“What’s that?”
I spun around. Mina stood in the doorway. For a moment, in contrast to the elegant vitality of Vale’s blood, the sheer withering mortality of her shocked me. Darkness ringed her eyes and dusted the deepening hollows of her cheeks. Once, she had been a strikingly beautiful girl—and she still was, but now hauntingly so, like the face of a stone goddess at a grave site. I glanced down. How long had she been here? I wasn’t sure which answer was worse. Longer, and she saw more of what I was doing. Less, and I could be more concerned about the distinct layer of dusted skin that already coated the floor around her feet.
“What’s that?” she asked, again.
“Nothing,” I said, even though my sister knew me well enough to know when nothing meant everything.
I thrust the vials and my lens into my bag, buttoned it, and rose.
“I have to go,” I said. “I’m visiting Farrow. Rosa will be by with dinner for you, and—”
I stepped past her, but Mina barely moved aside. When I brushed by her, I tried not to notice the faint fall of fine dust to the floor, steady as seconds ticking by.
“Lilith, wait—” she said.
I stopped, but did not turn back.
“What?”
I sounded colder than I wished I did. I wished I could be warm like Mina was. Like our mother had been. Our father. In a family of warmth, I was the strange, cold one—the one who could decipher textbooks and equations but struggled to decipher the exact cadence of a voice that made a name a term of endearment, nor the pattern of a touch that made it a caress.
“Stay with me today,” she said. “We can take a walk.”
“I wish I could. But I have too much work to do.”
Even I knew how to recognize the frustration in her voice when she said, “Why?”
I knew what she meant: What could be more important?
Growing up, people would always ask me, Why do you work so hard? They would always ask in the same tone of voice—confused, pitying—the kind of tone that told me they were asking me a different question than their words alone conveyed. In that tone, I heard all the implications. The implication that I was wasting my life. I had so little of it, after all. Why spend it toiling away?
I heard that in Mina’s voice now. That same judgment, same confusion. Except now she was the one whose time was running out, begging me to take some of it from her.
And that, in the end, was the answer.
Why was I working so hard? I was working so hard because none of it would ever be enough. I would continue until I had nothing left to give. Force myself through the grinding machinery of the mind.
Better this than to spend time making it harder for her to say goodbye to me one day. My love gave my sister nothing. But my work gave her a chance.
“I have to go,” I said again, and left Mina in the hall, watching after me.
She wouldn’t understand if I tried to explain it to her. She didn’t know death like I did. After all, she was never the sister who was supposed to die.
CHAPTER FIVE
I walked to the outskirts of town, where I could catch a boat out to Baszia. On my way through the city streets, I passed a congregation of Vitarus’s acolytes kneeling in the streets, praying over piles of burning leaves. At their front was Thomassen, Adcova’s head priest and devoted follower of Vitarus—a tall, thin man in his mid-fifties with kind eyes. He was the same age my parents had been, but looked much older these last few years. It must take a toll, spending all this time trying to understand why your god turned against you.
He gave me a faint smile as I passed, which I returned with a curt nod.
He had been good friends with my father, once, so he had always been kind to Mina and I. Pitied us, maybe. Funny, because I certainly pitied him, kneeling in the ashes he fed his god, while his god only gave him more ashes in return.
I continued to the outskirts of town, where I found a ship headed across the channel to the city. The journey took hours, and my stomach had become unaccustomed to sea travel, but when I stepped foot on the docks it was all worth it.
I inhaled a great deep breath of the city air—air that seemed to smell of books and excitement and knowledge… mixed, maybe, with just a hint of piss. I’d spent six years here, studying at universities and libraries. Right now, it struck me with staggering force just how much I had missed it. Even the buildings, tall and majestic, spoke of history—many of them had been erected a thousand years ago.
Farrow was, as I knew he would be—as he always was—in his study, a little room tucked in the back of the university archives. And, as I knew he would be, he was happy to see me. The brightness of his grin when he looked up to see me lit a little spark of guilt in my chest.
I shouldn’t be doing this. Shouldn’t be putting him in danger.
But he was one of the most intelligent people I knew, and I needed help.
Farrow was tall and slender, with ash-blond hair that he constantly had to push out of his eyes and silver glasses that were always a little broken. He had a way of bending his whole body up with interest in whatever he was working on, and that was exactly what he did as I set up my lens in the center of the room, folded over at the very edge of his chair as I projected those beautiful blood flower petals onto his chalk-smeared wall.
His eyes widened, and he crept a little out of his chair to look closer. He barely even breathed.
I did always so appreciate that about Farrow—his unabashed amazement at the world around him. When I first met him, as a young student, I had loved that he embodied what I myself so wanted to express but couldn’t. Men from upper-class families were welcome to be openly delighted by their craft. It made them interesting and eccentric, committed and passionate. When women did it, it made us vapid.
I had seen Farrow amazed many, many times. But never so much as he was now. He rose, circled the room, squinted at the blood, then eventually returned to his chair and sagged into it, running his hands through his hair as he peered at me from behind askew glasses.
“Great gods, Lilith, what is this? What am I looking at?”
I swallowed. I didn’t want to say the word, not aloud. It would only put Farrow at risk—more than I already had by coming here. There was a reason I had brought it here, rather than asking him to come visit our cursed town.
Selfish of me. I knew that.
“If I could distill this somehow,” I said, “how would I do that? This property?”
“You would need magic, probably.”
“What if I couldn’t do that?”
Farrow frowned. “Why would you not be able to do that?”
I eyed my lens. The projection had been up for longer than I’d ever allowed myself to look at the samples at home. I feared that at any moment, the magic would recognize the nature of what it analyzed. Magic was fickle and temperamental, just like the gods.
“Could there be a way to do it without?” I asked. “By scientific rather than magical means?”
Farrow seemed confused, which was reasonable. Science and magic were often two parts of the same whole—each complemented the other, their methods often inextricable.
“It would be… it would be hard. Maybe impossible. Bring it to one of Srana’s temples. See what the priestesses have to say about it.”