Some days it feels impossible. Thousands are suffering. Possibly tens of thousands. We hardly make a dent—and sometimes we’re too late, or we can’t steal enough, or someone falls ill so quickly that the medicine refuses to work.
Those are the worst, when someone goes from mild body aches to dead between one visit and the next.
Today, we’re able to get started on our rounds quickly, because we built up a good stash of crushed petals yesterday, so we don’t need to waste time thieving. I won’t admit this to Wes, but I’m still a little shaky over the few moments he was late. He’d never let me hear the end of it. As it is, we’re walking through the woods while he whistles under his breath. He probably thinks I don’t know the melody, a bawdy tavern song about a sailor wooing a maiden, but my father used to sing them all the time when he was busy crushing roots and measuring medicines, just because they would make my mother blush and giggle.
Thoughts of my parents still have the power to make my throat tight, so I shove them away and kick at pebbles in the path.
“You shouldn’t whistle that song,” I say. “It’s vulgar.”
He glances over and knocks the brim of my hat down a few inches. “Love is never vulgar, Tessa.”
“Oh, you think it’s a song about love, do you?”
“Well, I’m certain the maiden feels something for the sailor. Why else would she be removing her underthings?”
Now my cheeks are heated, and I’m glad for the darkness and the mask. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of hearing me giggle. “You’re incorrigible.”
“On the contrary. I am highly corrigible.” He fishes an apple from his pack and offers it to me. “Breakfast?”
I blink at him. We didn’t have time to go into the Royal Sector this morning. I don’t like the thought of Wes going without my knowledge. Some days I wonder what I would do if he simply . . . vanished.
I shouldn’t be so attached. I know I shouldn’t. But since my parents were executed, the only constant in my life has been Wes. The thought of fate yanking him away, too . . . I almost can’t bear it.
He must be able to read my expression in the forest shadows, because he says, “I saved one from yesterday.”
“Oh.” I hesitate. My stomach is still empty, but men who work in the forges don’t get a lot of opportunities to eat, and I’m sure Wes is no different. “No—you have it.”
He doesn’t argue, and he bites into it, his crunching loud in the early morning air. “You sure?” he says, holding it out. “The honey’s gone cold, but it’s still sweet.”
When I hesitate again, he picks up my hand and presses the fruit into it. “Lord, Tessa. Just share the apple.”
His fingers are warm against mine, and I try not to think about the fact that his lips were just against this piece of fruit. I twist it to bite at a different spot.
He starts whistling that stupid drinking song again. I roll my eyes and take a second bite.
Many of the sectors in Kandala have open borders, with the exception of three: the Royal Sector, where the king and his brother and all of the elites live, plus Moonlight Plains and Emberridge, where the Moonflower grows. Those sectors are heavily guarded and walled off, and also boast the healthiest—and wealthiest—populations. The Royal Sector sits in the center of Kandala, though, bordered by five others. Mosswell sits to the north, which is mostly livestock and produce. Artis is east, known for its massive lumber trade because of the proximity to the Queen’s River. The Sorrowlands is a vast sector to the west, composed mostly of desert.
South of the Royal Sector are Steel City, home to metalworkers and machinists thanks to its proximity to the iron mines, and Trader’s Landing, which has a bustling market that runs parallel to the Flaming River for miles. It’s sometimes called Traitor’s Landing, ever since their chief consul killed the king and queen.
The lands immediately surrounding the Royal Sector are heavily wooded and difficult to travel, dense with underbrush and brambles and thorns—the best place for our workshop, especially since it’s far from the main gates, and our little wood fire never makes much smoke.
Beyond the woods are the lands where most of the sectors come together to surround the Royal Sector like spokes on a wheel. The area is densely populated because of the closeness to the Royal Sector—and it’s also dense with poverty, illness, and armed guards watching for smugglers and troublemakers. My father used to say that the royal elites would sneer and call these lands the Wilds, a slur against the people forced to live and work there. But the people claimed the name for their own, and now living in the Wilds is almost seen as a point of pride, where sector borders are blurred and the people all feel united by desperation.
We always start in the Steel City part of the Wilds, because it’s closest to our workshop, and I think Wes is less worried about getting caught by anyone he might know. We trade lookout at each house, because we can’t just leave the vials and vanish into the night. We wake each person, make sure they drink every drop, then take our vials and leave. Leave no evidence, Wes always says. No proof.
The streets are empty and quiet in the early morning darkness, but Wes isn’t whistling now. We slip from house to house in the shadows.
At the fifth house, I step up onto the porch just as a low moan sounds from inside. I hesitate with my hand an inch from the wood.
Weston is instantly at my side, appearing out of the darkness. “Tessa. What’s wrong?”
The moan sounds again, and he freezes.
Mistress Kendall lives here with her son, Gillis. Kendall’s husband died two years ago, but she and Gillis haven’t shown any sign of the fever since, and they were two people I’ve felt we were helping. Gillis is thirteen, and he works as a runner for the forge closest to here. He’s a hard worker, and he often whispers that he wants to join me and Wes once he’s old enough. We haven’t seen him in a week because his mother said he’s been making early morning runs for supplies—but it means he’s been missing the doses we bring.
Wes taps at the door lightly, and for a moment, we hear only silence. Then a fractured sob from inside.
Wes’s eyes meet mine. I swallow.
He closes his fingers around the latch and eases the door open. Kendall is kneeling on the floor in the dark, a body wrapped up in blankets by her knees. She snaps her head up with a gasp.
Gillis. I suck in a breath, too. Wes puts a finger to his lips and shakes his head, and I’m not sure if it’s at me or her. Probably both.
“Tessa,” Mistress Kendall cries out anyway, half yelp, half sob. “Wes. He’s dying.”
Dying.
Not dead. Yet.
I stride forward and drop to a knee beside her. Gillis’s eyes are closed, and his dark hair is matted with sweat. That’s usually a good sign, meaning the fever has broken, but I think it has more to do with the blankets she’s got wrapped around him. I’m surprised we didn’t hear his breathing from the door. The death rattle in his chest is clear.
My own chest tightens. “Can you sit him up?” I whisper. “We brought medicine.”
But we’ll be too late. I can see we’ll be too late. He’s not even conscious. There’s no way he can drink a dose—and little chance it’ll do any good at this point.
Kendall nods hurriedly, and Wes meets my eyes. His expression is resigned, but he gets an arm under the boy’s shoulders to help. Gillis’s small body flops lifelessly, his head lolling against Wes’s shoulder. I fish one of the vials out of my pack and pull the cork free. My fingers are trembling.
“Gillis,” says Wes, and his voice is very low, very soft. “Gillis, open your eyes.”
We all hold our breath. Hoping. Praying. Waiting.
In the beginning, when the fever began to steal lives, many people believed that it spread through close contact, especially since it seemed to affect those in the Wilds before striking the elites in the Royal Sector. The gates to the Royal Sector were kept locked for weeks. But my father kept records of those who grew
ill, and as cases began to appear at random, even among those who closed themselves away, it quickly became apparent that the fevers had nothing to do with close contact. I’ve kept up my father’s books, and there’s no pattern to it. The illness might take one life—or a dozen.
It might leave an entire family unscathed—or it might leave a half-dozen bodies waiting for the next funeral pyre.
A sob breaks free from Mistress Kendall’s chest again. Just when I’ve begun to give up hope, Gillis coughs hard, then blinks. “Ma?” he croaks.
Kendall gasps. “Gillis! Oh, Gillis!” She presses her hands to his cheeks. He blinks again slowly.
“Shh,” says Wes. “The night patrol will hear. Tessa?”
I take a deep breath for the first time since we came through the doorway. “Here.” I hold out the vial. “Gillis, you have to drink.”
He coughs wetly. “Yes, Miss Tessa.”
While Wes helps him drink, I dig through my pack hurriedly, pushing the vials of elixir aside, looking for my bottle of morningwood oil. A few drops will help rouse a drunk or someone with a head injury, but I’ve learned that it will also help the Moonflower elixir work more quickly.
Mistress Kendall is kissing his forehead, his cheek, her breath shaking, her hands fluttering. “Oh, Gillis,” she whispers against his temple.
His hand lifts weakly to touch her cheek, but I pull the dropper of morningwood free. “This too,” I whisper.
His dry lips part, and I tap three droplets into his mouth. His throat works as he swallows.
“There,” says Wes. He finds Gillis’s hand and gives it a squeeze. “You’ll be slipping through the shadows with us in no time.”
Gillis blinks, but then a slow smile finds his mouth. “Promise.”
“I promise.”
Mistress Kendall presses a kiss to his cheek again, murmuring nonsense, but the love in her tone is pure and clear. I put a hand on her shoulder. She looks at me, tears gathering in her eyes.
Gillis coughs, hard, then tries to inhale, but the muscles of his neck stand out as he fights for air. His fingers dig into Wes’s arm.
“Slow,” Wes says, but I can hear the concern underlying his tone. “Slow, Gillis. Breathe.”
The boy’s jaw clenches tight, and his back arches, his fingers grasping at nothing.
Then he flops back against Wes’s shoulder, his entire body limp.
Kendall is frozen. I’m frozen.
Wes is the one who moves, laying the boy flat, pulling the blankets free. He presses two fingers to Gillis’s throat, then drops to put an ear against his chest.
Gillis doesn’t move.
Wes looks up. His eyes are blue pools of sadness.
“No!” Kendall’s voice is a sudden shriek, full of rage and pain and fear that echoes in my own chest. “No!”
Somewhere in the distance a dog starts barking.
She keeps screaming. “This is their fault! That horrible king or his horrible brother or any of those other horrible people who live on the other side of that wall. I hate them! I hate them! I hate—”
Weston grabs her arm and slaps a hand over her mouth. His voice is a low rush of words. “Kendall. Get a hold of yourself.”
“Wes,” I whisper.
“It’s treason,” he snaps at me. “If the night patrol hears, they’ll kill her, too.”
“I don’t care,” she moans. She’s sagging against him. “Let them kill me. Let them see what they’ve done to my boy.”
I take a long, shuddering breath. “Kendall—I’m so sorry.”
“He was just a boy.” She inhales, then seems to steel herself, and she runs a hand against her son’s face. “It’s their fault, you know.” Rage fills her voice again. “They sit in there healthy, and they leave the rest of us to live or die.”
We’ve heard this a hundred times. We’ll hear it a hundred more.
It’s why we do this. Because she’s right.
Wes pulls a vial from his bag and holds it out. “You need to take yours, Kendall.”
She takes the vial in her shaking hand, and I think she’s going to pull the stopper and drink it, but instead she moves to hurl it into the darkness. I gasp.
Always quick, Wes snatches it out of the air before it goes far. “Don’t let your grief make you stupid.”
His voice isn’t unkind, but she flinches and all but crumples onto her son’s body. “Give it to someone who wants to live. I don’t.”
I hesitate, then put a hand over hers. “Kendall,” I whisper. “Kendall, I’m so sorry.”
She turns her hand to clasp mine within hers. “You know what it’s like,” she says. “You lost someone, too.”
“Yes,” I say. My father. My mother. I’ll never be able to erase the moment of their death from my memory. Unbidden, tears form in my own eyes.
“Someone needs to stop them,” says Kendall, her breath shaking. “Someone needs to stop them, Tessa.”
“I know,” I say. “For now, we do what we can.”
She nods, then lifts my hand and kisses my knuckles.
“You should drink your medicine,” Wes says gently. “Gillis would want you to.”
“Gillis can’t care anymore.” She draws a shuddering breath. “Go. Both of you. Don’t waste your potions on me.”
I inhale to refuse, and her face contorts with fury. “Go!” she shouts. “Go! You remind me of him. Go!”
I jerk back.
“Tessa,” says Wes. He catches my elbow.
I don’t want to leave. We shouldn’t leave her like this, a broken husk of a woman sobbing over the body of her son.
But Wes is right.
“We’ll tell Jared Sexton,” I say to her quietly, referring to a woodworker a few houses away. He’s big and burly—and usually the one who drags bodies to the pyre for burning. “I’ll check on you tomorrow.”
She doesn’t answer. She’s sobbing into her hands now.
We slip away into the shadows, our feet practiced at making no sound on the pathways. Weston must see or hear something, though, because he quickly jerks me into the pit of darkness by the corner of the next house. My back is against the building, and he’s all but pressed against me, his head ducked, partially blocking mine.
“What—” I begin, but his eyes jerk to mine, and his head shakes almost invisibly.
I peer past him. There’s little light, but now I can hear the booted footsteps of the night patrol. Wes was right—they likely heard Kendall’s screams, and now they’re here to check it out. It’s too dark for me to see her. Maybe they won’t see anything, and they’ll pass by.
But no. Kendall comes flying through her door. “You killed him!” she screams. She has a rock in each hand. One flies, and a man cries out. “You tell that pig of a king and his evil brother that they’ll burn for their—”
A crossbow fires. The arrow hits with a sickening sound. Her voice goes silent, and her body drops.
I whimper. Against me, Wes goes rigid.
One of the patrolmen kicks her body.
“Leave it,” says one of the others. “They’ll find her.”
Another one spits at the ground. Maybe at her. “They’ll never learn.”
“Tessa.” Weston’s voice is a bare hiss in my ear. “Mind your mettle, girl. They’ll kill you, too.”
His weight is against me, pressing me into the wall, his hand over my mouth. I don’t realize I’m struggling against him until I stop. My eyes meet his, and when I blink, he goes blurry.
“I know,” he whispers.
My breathing shudders. I clench my eyes closed. His hand comes off my mouth.
I press my face into his shoulder, shaking with tears like a child.
After a moment, his hand presses to my cheek below the mask, his thumb brushing away the tears that slip down my face. “I know,” he says again. “I know.”
At some point, my tears slow, and I realize that Wes is nearly holding me, and I want to stand right here in this circle of his comfort, because the
idea of anything else is too terrible. The thought feels immeasurably selfish in the face of what happened to Kendall and Gillis, but I can’t help it. Wes is warmth and safety and . . . friendship.
He draws back at exactly that moment, his hand falling to his side. He’s looking into the distance, his eyes searching for trouble. “We should head west now. The night patrol is already keyed up. I don’t want to take a chance. If we have time, we can double back and do the rest.”
I swallow and try to force my thoughts into some kind of coherent pattern. “Yes. Sure.” I sniff back the last of my tears and swipe at my face. I’m full of sorrow now, but I know from experience that later it’s going to rearrange itself into rage. “Should we—should we do something about her body?”
“No,” he says. He reaches out to straighten my hat. “They’re right. Someone will find the body.”
“Weston!”
“Shh.” He puts a finger to his mouth, and he shakes his head. “I’m not being callous. We can’t help her anymore, Tessa.” He adjusts his pack, the vials clinking. “We do have rounds.”
“Right.” I swallow. “Rounds.”
We head into the darkness again, shifting silently through the night. Weston’s usual lighthearted banter is gone. His whistling is silent. The air is heavy, as if we carry the weight of what happened along with us.
“I hate the king,” I whisper. “I hate the prince. I hate what they’ve done. I hate what Kandala has become.”
My voice is so soft that I wonder if he can even hear me, but after a moment, Wes reaches out to take my hand. He gives it a squeeze, for just a second longer than necessary—the only sign that this affected him as profoundly as it did me.
“Me too,” he says.
Then he lets go and nods at the horizon, any hint of vulnerability gone. “Morning is coming. We’ll have to step quick.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Corrick
When Harristan was very young, he was weak and sickly. He fell ill often. This was before the fevers had begun to terrorize our people—before I was even born. I’ve heard rumors that my mother and father were relieved when she became pregnant with me, because there was a time when they worried Harristan wouldn’t survive, that they’d be left without an heir. Our parents spent so many years coddling him that they never seemed to stop, even once he grew out of his childhood illnesses. Weeklong hunting trip? Harristan remained behind in the palace, while I was free to gallop off with Father and the nobles. Journey to distant sectors? Harristan would ride in the carriage, protected from the sunlight and the cool air, while I would ride with the guards and advisers, feeling far older than I was when they included me in their banter.
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