The next afternoon, Juan Carlos takes me to the gardens. He seems to know when I need fresh air, and the realization irks me. We walk to my favorite bench and he leaves me there, watching carefully from under the shade of a toborochi tree. The stone is hot beneath my long skirt, but I ignore the press of its heat.
One of the castillo’s side entrances opens and out comes the healer, carrying bottles of dried herbs and walking toward the army training grounds. He tips his head back, shutting his eyes, letting the sun warm his face, and something flutters within me. Vaguely uncomfortable. I almost call out to him, but I bite my lip.
It doesn’t matter. He sees me and stops from across the garden. We stare at each other for a moment, and then his toes pivot in my direction. He lazily cuts through the garden, his eyes on mine until he’s standing a foot away from the bench.
“You’ll melt out here if you don’t seek shade,” he says. “Your face is turning red.”
“Buenas tardes to you too.” I motion toward the glass bottles in his hands. “What do you have there?”
“Dried lavender,” he says absently. “Seriously, you should get out of the sun. You’ll burn—”
“Stop worrying,” I say.
Rumi looks over my shoulder and meets Juan Carlos’s gaze. “You’re supposed to be watching her.”
“Iamwatching her.”
“I meant—” Rumi breaks off with a quiet laugh, his face flushing.
Juan Carlos chuckles as if there’s some joke between them. The healer gently places the bottles onto the cobblestone, the glass clinking against the hard rock, and sits next to me. We sit in silence for several long minutes. I’m enjoying the honey and mint scent too much to go back inside the stifling castillo.
My gaze lands on the watchtower, several stories high. Assuming my parrot reached the keep, Catalina has read my message by now, and she’ll be able to check out the distant coordinates. Only I can search that tower.
My fingers curl into a fist. I’ll do it tonight. I have the disguise.
“You haven’t said a contrary or sarcastic thing in ten minutes,” Rumi says suddenly. “Are you feeling ill?”
“Can’t I be—I don’t know—deep in thought?”
He exhales and some of his exasperation escapes with his breath. “It’s hot. Come with me to the fountain.”
Said fountain is in the middle of the garden courtyard. I glance at it and then back to him. “I’m comfortable where I am.”
He stands and holds out his hand.
I roll my eyes but let myself be dragged toward the fountain. “You’re so bossy.”
“I swear to Inti,” he says, letting go of my wrist. “You try the patience of a saint.”
“You aren’t a saint, Llacsan. No matter what your mother might have told you.”
For some reason this makes him smile. Warmth spreads throughout my body as if someone has draped a cloak around my shoulders. We sit on the fountain’s edge and dip our fingers into the water, hauled in from a lake nearby. He drips some of it onto his face and neck. I frown. Outside the castillo, everyone else has to pay for the water from small lakes and streams. In here, we have more than we need. Enough to fill fountains. I wonder if the Llacsan journalists wrote aboutthatin their publication.
“What’s that expression for?” he asks.
“Honestly?”
“I didn’t know you could be.”
My gaze narrows. He’s teasing me. “Then I’ll keep it to myself.”
“No,” he says softly. “Tell me.”
Somewhere in our interactions, he’s lost that constant look of contempt. Still impatient and annoyed with me from time to time, but it’s no longer a visceral hatred. He’s not hostile or watching me distrustfully as one would an enemy. We’re different, but that only makes our conversation deeper. I don’t mind that he challenges me. I wonder when exactly that happened. He’s not what I expected, and part of me finds him interesting. Catalina says that people are like books. Some you want to read and enjoy; some you hate before you’ve even read a word.
Rumi has become a book I want to read.
“Why didn’t the Llacsans in court protest the treatment and arrest of the journalists?” I ask.
