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Ivan scowls but obeys, striding off and gesturing to the guards holding Caro to follow him. The four of them disappear through the door they came in, and the last I see of them is a glimpse, in profile, of Caro’s tear-smeared face.
As the other servants start to file out, muttering sadly and shaking their heads, Liam reaches out as if to steady me. I stumble back. “Don’t touch me.” His earlier nod replays in my mind—such a tiny motion, but carrying such a weight of death and pain. “Where’s Roan?” Surely he would stop this.
Liam freezes, something folding in his face. Finally, he says, “I’m sorry, Jules,” and follows Ivan from the room.
I stand numbly, watching the closed door where they vanished. Every beat of my heart feels like a knife in me, twisting.
Ivan didn’t mean what he said about going to the time lender. It was a cruel joke. But now that the idea is there—
Surely Ina can save her; any one of her elegant gowns or glittering jewels must be worth many years. But Ina is away, along with the Queen, because of our foolishness. There may not be any time left to wait for her. Between the pouch on my belt and the stash under my mattress in the dormitory, I have almost three years of blood-iron to my name. I could run there now, and bring it to Caro. But it’s not enough. Not nearly enough—and if she had less than forty years to begin with, it wouldn’t even save her.
No. I know nothing else will stop the twisting knife, ease the guilt burrowing into my heart.
I have to find the time lender.
22
Bursting from one of the castle’s side doors, I sprint across the lawn toward the south gate, where the road will lead me back to Laista. Fear drags at my feet, and my thin indoor shoes immediately soak through with snow. But I know if I stop running, if I even slow down, the fear will overcome me. You don’t have to do this, something in me whispers.
Caro will die, another voice says, and it will be your fault.
I run.
I reach the time lender’s shop, a thin, simple wooden building tucked into an alley lined with the ugly back sides of Laista’s storefronts, all willfully blind to its business. A crude sign by the entrance marks it—an hourglass symbol burned into an unpainted square of wood. The dark, narrow alley is heaped with dirty snow and smatterings of old blood. Laista’s time lender—Wick, I learn from the guard posted at the door—is busy today. He smiles grimly as he lets me pass.
In the dimness, few people look up at me as I take my place in line. Unlike the rest of Laista’s citizens, the likes of whom I drank with the night before, the people in line are gray, shivering. Ahead of me, the table is heaped haphazardly with a burnished knife and silver bowls, and a simple kiln smolders farther back. The cheap balsa wood inside it gives off a sour, acrid scent as it burns. The man moving behind the table must be Wick. Lank hair and ragged, bloodstained apron aside, he looks young and healthy compared to the people using his services, his eyes pale from the consumption of blood-iron. My skin crawls, but it’s not as if I have another choice.
After a time that seems like forever and also entirely too soon, it’s my turn to step up to the table. The older woman ahead of me hobbles away, cradling her bandaged hand. I approach the table and sit down on the rickety stool. Wick ignores me as he shakes a few stray droplets of blood onto the tabletop and wipes his knife clean with a rag.
For a moment, I think I’m going to vomit all over the instruments of bloodletting. I’ve seen enough of this in Crofton, but now, watching Wick hold his blade over the leaping flame of an oil lamp to prepare it for my skin, I know why Papa made sure that I’d never had it drawn myself.
When Wick takes my arm and lays it out on the table. I clamp my lips shut, bite the inside of my cheek. Caro risked everything for me. To try and bring me something—anything—of my father’s. Some tiny piece of a memory. One small act of justice.
It’s my fault what happened to her. My duty to save her.
I expect Wick to say something, try to comfort me before he cuts, but Wick is all business. “How much?” he asks.
“What?”
“How much time d’you want to withdraw?” he repeats impatiently.
My voice cracks when I say, “Forty years.”
Wick’s face draws together in a moment of shock, then disapproval. “You’re joking,” he says. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.” My whole life stretches out in my mind, seventeen years filled with memories and pain and everything that makes me who I am. For the span of a breath, I don’t think of Everless or the Queen or darkness or anything but small, pearled moments of pure joy: Roan’s hand held tight by mine and a child’s shriek of laugher, Amma’s smile as she sends Jacob away, the smell of charcoal as my father tamed my hair with his fingers and a length of ribbon.
I’ll have those, always—but what moments am I about to bleed, and how many—if any—will I have left?
“I’ll have to measure the time in your blood first,” Wick tells me, apparently seeing the determination on my face. “I don’t want anyone dropping dead at my table.”
I nod mutely. My heart is beating fast, making my pulse hammer away in my wrist and throat, try as I might to quiet it. As if my blood is afraid to leave me. But Wick just shakes his head wearily and lowers the knife.
“Don’t look,” he tells me.
I look—how can I not?—and gasp and shudder as he pricks my finger with the knife tip, catching the drop of blood in a glass vial. He turns, and I watch in horrified fascination as he fiddles with the mess of instruments on the makeshift tabletop. He has a contraption consisting of a little glass dish held with wire over a candle, and presently he lights the candle and tips the drop of blood into the dish. Finally, he sprinkles a pinch of green powder into the blood; we both watch as it hisses and smokes. He checks a watch at his waist, I wonder how much of this is for show, and how much is real alchemy.
The mixed blood and powder in the dish ignites, and burns with a small, steady flame like at the head of a match. Wick studies it with a businesslike air, glancing briskly between the flame and his stopwatch. But as the seconds tick on, he slowly lowers the timepiece, and a deep frown furrows his face. Though I’ve never seen timeletting before, I know from his expression that something is wrong.
“What is it?” My voice rises as I try to interpret the look on his face.
He shakes his head. “Give me your hand,” he says.
Reluctantly, I extend my hand, and he squeezes another drop of blood from the tip of my finger. He repeats the process, mixing my blood with the powder in a new spot on the dish and setting it alight, all with the same result. He watches with confusion as the two flames burn and burn.