“Iczib twyba,”Brela grumbled as she rolled her eyes.
Elias glanced down at her—sprawled on the ground with her head in his lap, only wearing Cason’s oversized shirt—and raised his brow.
“Fragile temper,” she translated. “I can’t believe he punched you.”
He resumed his idle strokes in her hair. “Yes you can. Because if it were you and I or you and Oni, the same thing would have happened.”
“I would have gone for the elbow in the back to stun him, not the fist to the face. It might surprise you to know that glass spines are a weak point for sand sprites,” she chuckled before going back to the book in her hands.
“I’ll take that into consideration the next time Oni and I fight,” Elias replied, flicking her nose.
She batted his hand away and fell into silence as she flipped a few more pages. Reading about the different experiments that had been run on her people. At least two dozen had been prisoners in that camp, if this book was the only documentation of those tests. All of them ended the same way.
He watched her make a myriad of faces between disgust, horror, and anger before she finally huffed.
“Opharel is an obvious ingredient for interrogating and making sure the prisoners were reporting their symptoms accurately. What do you make of this, though?” she asked, raising the book toward his face.
He blinked and let his eyes focus on the ingredient page. “Arrose. A healing agent.”
“There was a lot of it on the shelves, but why? It would be a terribly slow healing process, especially if they wanted results. They had to wait weeks between experiments when there weren’t multiple prisoners to test.”
Elias took the book and read a few more pages. “There’s no mention of any healing magic used at all.”
“Anfroy elitism? Refusing to let anyone with moon magic know what they were doing?”
He shook his head. “No, I think they were avoiding healers so as not to taint the body with a foreign magic.”
“In case the wall would register it as non-shadow,” she whispered.
Elias paused on an ingredient list for one of the longest surviving prisoners. “They weren’t just using arrose for healing, it was an active ingredient in their injections.”
Brela blinked up at him. “What does that mean?”
“It means that they were trying to get the bodies to register the foreign substance as part of the system, not reject it. Healing the bodieswhilethe Veil dust is in the bloodstream. Embedding it even further and trying to get the body to process the magic from the obsidian.” He ran a hand over his face. “This is why hellthorn affects them. It might not make the person able to get through the wall, but there’s enough residual shadow magic in that ground up obsidian to give them the side effects.”
A pause, then, “But it didn’t give them actual shadow magic?”
Elias frowned and glanced down at Brela as she scratched at the shard in her chest. Her gaze was distant, mindless.
He closed the book and wrapped his hand through hers. “I’m sorry, Bre. I know we keep running into more questions that can’t be answered.”
“I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up. It’s just with Fowke…”
She’d hoped to finally have an answer to how the shard got in her chest.
Brela forced a breath through her nose. “Distract me. What’s up with those two?”
She didn’t need to point for him to know she was referring to Serill and Farrah. They sat on their bedrolls, engrossed in some game they’d made from scraps of paper and rocks.
“The prince is a little overwhelmed with all of this. Trying to find a way to help us while also looking out for his kingdom. Farrah’s a rational mind, and a good friend.” He chuckled. “Plus, I think Farrah needs thecivilizedcompany.”
Brela grinned. “She does know she’s the most uncivilized of the three of us, right?”
As if the gods themselves provoked it, Farrah lost whatever game they were playing and she let out a string of curses that made even Brela blink in surprise.
Elias rolled his eyes and resumed playing with Brela’s hair. “Also, she’s determined to make him lose a bet. This entire trip, he’s gone undefeated and it’s driving her insane.” His fingers snagged in a braid and he lifted it. “What is this…thing?”
Brela gasped and plucked it out of his grip. “Cason did that one.”
