I nod. “I’m not as strong as Cress, but I’m stronger than I was. I hope it’ll be enough when we meet again.”
He drops his hand and lets me continue my work, wrapping the rolls of white gauze bandages around his shoulders. I leave them off his face for now—in part because they will be uncomfortable but also because I think if I can’t see his face, I’ll be less able to believe he’s here.
“What—what about you?” I ask him, stumbling over the words. “What did…what did she do to you?”
I’m not sure I want to know the answer, and Søren doesn’t seem inclined to give it, but after a moment he speaks.
“Her claim on the throne is weak. Many of the nobles were in awe of her power to begin with. They feared her, and that was enough that she was able to seize power after my father died. But the novelty of it wore thin quickly. As powerful as she is, she’s still a woman, and Kalovaxia has never had a female ruler. There have been whispers about overthrowing her, plots even to free me and put me on the throne instead. She thought that if she married me, she could consolidate power, that no one would question her claim to the throne then. But she couldn’t control me, she knew that. She could have forced it, but that would have backfired—as soon as I was out of the dungeon, she would have been assassinated and I would have been crowned Kaiser. She seemed to think I wanted that. So she endeavored to convince me to marry her willingly—though willingly isn’t an apt term when it comes after torture.”
I flinch, picking up the jar of ointment again and dabbing it onto the traitor branded over his heart, then the weak scrawled over his ribs.
“And since she couldn’t make you an ally, she got rid of you,” I say. “Better to have you far away, to have you dead, so your supporters couldn’t use you against her.”
He nods, not speaking for a moment.
“I thought of you, you know,” he says quietly. “When I thought I might break. I thought of you and how you’d survived worse. I thought that you were watching me from the After you believe in, and that if I broke, you would be ashamed of me.”
I shake my head. “There’s no shame in breaking,” I tell him. “Gods know I did often enough. You just have to put yourself back together again.”
His torso is more burns than it is unmarred skin, and I use almost half of the jar of ointment there alone.
“Turn around,” I tell him. “I have to get your back.”
He does as I ask and I have to stifle a gasp. However bad I thought it might be, it’s worse. Though the lines of the burns are thin—done by one of Cress’s fingers, I would guess—she’s crafted what looks like an elaborate spider’s web from his shoulders to his lower back. Lines are layered over one another, some going so deep that his flesh peels back like pages of a book.
I dig into the tub of ointment and take a steadying breath, willing my stomach to settle.
“It’s going to hurt,” I warn him.
“It already hurts,” he admits. “Just…keep talking to me. It’ll distract us both.”
I nod before remembering that he can’t see me. “I think Cress and I are sharing dreams,” I tell him. It still sounds ludicrous to say out loud, but he doesn’t laugh like I expected he might.
“What do you mean?” he asks instead, through clenched teeth, emitting a low hiss of pain after the words.
“In my dreams, she talks to me, as clearly as we’re talking now. The things she says…I couldn’t make them up. She told me she was keeping you in the dungeon. She said that she was trying to convince you to marry her—essentially she told me exactly what you just did. It could be a coincidence, a few lucky guesses, but…it doesn’t feel like that.”
“You think you’re really speaking to her in your dreams?” he asks. The subject must be distracting him, because this time he doesn’t even react when I smear ointment over one of the rawer burns.
“The poison she gave me was made from her blood,” I explain. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but I know what I know. It’s her.”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment, and when he speaks again, his voice is low.
“But she still thinks you’re dead.”
“She thinks I’m haunting her,” I tell him. “But it’s strange. In these dreams, she talks to me like a friend. Like we used to talk. Even when we talk about the things we’ve done to one another, she doesn’t sound angry. She just sounds tired.”
“She isn’t well,” Søren says. “There were rumors that made their way down to the dungeon—noble girls found dead in the palace after they were seen with her. Their throats were always charred, lips black. Like…” He trails off.
“Like they’d drunk Encatrio,” I say, pieces beginning to fall into place.
He nods. “Everyone knew that she was responsible, but she’s untouchable—at least for now. They were too frightened to accuse her out loud, but everyone knew.”
I think about her offering the potion to me—to Amiza—how she’d hoped that in taking it, Amiza would become like her. That they could be rulers together in a changed world.
I tell Søren about that as I finish up with the ointment on his back.
“She’s trying to build an army,” I say when I’m done, reaching for the roll of gauze. “An army of women like her, placed high in society. Here and abroad. She doesn’t just want Astrea; she doesn’t just want to rule the Kalovaxians. She wants a new world.”
Søren shakes his head. “As I said, she isn’t well,” he says. “It’s a delusion—she’ll keep killing girls.”
“Most of them, yes,” I say, wrapping the bandage around his torso until there is no skin showing through at all. “But not all. A fraction must have survived, just like she did. Just like I did. And they have that poison in their veins now as well. Weaker poison, yes, but maybe still strong enough to turn others, who could turn others.”
“It can spread like a disease,” he says, looking at me. “Killing almost everyone it infects but changing the few it doesn’t.”
I nod. “The Kalovaxian court doesn’t want her for a Kaiserin, so she’s creating enough loyal followers to cow those who would dethrone her.”
Søren doesn’t say anything at first, but I can see his mind whirring.
“At this rate, the Kalovaxians will weaken themselves,” he says. “There’s a chance, if we let them carry on like this, fighting one another, that in a few years they won’t be a threat at all.”