“Do you not think the people who have legally procured it have a right to their medicine?”
I hesitate.
His eyes bore into mine. “Truth, Tessa. If you will not give me the truth, you can spend the rest of your days in the Hold, and my brother’s wishes be damned.”
I stare back at him. I stood in front of Wes and said the time had come for revolution. I said we should step out of the shadows. Now I’m out of the shadows. I’m right in front of the king—and he’s asking for the truth.
So I give it to him. “Your dosages are too high,” I say. “You’re taking more than you need.”
“You cannot possibly know that.”
“I do know that. My father was an apothecary, and I learned to measure doses myself. The people we are treating stay just as healthy as people taking six times as much.” I’m saying too much, but now that I’ve begun, I can’t stop. “My father used to say that too much medicine could be as harmful as too little. I sometimes wonder if you could heal all your people by virtue of regulating dosages more stringently. If you add a bit of roseseed oil to the elixir—”
“You and your father steal together?”
“I—what? No. My father—my parents are dead.” I swallow. “They died two years ago.”
To my surprise, he looks startled. He draws back in the chair. “You have my sympathy.”
“Do I?” I say recklessly. “They were killed by the night patrol. Your night patrol.”
“So your father was a smuggler? An illegal trader?”
“No!” The king might as well have slapped me across the face. I grip the edge of the table. “My father—he—he was a good man—”
“He was doing what you were doing?”
“Yes.”
“Which, at its base, is stealing, yes?”
I glare at him. “It’s not the same.”
“It’s the same to the night patrol.” He takes a sip of tea.
I want to knock it right into his face.
Corrick might not have cut my hands off, but I have a feeling the guards standing by the wall would do it.
“My intention is not to upset you,” says King Harristan. “But if you are to hold me in low regard for what happened to your parents, I would suggest that you consider the choices they made. Every smuggler has a story to justify their actions. The penalties are well known. How can I turn a blind eye to one type of thievery and not another?”
My fingers are clutching the edge of the table so tightly that my knuckles ache. He’s wrong.
But . . . he’s also not. I had this exact argument with Wes from the other side. It’s all the same to the king and his brother.
“What choice do we have?” I snap. “People are dying.”
“I know.”
I freeze. That note is in his voice again. He does know. He does care.
“It might be all the same to the night patrol,” I say roughly, “but it’s different when someone just wants to survive.”
“I believe the people who buy the medicine lawfully want to survive as well.”
“If someone is starving and they steal a loaf of bread—”
“It is still stealing.” His tone doesn’t change.
“Have you ever been starving?” I say boldly.
Silence falls between us, sharp and quick. He hasn’t. Of course he hasn’t.
His eyes don’t leave mine. “If you had this theory about Moonflower petals, about dosages, why did you not make it known?”
“To whom?” I demand. “I just told you, and you didn’t believe me!”
He stares back at me impassively, running his finger around the rim of his teacup again.
I sit back sheepishly. “Your . . . um . . . Majesty.”
“You said ‘we.’ ”
“What?” This whole conversation is leaving me a bit breathless.
“Are you referring to the Benefactors?”
“No! I don’t know who they are.”
“You said, ‘the people we are treating stay just as healthy.’ Who is we?”
I frown. There are people in the sectors who think the king is a boorish fool who’s lazy and frivolous, but sitting in front of him, I can tell that they’re wrong. I don’t get the sense that it’s easy to lie to this man.
I do get the sense that he actually wants this kind of honest discourse, which is more surprising than anything else I’ve learned since coming here.
I take a deep breath. “When my parents died, I was there. I saw it. The night patrol—they’re not . . . they’re not subtle. I was blind with grief. I was going to run out after them. But there was a man in the shadows who caught me and trapped me in the darkness. I thought he was an outlaw. And he was. But not . . . not a smuggler. He was saving lives with stolen medicine. He saved my life.” To my surprise, my throat tightens. I feel like I’m grieving Wes all over again, in a completely different way. “We became . . . friends. We were partners. We helped people.”
“And what became of this friend?”
I wish I still had Quint’s handkerchief. I dab at my eyes with my fingertips. “The night after you tried to execute the eight smugglers, he wanted to stop. He said it was too dangerous. But I begged him to continue. I didn’t—I didn’t—” My voice catches. I can’t breathe. I press a hand to my chest and close my eyes.
He wasn’t real. Wes wasn’t real. He didn’t die on the wall. He didn’t exist.
“He was captured,” says King Harristan.
I swallow. Nod. Breathe.
“Look at me.”
I have to force my eyes open. He’s staring at me again, but his voice is no longer impassive.
“What of the people you were helping? What will become of them?”
I swipe at my cheeks. “They’ll get sick and die,” I say. “Or they won’t. The same as will happen to anyone who doesn’t have the elixir.”
“Finn,” he says, and it takes me a moment to realize he’s not talking to me.
The footman peels away from the wall. “Your Majesty.”
“Fetch Quint.”
Quint must not have been far, because he appears in less than a minute.
King Harristan doesn’t even give him time to speak, but Quint must be used to that, because he already has a pen in hand. “I would like a meeting with the palace doctors and apothecaries about the dosage levels in the Royal Sector. Tessa will present her findings to them tomorrow, and—”
“What?” I squeak.
Quint pauses in his writing to lift a finger to his lips, and I clamp my mouth shut.
“I would like a full accounting of the medicine dispensed in each sector by population, along with records of efficacy. Have Corrick review it. Issue a statement that our breech of security was a misunderstanding, that a concerned citizen, an apothecary herself, was merely trying to deliver a reporting of her research to the palace.”
I’m staring at him.
King Harristan looks back at me levelly. “I can’t grant you your life forever,” he says, “but I can grant a few more days to corroborate your story. I am interested in hearing your theories in more detail.”
I don’t know what to say.
“She is overcome with gratitude, Your Majesty,” says Quint.
The king grants him a withering glance. “Out of here, Quint. Take her with you.”
“Indeed.” Quint snaps his book shut and offers me his arm.
“Thank you?” I whisper. I’m not sure I mean it. I’m not sure if I want to.
Quint pats my hand where it rests on his arm. “Come along, my dear. Etiquette awaits.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Corrick
I’m rarely called to the Hold when the sun is in the sky, and now it’s been twice in one week. It’s never a particularly pleasant place, but during the nights it’s usually cool, which keeps the odor manageable, and quiet, because even the most offensive criminals must sleep occasionally.
During the day, it’s hell.
; “You really must do something about the smell,” Allisander says, a handkerchief masking his face as we walk through the gates.
Maybe it’s only hell because he’s here.
Or maybe it’s hell because I am. I should be in the palace. I should be watching over Tessa. I keep thinking of the way she tossed that glass of brandy at me, and I imagine her doing something similar to my brother.
It’s too easy to imagine. And despite all evidence to the contrary, I really am a lot more tolerant than Harristan is. Lord, Tessa.
“You haven’t said anything about the girl,” says Allisander.
The girl. I bristle at his dismissive tone, and it takes effort to hide it. The girl is brave. Brilliant. Strong. Compassionate. The girl does more for Kandala than the spoiled consul standing in front of me. “The young woman you assumed spent the night in my quarters?”
A guard steps forward to hold the door to the staircase.
“Well . . . yes,” says Allisander. “According to Arella, you were—”
“I know what Arella thinks I was doing, just as I know what you think I was doing.” I glare at him, and he has the grace to look surprised. “She was wrong. So are you.”
He stares at me over the handkerchief. “Rumors say she snuck into the palace to kill Harristan.”
There’s an undercurrent of concern to his tone that makes me wonder, just for a moment, if the tiniest spark of their friendship remains. But then he adds, “She could have been working with the smugglers I captured, and now you’ve allowed her access to the king.”
Ah. Of course. I keep my eyes forward and stride down the stairs. “She’d hardly be alive right now if that were true.”
He’s all but hissing at me behind his handkerchief. “Well, it’s certainly not commonplace for you to bring a smuggler to your room—”
“Consul, I hope you didn’t drag me to the Hold before breakfast for a discussion we could have had in the palace.” We reach the bottom, and I glance at him. I need him to stop digging for information about Tessa—at least until I can find out what she said to my brother. “Tell me about your prisoners.”
He huffs for a moment, like a discomfited toddler. “Well. They struck in the Wilds. We had six wagons full between Lissa’s shipment and my own. There were dozens of them, all at once.”
I stop short in the final hallway before the turn into the lowest level. A lone lantern hangs from the wall here, flickering shadows across Allisander’s cheeks. There isn’t much that could drag my thoughts away from Tessa, but that does it. “Dozens?” I say. “Your supply run was attacked by dozens?”
“Yes. Far more than the small pack you unearthed from Steel City.” He coughs, and he must be grimacing behind the handkerchief. “We couldn’t capture them all, of course. And lord knows how many parcels they were able to escape with—”
“You don’t keep an inventory?”
“Of course we do. But they set one of the wagons on fire—”
“On fire?”
“Yes. They had flaming arrows. Torches. They were organized, and they must have known we were coming. We just authorized this shipment two days ago, and because of its size, few people knew we were coming.” He makes a disgusted noise. “I knew those first eight wouldn’t be the end of it. There must be hundreds more, waiting to destroy our supply runs. They endanger all of Kandala, Corrick. They must be stopped.”
“I agree.” And I do. If Allisander and Lissa are spooked, they’ll stop making shipments at all. Or they’ll require the sectors to spend money and manpower they can’t spare to come get medicine themselves. I wonder if any of the prisoners were those who escaped during the riot. “I’ll question them. We’ll unearth what’s happening.”
“Good.”
We turn the corner. The smell is worse down here than usual. It’s quieter, too. For midmorning, I was expecting shouts and curses to be coming from the cells, but no one is talking. Four guards are stationed down here, and they nod to me, but they look . . . bored. I stop at the first set of bars and peer inside.
A young woman lies on the floor, facing the rear wall. I see brown hair first, in a messy pile beside her head. I’m so used to watching for Tessa among the smugglers that are dragged to the Hold, so for an instant, my stomach clenches. It’s not her. I know it’s not. It can’t be.
This woman doesn’t look quite right anyway. She’s older than Tessa, with beige skin a few shades darker. Her jaw is bruised heavily, her lips cracked and bleeding. A fly alights on her mouth and she doesn’t flinch—meaning she’s unconscious or asleep. One arm seems twisted at an unnatural angle.
I can’t shake the tension in the pit of my stomach.
I say nothing and move to the next cell. A man this time, easily in his thirties. Eyes closed, his nose crooked and crusted with blood. His clothes are torn and stained crimson in so many areas that I can’t tell where his injuries originated. Both arms are definitely broken.
My jaw tightens.
Next cell. Another man, this time in his twenties. Broken, bloody, and bruised. Also unconscious. His leg is broken.
Next cell. A third man, even older. His beard is speckled with gray. The side of his face is awash with bruises and swelling, and it looks like his eye is crusted shut with blood.
A woman is in the next cell, her breathing rough and ragged. Her face is dirty but unharmed, and her feet are bare and bleeding. She’s also pregnant. While I’m standing there, her eyes flutter open, and she coughs against the straw-covered floor. She sees me watching her, and I wait for fear to bloom in her eyes.
It doesn’t. Resignation does. “I figured dying here would be quicker than the fever,” she croaks, then blinks slowly.
Allisander said they were organized, that this was a planned attack, but none of these people look like organized criminals. I wonder if they’re all sick.
“We’ll make sure it’s more painful,” says Allisander. He kicks at the ground, sending a cloud of dust and grit rattling into the cell.
The woman coughs again, then spits blood onto the stone floor. “I figured. You proved that when we surrendered.”
It takes a moment for the impact of that to sink in. I turn and look at Allisander. “They surrendered?”
“Of course. We had a heavy contingent of guards. Once we realized what we were under attack, we were able to corner half of them. Though most were able to escape into the Wilds.”
The woman smiles, blood on her lips. “Thanks to the Benefactors, you’ll see them again.”
I freeze. I remember the shouts during the riot in front of the gates. “Who are the Benefactors?”
Her eyes fall closed.
Allisander slams a hand against the bars. “You will talk.”
She doesn’t.
Allisander inhales as if he’s going to spew more vitriol, but she’s not going to talk, and he won’t be satisfied unless I start creating nightmares to get answers. I’ll do it if I have to, but not for his private indulgence. I head for the next cell. Allisander shuts his mouth and follows. Another man this time. He’s sitting upright in the corner, cradling his wrist in his lap, but his eyes are heavy-lidded. He’s pale and sweating, his breathing a little too quick.
With a start, I realize he’s a man Tessa and I used to bring medicine to. His name is Jarvis, and he has a pretty wife named Marlea. I wonder if I’ll find her in one of the cells. They live in Artis, just outside the Wilds, and he works as a bricklayer while she mends clothes. He’s large and thick with muscle, but he’s also one of the most gentle men I’ve ever met. While most of the people who rely on us for medicine are quick to condemn the king—and me—Jarvis was one who’d always say, “I’m sure the man is doing the best he can.”
I can’t see him attacking a supply run.
Then again, I couldn’t see Tessa sneaking into the palace either.
Tessa. Tension’s grip on my insides grows even tighter. I look at the consul. “If they surrendered, why are they all so heavily injured?”
I don’t play. “Yes.”
What I can see of his face turns serious. I want to rip the handkerchief away. “Why?” he says.
“Because I can’t question prisoners who are barely conscious.” I pause. “My guards know that. If someone surrenders, they’re brought to the Hold. Unharmed. Did you give them different orders?”
Allisander hesitates. He’s trying to read my face.
I don’t give him the chance. I look to a guard stationed by the wall. “Stanton. Have the prison doctor treat their wounds. Feed them all. I’ll return late this evening.”
He nods. “Yes, Your Highness.”
Allisander has finally lowered that handkerchief. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am,” I say. “If you want information, they need to be in a condition to give it.” I turn for the stairs.
He’s not following me. “First you bring an assassin to your room, and now you’re caring for prisoners? Why isn’t that girl down here in a cell, too, Corrick?”
I ignore him and look at Stanton again. “Have the guards who were assigned to the supply run report to the palace. I’d like to speak with them.” Then I step close to Allisander, and I shove every thought of Tessa out of my head. I send my thoughts to the dark place that reminds me of how I felt after my parents were killed in front of me. “Would you like me to prove that I haven’t turned soft, Consul?”
My voice is cold, but he doesn’t back down. He may have been friends with Harristan, but his relationship with me has always been a bit more politically weighted. I sometimes think he avoids my brother, as if their standoff from so many years ago still stings, but he and I have always met on a level playing field. But now he looks like he wants to challenge me, and that is unlike him. I wonder how much gossip is already swirling in regard to Tessa. I wonder if the fact that prisoners escaped during the riots is being seen as a weakness on my part. I wonder if I’m going to be forced to do something terrible, just to quiet the rumors.
Without warning, my thoughts summon the image of Tessa on the floor of my room, shaking and terrified. Her thoughts are always of the people. Mine are too, but not the way hers are. She used to look at Weston—at me—with such devotion. I didn’t deserve a moment of it then, and I deserve it less now.
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