“I don’t wear it often anymore.”
“Why not?”
He ran his fingers over his jacket, smoothing nonexistentwrinkles. “Mother gave it to me,” he admitted. “I’m not certain where she got it from, and…” He glanced over my shoulder as if looking for his entourage to come back and save him. He sighed. “I don’t want to use it up too quickly, you know? She always gave us bottles for our birthdays, saying that all one needed to make an impression on this world was a great deal of confidence and a signature scent.”
It was an absurd sentiment, but I was willing to overlook that if it helped me. “And what’s yours?”
“Black agar.”
“That’s a tree resin, isn’t it?” I mused.
Leopold shrugged helplessly. “Mother liked it for me becauseit’s what they burn at some of the temples, for incense. She said she wanted everyone who came across me to remember”—he let out a pained noise of chagrin—“that I was like a god on earth.”
A thought occurred to me even as I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “Do you remember when you came to get me, in the Rift?” He nodded. “Were they burning black agar that day?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. The Divided Ones were always Mother’s favorites of the gods.”
“I need to go,” I decided, switching directions and heading for the greenhouse. Sleep could wait until this mystery was solved.
I was nearly to the end of the corridor when he called after me. “Whydon’tyou like me, healer?”
There was something in his tone that made me turn around.
He made such a forlorn, solitary figure standing there. It was a rare thing, catching the prince alone, without his cluster of courtiers and the pretty girls that always seemed to trail them.
“I never said I didn’t,” I stalled, hoping it would appease him enough to let him trot after his friends and leave me to my work. If I could find a sample of the agar, my night was not coming to an end; it was just beginning.
He laughed. “I may spend my days in a drunken stupor,” he began, using my words against me, “but even through all that haze, I can tell you don’t think well of me.”
“In truth…” I frowned, torn between the desires to placate him and to lay out each and every one of his many shortcomings. He blinked, waiting. “…you give me very little to think upon at all.”
He clutched one hand to his heart. “Healer! Do you slice all your patients with such savage skill?”
My shoulder blades tightened, a fight bristling within me. “I find myself thinking with far greater frequency of the young men marching up and down the battlements outside, preparing to risk their lives to protect your family. I find myself thinking on the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands of people across the capitol, across the province, across thewhole country,who are depending on me to show up and do my job. That is where my thoughts lie, Your Royal Highness, not with you and your revelries.”
We stared at each other in silence, only a dozen paces apart, but the distance felt far greater.
Leopold opened his mouth but couldn’t seem to find the words he wanted to say. He frowned, his dark brows lowered.
My feet itched to inch forward, to make sure he was all right. Had I actually hurt him? Wounded his feelings?
At last he closed his mouth, swallowing. “Well.”
“Leopold—”
He held up his hand, stopping me with a shake of his head.“Don’t go back on all your noble convictions now.” He paused.“I’d imagine with such heavy thoughts you must be quite tired. I hope…I’ll leave you to your slumbers.”
“Leo.” It fell from me before I could stop it, short and familiar and achingly intimate. But I didn’t know how to go on, what to say to ease the sting of the truth. “I…I hope you enjoy your evening.”
His smile was small and lopsided and sad. “Sweet dreams, healer.”
Sunlight streamed in through my curtains. It was amber and golden, the light of late afternoon. I groaned and flopped over, hiding beneath a mountain of pillows, before remembering the night before and sitting up with an excited cry.
After a month of trying, after a thousand attempts gone wrong, I had found the cure.
It was black agar, a resin found in certain trees infected by a specific strain of fungus. It was used in holy ceremonies, in cleansing rituals, in perfumes and colognes, and now…now it would be used to save Martissienes from the Shivers.
On the first floor of the palace was a series of niches, each a small shrine to the gods. I’d raided the Divided Ones’, stealing their smudge of incense and bringing it back to my workroom. I’d mixed it into a paste, into an oil, and into salve, and every version of it had an immediate effect on my samples. The Brilliance writhed and swirled, ultimately shrinking until there was nothing left on any of the glass plates.
