* * *
—
I wake up with a gasp, the sharp pain of Cress’s dagger still as excruciating as it was in my dream, the smell of smoke still thick in my lungs. I cough, sitting up and grabbing my stomach, only to feel a new wave of pain. My fingers come away sticky and wet, stained a bright red that is visible even in the pitch-dark.
It takes my brain a few seconds to drag itself from the tendrils of my dream enough to realize that I am awake, I am miles and miles away from Cress, but the wound she created is very real.
The scream that rips its way out of my throat is not entirely human, not entirely mine. I fall back onto my bedroll, clutching my stomach.
In seconds, the others are awake and alert and gathered around me, all panicked words and hands touching the wound, but I barely hear them. The agony is unbearable, made worse with every breath, every touch.
“It’s deep,” one voice says. Heron. “But not fatal. I can fix it.”
No sooner does he say the words than the wound goes numb, like an icy wind has brushed over, freezing it. The pain is still there, but it is a dull thrum beneath my skin. It no longer feels like I’m being torn apart from within.
I open my eyes to five concerned faces staring down at me. Heron’s hands are covered in blood—my blood.
“What happened?” Blaise asks. “Were you attacked?”
He’s on his feet, searching our small tent for any sign of intruders, but I shake my head.
“Not here,” I manage to get out. I sit up carefully and cough. The smoke is still in my lungs. If anything, it’s getting stronger. “In my dream. Cress. She knows I’m alive; she knows I killed Rigga. She stabbed me, and I woke up…”
“You woke up stabbed,” Artemisia says quietly.
“It isn’t possible,” Blaise says, still pacing the tent, searching for some other explanation, but there is none.
“And yet…” Artemisia trails off, her eyes trained on my wound.
“It’s not possible,” Blaise says again, stopping his pacing to stare at us. “You can’t really believe this madness.”
“I’ve seen madder things than this,” Erik says, turning his face toward Blaise. “Yourself included, if you don’t mind me saying so. The real madness would be in ignoring the truth when it demands to be acknowledged.”
Blaise doesn’t have a response to that. He only scowls before turning to me.
“Are you all right?”
It’s such a ridiculous question that I can’t help but laugh, but the movement makes the dagger wound ache all over again.
“Here,” Heron says. “Lie down and I’ll heal it completely.”
I do as he says and bring the blanket up to cover my hips so that Heron can lift my nightgown and bare my stomach. There is so much blood, though the wound itself is still frozen.
“I have to unfreeze it first,” Heron says. “It’ll hurt for a few moments—badly—but then it’ll be fully healed.”
I take a deep, bracing breath before nodding. “Go ahead,” I tell him.
Søren reaches for my hand, squeezing it tightly in his to distract me, but it doesn’t work. As soon as Heron begins working, pain floods through me again, blurring my eyesight and turning my mind into a whirl of bright colors and agony. I hear myself scream, though the sound feels far away, not quite a part of me.
“Breathe,” Heron says, his voice low. I feel his hands on me, warm and soothing but always gone too quickly. I can feel the skin closing, feel it knitting itself together again, excruciating and slow. “It won’t leave a scar,” he continues, which I suppose he means to be a relief, but the idea doesn’t faze me—what’s another scar, after all?
After what feels like an eternity, the pain begins to ebb and I find I can breathe normally again, though I can’t rid myself of the smell of smoke. It lingers in my lungs, like Cress’s fingers, refusing to let me go completely.
“There,” Heron says, lifting his hands from my stomach and pulling the blanket up to cover me. “Good as new, or thereabouts.”
“What happened, exactly?” Søren asks me.
“I thought I could find out how she was progressing with Brigitta and Jian—Laius, rather.”
“Did you?” Artemisia asks.
“Not in so many words, but when I mentioned her mother, Cress frowned. She looked annoyed. I don’t think she’s broken her yet. I don’t know about Jian.”
“What did she say, then?” Heron asks.
I find my voice and tell them about the dream, the half-dozen other girls Cress has turned. I tell them about the moment when I knew that she knew I was alive, and the moment she slipped the dagger into my flesh, as easily as a knife through a pat of butter.
“She called it a surprise afterward,” I say, shaking my head. “ ‘I hope you enjoy my little surprise.’ That’s what she said. And she smelled like smoke, like burning. I still smell it now,” I admit, wrinkling my nose.
Søren frowns, looking around the room. He sniffs at the air, and the others do as well.
“I smell it too,” he says quietly. “Smoke.”
Blaise shakes his head. “It’s a hallucination,” he insists. “She said she smelled smoke, and now all of us can smell it.”
But when the screams sound from outside the tent, I realize that Blaise is wrong—it isn’t a hallucination. It isn’t a stubborn remnant of my dream, either. An instant later, Maile bursts into the tent, still dressed in her own nightclothes, red-faced and winded.
“The camp at the Air Mine,” she manages to get out between gulps of breath. “Our scouts just returned. It’s on fire. The whole thing.”
OUTSIDE THE TENT, THE SMOKE in the air is thick enough to choke me, and I hold the sleeve of my bloodied nightgown up to cover my nose and mouth to filter some of it out. All around our small camp, people are panicking, running in one direction or another, half-asleep still and trying to determine what’s happening.
Maile leads us to the northern edge of the olive grove, where the Air Mine is just visible rising over the pale pastel horizon. At first glance, I could mistake it for the sun itself rising. The whole thing is ablaze, the brightness of the flames so intense that I have to shield my eyes to look at it.
“How?” Artemisia asks behind me, unable to manage more than the single word.
I can’t bring myself to answer, though in my gut I know exactly how, and exactly why. I remember Cress leaning in, twisting the knife in my stomach.