But I needed to take care of myself first. I pulled my canteen free and forced down a long swallow. I made myself eat. The dried rabbit meat was tough, salty, sticking to my teeth, but I needed the energy. I washed the meat down, the water lukewarm and metallic, but it would keep my head from spinning and my knees from wobbling.
I lifted my face to the canopy, where the sunlight streamed through. It had a small slant, which meant it was about midday.
I used the sun’s slant to orient myself to the southeast. Then I rose. I did so with one hand over my breast, where my mother’s journal was tucked away.
Then I set off. Deep, deeper into Sylvanwild.
The forest pressed in,dense and endless. Only occasional gaps in the canopy let glimpses of the sun reach me, just enough to confirm I was headed in the right direction. I trusted I was still close enough to our original path that I wouldn’t veer too far south or east.
If I did, I’d be lost, and I would die out here.Wewould die.
The cuts on my face had stopped bleeding, but they stung everywhere: my forehead, my cheeks, my chin. The longer I walked, the more the air brushed over them, the more they throbbed, until it felt like my whole face was on fire.
These weren’t normal cuts. Which meant those weren’t normal bushes I’d sprinted through. In glimpses, they reminded me of the hedge from the maze.
What had that plant been called?
I kept walking, forcing my mind to dredge up the name. In my time at the citadel Haskel and Dorian had mentioned flora here and there. Some were edible, some medicinal, some deadly. The poisonous hedge—what was it?
There was blackmourne vine, the hanging vine with black blooms. That wasn’t it. Gloam bell, the drooping twilight flower. No.
Razorleaf.
The name punched into my mind. After the maze, I’d asked Haskel about the hedge one morning. It was a tall bush with serrated leaves coated in a natural toxin. The slightest scratch could drive the poison into your blood. And I had sprinted through it.
I was poisoned. Badly.
But for every poison in Sylvanwild, there was a cure. Haskel had said that the antidote for razorleaf was a delicate white flower with a yellow face: solacebloom. I just couldn’t remember where it grew. So all I could do was keep walking, scanning the ground, and pray to gods I wasn’t sure existed.
By midafternoon the trees began to thin, and a massive low rock appeared ahead. From a distance, it looked like a wall, but as I drew closer its shape came clear—smooth curves, a propped elbow, the gentle slope of a waist and hip, long legs sprawled in repose.
The reclined woman. I was halfway.
Tears blurred my vision. They fell, stung my raw face, but I couldn’t stop them. Sometimes the body took control of its own relief.
I moved faster now, keeping the sun always a little on my right. I didn’t find solacebloom, though I did recognize an edible blue berry I’d seen children eat outside the citadel. Frostbite berry, a little girl had called it. I plucked until my fingers were raw, keeping watch like an animal as my fingers darted over the bush.
I ate the berries in one go, chewing fast, swallowing faster, before pressing forward at a limping walk.
The sun was getting low. It would be down by six, and then the darkness would overtake me and I would be done. And I couldn’t be done. Not like this.
My face had begun to swell. My eyelids had become puffy, partially obscuring my vision. My lips were getting fat, and it was harder to swallow.
Somewhere in that haze of pain, I heard it: the faint hum of water. I froze, straining to listen.
I stopped. I wasn’t sure if it was a dying delusion.
No, that was the hum of rushing water. For anyone who’d grown up in the Kingdom of Storms, it was unmistakable.
I ran toward it, less graceful than I’d been in my whole life. And when I came to the pebbly river and its crystalline water, I dropped to my knees beside it and drove my burning face into the cold stream.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The water soothedsome of the burn, but it didn’t stop the poison.
But the stream meant I was close to where I was supposed to be. If Dorian was here, he would find the solacebloom. Somehow I knew he wouldn’t stop until he’d found it.
I followed the river along its left bank. The sun drew lower, slanting longer, and my face grew tighter and more swollen. I tried not to think about either fact, only to keep my feet moving toward the falls and to keep my eyes searching for the small flower I needed to counteract the poison.
