“She can’t heal me.” Taillefer paused and Amarande realized his voice didn’t sound tired but rather strained. “No one can. But… why?”
“You know enough of the natural arts to do great damage—surely the inverse would be true. Or have you only learned to destroy, not heal?”
Amarande expected some shade of flippant answer, lobbed at her immediately. Something that would turn into a taunt to undermine her or keep her off-balance. Something that might even hurt her—because in truth and against all odds, a trust had started to grow between them.
She’d returned his blade after stealing it and he hadn’t tried to stab her.
She’d eaten food he’d provided.
She’d shared the secret of Ferdinand’s blood.
Instead, there was a pause from his side, and with a loud rumble, shouts and curses from either direction and creaking of carriages, the caravan lurched into motion.
As the prison cart settled into a steady pace, Taillefer responded softly, his voice not flippant or sardonic in the least. Rather, it sounded stiff, sad. “You know why I began to dabble in the natural arts at all?”
Caught off guard by his tone, Amarande found herself replying almost in a manner she’d expect from him. “Answering a question with another question is very rude. But yes, tell me.”
“My father.”
Amarande settled against the wood that separated them. Her memories of King Louis-David were hazy. He’d died four years before, and she’d traveled with her father and Koldo to the Bellringe for the funeral. It was the last funeral she’d attended before her father’s, and it was the last time she’d been at the Bellringe before her very recent trip and escape.
“I didn’t know he was scientific.”
“He wasn’t. But—hewassick for more than two years before he passed. Most people, even Sand and Sky royalty, believe it was an infection that took him, but that was just the nail in the coffin—he’d been dying for a very long time.”
The prince sucked in a deep breath. A cough rattled up. He steadied. Tried again.
“I was ten, almost eleven, when I decided I could do something about the cough that would never leave him. I devoured any book I could on herbs, tinctures, potions—even magic. I begged my mother to ship me off to train with a medikua.”
Amarande rested her cheek against the wall. She’d never heard his voice sound so truly candid.
“Mother didn’t, of course,” he said, anger tingeing his low tones. “She didn’t even send for your storied Medikua Aritza—your father was the one who brought her to our doorstep. It was a kind gesture, but far too late—she arrived after the final infection settled in. Within a week, it claimed his life for good.”
It was difficult enough to process the sudden death of her father at sixteen; Amarande couldn’t imagine waking every day for two years as a much younger child and not knowing if that day would be the day to say good-bye.
“Some nights, I can still hear him coughing in my sleep,” Taillefer said. “The sound of it came from somewhere so deep within him it was like his soul was rattling with his bones.”
There was no sarcastic turn to this admission, no caveat, no attempted stab at self-deprecation. It was raw and honest, and the pain of it took Amarande’s breath away.
After everything they’d been through together, the hatred she’d borne him for what he’d done to Luca, she could not help but respond to the desolation in his voice. Taillefer had exposed his heart to her and she could only say, “I am sorry, Taillefer.”
And she was.
After another long pause, he quietly continued. “I do not have much left of him now. Not at the Bellringe. And certainly not here with me now.”
“You brought nothing but your potion and gold pieces?”
“Only that and my memories.”
There was a rustling of parchment, and then, to Amarande’s surprise, Taillefer’s ungloved hand appeared around the corner formed by the wall that separated them and through her cell bars. Held tightly in his fingers: the map.
“Here. I want you to have your father’s map. Take it.”
Amarande didn’t hesitate, though she was shocked to see it in his possession. “Didn’t they search you? How did you manage to keep it?”
“Come now, I know you admire my cleverness and it was just that sensibility that allowed me to keep it. I am no less clever because we were captured—just as you are no less talented with a sword.”
The princess slipped a finger between the folds, opening it just enough to reveal a snippet of her father’s writing in the margins.
