My head rears back. “I…? My…my mate is Glacin?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“The Mahananda hasn’t shown me what he looks like. Only that you meet him at the Jubilee.”
I recall something my cousin Naeva—technically my aunt, but she’s six months younger than me, so, yeah…cousin—mentioned a while ago: Behati isn’t the sharpest sword in the armory.
Instead of challenging the Shabbin advisor about this prophecy—delusion?—I prop the jar in her face to return to the more pressing matter. “This is what I gave Shoshair.”
She glances at the label. “Fungi Alaramis: induces inflammation of the gut.”
Where the corners of her mouth quirk after she reads it out loud, mine plummet. I spin the jar. The cursive letters begin to shiver, to shake, but not before I make out the first syllable of the word after the mushroom’s name:in.
In-fucking-duces! Notre-duces.
“I’ll purge the gasses from her intestines before more can form. Arin will be just fine, Isla.”
Brimming with self-loathing, I squeeze the jar with such force that spiderweb cracks form on the brown glass.
Behati holds out her arm. “Help me kneel.”
I ease the seer onto the sunstone floor, then watch as she begins to bloody my grandmother’s stomach with a complex array of lines and swirls, ones I didn’t have a fighting chance of getting right.
“Arin can convalesce here until your return,” she tells me as her sigil penetrates into my grandmother’s flesh.
“My return?”
“From Glace.”
My grandmother’s stomach begins to deflate like a pricked balloon…unlike my onus.
“I’m not leaving her,” I say.
The ancient sorceress cranes her neck to stare up at me. “It’s your destiny.”
“I’ll go next week…or next month,” I mumble as the green tinge finally recedes from Shoshair’s skin.
Behati inhales a bladed breath that reels in my attention. Her eyes have gone bone-white. I stay quiet as the Cauldron feeds her a vision.
Once color returns to her irises, she says, “Your mate will perish if your paths don’t collide tonight.”
My heart snaps like those whips Faeries use on horses. “The Cauldron has just shown you this?”
“Yes.”
I glance toward the mirror-smooth basin that reflects the cloudless blue expanse above. If only I could communicate with it like Taytah Daya. If only I could ask it if Behati is sending me on a wild love chase, or if there’s truth to her vision.
I suppose that if I go to Glace, I could ask Taytah. Or I could just shift right here, right now, and demand the truth from my father.
Except that would make him wonder how I heard about the prophecy, and I’d have to tell him about the mishap that led me to Shabbe. Preferring not to worry him—and to disappoint himonce more—I decide to confess my mistake after Shoshair recovers.
Guilt and remorse stiffen my hold on the jar, which shatters. The shards bite into my palm before slipping free and dinging against the stone floor.
I kneel beside Behati. “Why isn’t she rousing?” With my unwounded hand, I smooth a silver strand off my grandmother’s brow.
“Because her body’s healing.”
