“Do you?” asks a woman’s voice from nearby. It’s familiar, so familiar, but I can’t place it.
The voice is close, close enough that anyone should be able to see it, but I see nothing but the emptiness of the city street at night.
“Good night, Sylvie,” the woman says.
I feel movement behind me. I lash out with my shadows, but it’s too late.
A cloth covers my face, and my legs collapse beneath me as my vision fades to black.
Chapter Thirty
Iawake in a darkened room.
I’m lying down on something hard, maybe a table, judging by the height of the ceiling overhead. The air is damp and cool with a vague scent of rot. It’s a familiar scent, one that transports me immediately to the dripping, dreary cellars beneath Pyka.
I lift my head to look around, but it doesn’t move. Am I restrained somehow? I don’t feel anything. My eyes are able to dart around the room though, taking in walls lined with shelves of books and strange bottles of liquid, peculiar implements of metal and glass. There’s a single candle burning somewhere behind me, but my head won’t budge to see it.
There’s a pain in my left arm. I reach my right arm up to see what’s hurting, but it won’t move either.
Fuck. I can’t move. I’m still breathing, and my heart is still beating, but my body won’t move at all.
“Help,” I call out, but it comes out as a quiet creak, barely audible though the room is silent.
“Sylvie,” says a comforting voice. It’s a woman’s voice, but she’s behind me, back in a place my eyes can’t reach. “Relax. You’re alright.”
“Where am I?” My lips can barely form the words, but the woman seems to understand.
“You’re back in the palace,” she says. “Someone poisoned you. We’re giving the elixir time to work. Don’t worry. You’ll feel better soon.”
She moves around the table, but I can’t see her face. All I can see is the brown robe of the Alchemists’ Guild.
The Alchemists’ Guild.
That sends alarm bells ringing through me, but I can’t quite recall why.
“Ronan?” I ask. I was with Ronan before I came here, I’m pretty sure.
“He’ll be back soon,” she says. “Just get some rest.”
The voice is familiar. There’s an accent, something foreign. Not Selaran or Nithyrian. Not the Enez Islands. It’s different. It’s warm and comforting, though, and it’s saying nice things.
So why does it feel wrong?
“My arm.” I try to lift my left arm to see what’s wrong with it, and that works, a little. There’s something sticking out of it. A tube of some kind, strange and soft like a noodle, emerging from the inside of my elbow.
“It’s the medicine,” says the voice. She moves around the table to check on it. I can’t see what she reaches for near the ground, but there’s something down there on the end of the tube. I feel it move when she pulls, just barely.
I’ve never seen medicine given like this. But then again, I’ve never been poisoned.
The woman looks up, and I recognize her.
“Zara,” I say, relaxing. She should have just said. Maybe she did say before I woke; I’m having trouble remembering much from tonight. “How did I—?”
“We found you, like I said. You’d been poisoned.”
Found me. Where? Where had they found me?
And who were they?
