borns who don’t know what to be scared of and won’t remember the procedure once it’s done.”

Not true. Most of us do remember. Even that early, even eight sunups after we’re born. Nons might not, but faeries definitely remember.

“Ah, still. It’s for the best. Imagine Lunav back in the grips of that terrible plague! You know I hear the Forest only has two faye healers; so hard to get volunteers to learn since the plague wiped out so many of them.”

I take a long swig of my warm mead. The spices more than the alcohol rush to my head. I keep quiet, just listening. I don’t think about the way he’d never talk to me if he knew I was a faerie. I call to mind all my training and keep my face wiped clean, even sympathetic.

The head Slicer—Artem—clears his throat, looking away like he’s embarrassed. “Ah, you came here for quiet, not to listen to the ramblings of some old man.”

I try to protest that he’s not old—and sure enough, with thick, graying brown hair and robust voice, he doesn’t seem at all old to me—but he waves away my stammering.

“What about you, Jayden? Don’t get enough quiet during your days?”

I grin and take a gulp of my mead. “No, sir. In the logging fields all day, sunup till sundown. The sound of those axes alone’ll drive anyone away from direct noise.” Non loggers are rarer—they like to use faeries for the hardest labor when possible—but by no means unheard of, especially in the poorer provinces like Lethe.

When I was younger, I learned that the easiest way to spy is to make up as few fake facts about myself as possible. I don’t imagine Zaylam would appreciate having to fly out of the safety of the Plains, risking her life to cause the distraction I need to help me get away from growing suspicions at a gaping hole in my story. Again.

A strangely companionable silence falls between us. I swivel on the tree flesh bench between us to see what’s causing the sudden commotion on the other side of the bar. An older man in a Hand’s uniform is leading a younger one out of the inn by the scruff of his neck while the boy’s friends hoot and carry on. I shift to make sure I’m not visible from the path to the door. I don’t recognize the Hand, but that doesn’t mean he’s not one of the Controller’s men.

I jump when Ruth appears at my side and puts a gentle hand on my shoulder. Thankfully, I don’t knock anything over this time. She swaps our empty mugs for steaming full ones in an easy motion as she leans forward, her lips close to our tilted heads. I force myself to listen to her instead of soaking in the combination of her low-cut dress and breath of spiced ale.

“Seems the young one’s father decided his performance in combat wasn’t where it needs to be for him to deserve a night out with his friends,” she tells us conspiratorially.

“Mmm. What’d the poor lad do?”

“According to him or according to his father?” We laugh. “Says he refused to arrest a mob of scum in the Samp. Gone all soft-like with them.” She rests her elbows on the tree flesh, and I hold my breath to keep my face neutral. “He swears, of course, that he’s just as tough on the slime as the rest. Just didn’t get the orders right is all.”

“Ruth! Another!” calls a voice from the bar.

She waves her rag in acknowledgment and lifts her tray back up.

“I’ll be back.” I return her wink, although there’s a hole in my stomach.

Artem shakes his head at his mug. “Fathers,” he mutters. “Have you got growns, Jayden?”

I think of Mama’s comforting hands on Mom’s shoulders and Mom’s soft voice singing me to sleep each night when I was a young one in the Highlands.

I think of the light non man Mom worked for before I was born, who forced himself onto Mom and gave me my lighter skin shade and my slowed, almost non-rate growth, my rounded ears and straight legs. I remember when he caught me Dreaming one night—he’d never come to the storage closet where we slept before, Mom was always supposed to go to him—and I didn’t know Mom had that much blood inside her. We were still running from him when we first met Mama.

After rescuing us from the Hands that chased us to the border of the Grove where we could claim sanctuary, Mama healed her. And me.

My growns.

“I guess everyone’s got growns, huh?” Artem frowns with his mouth but grins with his eyes. He swishes his mead around in his mug before taking a swig and giving me a pointed look. As always when I’m Jayden, I move in part truths, part terrors.

“My mom’s amazing. A healer, and not like one of those ones who just relies on faerie myths. She does the whole package. My dad’s trash. Wish I could say I never met him, but what can you do, right?”

My heart tugs, calling that non family, not mentioning Mama, not bringing up Aon. But Jayden’s heart swoops at the look of understanding in Artem’s eyes, the way he runs his thumb over his growing chin stubble and nods at me sympathetically.

People don’t look at me like this when I’m just Sadie. Not strangers, anyway.

Except Evelyn. I wonder, not for the first time, why I didn’t use my spy name with her the first time we met.

“What about you, Artem? Family?”

The Head Slicer heaves a heavy sigh and signals Ruth for another round. I remind myself that he’s not some nice person buying me mead. He’d never buy mead for me as Sadie—he’d just cut into my skull if he found out I haven’t been Sliced.

“I had family. A big one. I suppose they’re still my family, but…”

“But?” I brace myself for blood boiling.

“It was fine, if a little strained, as families can be. You know. But—oh, I guess it was what, ten harvests ago now—you’d have been no more than seven or so harvests, you probably won’t even remember this—” I wasn’t seven. I was just a newly born, but he can’t know about my slightly faeric growth rate—“the king retaliated against the Grovian dragons for spreading the risk of blood plague infection. Good thing too, if unfortunate for the poor souls, because their blood, you know, is the key to granting immunity to the thing.”

I watch him as he drinks deeply and fight off a smile. He leans in and points a casually uncoordinated finger at me.

“I have some of that lifesaving blood in a case in my room, just upstairs, you know. Funny, isn’t it, how the lifeblood of such magnificent creatures can be the key to saving the lives of an entire civilization?”

He stares at me with big eyes, and I realize he wants an answer.

“Yeah.” I think of Mama’s hatchling dragon, Xamamlee. He was slaughtered in the so-called retaliation Artem’s talking about. The first massacre. Zaylam’s screams during the second send me deep into my mug for more mead even though it isn’t affecting me.

Artem grins sadly at me. “I’m doing it again. You didn’t ask me about dragons and blood! Growns! I have them. But they chose the wrong side of this whole thing. Good people, my growns. They just never understood the value of doing what needs to be done. Understand me, Jayden?”

“Yes, sir.”

His smile reaches his eyes this time, and he reaches over to clap me on the shoulder.

“Sir is what they call me at my labor, Jayden. Artem. It’s Artem.”

I return his grin, hoping it doesn’t look like a grimace.

“If that boy had sympathy for the faeries he was supposed to arrest, I understand. Initiations are hard. Especially that first round we had to do, of all the growns and young ones—we started with the humans, and then later mandated it for other creatures—growns had to submit to the surgeries, and wouldn’t always accept the anasthetics.” We both shudder. Mom hadn’t. I don’t know if Mama had—I never asked. Mom’s muffled shrieks and tears were more than enough.

“I’m sure your mom gave you a great anesthetic, though. When you were a young one.”

Artem’s eyeing the Slicing scar on my right temple. I squirm, hoping he doesn’t recognize it as a tattoo, faded white ink on light brown skin. Mom had done the tattoo herself—when I was a newly born, not a young one like Artem’s imagining—when she convinced the man she worked for that she’d Slice me herself, being a healer and all.

“Yeah,” I half lie. “She held my hand through the whole thing.” Sort of. I was in her arms, anyway. A fully non newly born wouldn’t remember something like that. I do.

I wonder if he knows that it’s not only the older ones whose minds he’s butchered, whose hatchling connections he’s severed, that remember hearing his scalpel cut into tender flesh and newly formed bone.

I stand abruptly and, remembering myself, sway a little on the spot. Then I sway a lot.

Ruth, passing near me, lets out a throaty laugh. “Seems like you’re too young to handle that mead after all.”

I exaggerate another stagger, careful not to overdo it. I want to look young and in need of help, not pathetic in Artem’s eyes. And sure enough, he steps around the edge of the table to me. “You all right, son?” His voice is concerned, but his eyes are mischievous. “Maybe we indulged too quickly, hm?” He puts his arm around my shoulders, and I’m glad for my thick layer of muscles carved out by labor. “Ruth! Can you get this nice young boy a room?”

I almost smirk at my own cleverness, but I just nod gratefully with a bemused grin on my face. “I’ve drank more than this before. Maybe ‘cause I skipped dinner,” I mutter in my own defense, but I’ve already won. I feel the vial Kashat took from Jax so acutely it’s like the thing is burning in my pocket.

He supports me on my left side all the way up the rickety tree flesh stairs, winking at Ruth as she tells him which room to plop me in. I swallow my embarrassment as Maeve and her friend, now with the group playing darts on the other side of the bar, giggle at my retreating back. Artem takes on both the dead weight from my limp and the stumbling uncertainty of my fake intoxication surprisingly well; his reedy body doesn’t look particularly well built, but I guess you have to be of a certain kind of strength to tug at the Energies like he must as a healer.

The Head Slicer leans me against his shoulder as he fiddles with a door just above the stairs to open it. It occurs to me that other than Jax and P’Tal, I’ve never had this much physical contact with a man before. It feels strange. I wonder if he’d be touching me any differently if he knew I was a woman. Or a faerie.

Artem looks around the empty room for a moment and stokes a small tree flesh flame in the fireplace before laying me gingerly onto the solitary mattress, stuffed with dried up plant carcasses.

“You rest here for a bit, and I’ll have Ruth bring you up some water soon. She says you can have the room as long as you need, no charge. All right, Jayden?”

I let my neck wobble loosely like Lerian’s did last Lunamez, when we smuggled some mead from Rada’s stash and drank it deep into the nighttime celebrations. “Mmhmm.” Artem chuckles and brushes a couple stray, curly hairs from my forehead before leaving the room, closing the door softly behind him.

The moment the door closes, I’m bolt upright on the mattress, my ears straining. I hear his footsteps thud down the stairs and back into the bar area, and I immediately crouch on my haunches, pressing my ear to the door, straining to hear any movement in the corridor.

I don’t have much time.

Hearing nothing but the rustling from downstairs, I slip out of the room quietly and tiptoe to my left. The biggest room—the one reserved for the most esteemed passers-through—is in the left corner wing of the corridor.

I’m starting to sweat despite the chill in the air as I tug softly at the Energies around me, tugging and twisting until I hear a small click in the doorknob. The tree flesh door swings open with a slight creak and I flinch, frozen. But there’s still no movement but my own.

I slip inside the room, hoping against hope that it’s Artem’s. I poke into a soft sack full of clothing, and sure enough, a change of Head Slicer clothing is folded neatly underneath some sleeping wear. I picked the right room.

He doesn’t seem to have many possessions here. For a moment a swirl of panic flares up in my belly, but then I notice the hard case sticking out slightly from under the mattress. It looks like what Jax attaches to the back of his chair when he goes to heal someone who can’t make it to the infirmary. A classic healer’s case.

I lick my lips. This is it. I steady my hands so I can flip the catch of the case open. My eyes fall immediately on two vials. They’re full of deep golden liquid, the color and consistency of Lunavad tree sap.

Dragon blood.

I shudder and wonder whose veins this blood used to run through. Before I was born, Mama’s hatchling dragon, Xamamlee, died saving one of his friends in the massacre of the Plains. Mama says before the massacre, all Lunavic skies were always full of dragons and their songs. After Xamamlee and the others were killed, the Lunavad trees magicked the barrier around the Plains and with rare exception, the dragons don’t leave their confines anymore.

I hope this blood is too new to be Xamamlee’s. Mama still cries about him sometimes in the Plains with Baml, her hatchling tree, but only when she thinks I’m not watching.

My ears strain for movement in the corridor, but I can’t hear anything beyond the cheers and shouts of the ever-rowdier crowd of Letheans downstairs. I slip the vial out of my pocket and remember what Kashat had told me— mixing its contents with the dragon blood will hopefully allow the Slicing to do whatever it supposedly does to prevent the plague, but will still allow the Sliced newly born to Dream.

My heart slams as there’s rustling on the stairs. I freeze, helpless, but another door opens all the way down the other side of the corridor. I release the breath I didn’t know I was holding and work faster.

I open the vial and twist off the stoppers for the dragon blood with my teeth, one at a time. I drop an equal amount of the liquid Kashat gave me into both vials before closing them up and giving them a swift shake. They glow for a moment, the whispy golden color of banned soul keeping magic, and then still. The blood looks the same as they did before I touched them, no trace of the sabotage I’ve attempted.

I wipe the vials carefully on my tunic to remove any smudges from my fingers or mouth and slip them back in the case, exhaling shakily as my eyes try to avoid looking at the carefully wrapped set of scalpels. I swallow vomit and seal the clasps of the case, placing it back against the wall in the same slanted position I’d found it in.

More movement on the stairs. I launch myself out of the room, silent as Osley, and slip into the room at the top of the stairs. I throw my body onto the mattress and remember to look intoxicated.

A soft knock at the door precedes a small sliver of light from the corridor glowing off my face. “Jayden,” Ruth calls gently. “I brought you water.”

I am absolutely alert, but force my body to move blearily, even with my heart beating wildly. I accept the water with a murmur of thanks and hold it with both hands as I drink it all hurriedly. Some slips down my chin onto my tunic. I don’t care. I need something to do with my hands, my mouth, to keep my entire body from shaking.

Ruth’s staring down at me with her head cocked to one side, her wide gray eyes narrowed as she looks down at me. “Want me to send for anyone to come get you?”

I shake my head and drag myself up, careful to stumble less than I had on the way up here. “No, no. But I uh…I should be getting back to town.”

Ruth scoffs. “Town’s a ways away. What’re you gonna do, fly to get there?” She chuckles and I force a laugh.

“I’ll be okay. Just needed to lie down a bit. Tell Artem uh…tell Artem thanks for the drinks. And the help.”

Ruth sighs, her eyes looking at my face hard. Then she tosses up her hands slightly as the voices of young men yelling for more mead travel up the stairs.

“Duty calls,” she tells me with a twisted smile. “You get home safe now, all right?”

I nod and wait until I hear drunken cheers rise up downstairs at her return. All eyes will be on her, I know. I descend the stairs at a crouch, my eyes seeking out Artem. He’s staring thoughtfully into the bottom of his mug. I swing myself from the stairs to the back door and slip out into the night.

The cold air hits my sweaty skin like a sheet of ice, but Osley’s bright eyes are waiting for me at the edge of the Forest. I force myself not to run, and I thank Lunara that the cold has forced the lingering men from earlier back into the inn.

“Mission accomplished, Os,” I tell quer, bending down to stroke quer gray-white fur after seeking and receiving permission from the grass to step into the Forest again. Que nuzzles into my hands, and we both turn to look back at the inn.

I wonder if the people who were kind to me in there would have even hesitated to send for the king’s Hands if they’d caught a glimpse of my wings.

I wonder what Artem would say if he knew the near he’d befriended tonight only talked to him to destroy his means of making a living. Because his means of making a living is destroying my life.