“But you said you don’t do blood magic.”

She pushed her dark hair off her face and leaned back against the rock. “I said I don’t like to do it.”

“Then you know how?”

She turned to face me, her eyes glittering in the moonlight. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you’re dealing with, Nor.”

I nodded and reached for one of her clean blades. “I think it would be easier if I show you.”

20

“What are you doing?” Adriel grabbed for the blade, trying to stop me, but I had already stepped out of her reach.

“Don’t worry,” I said as I dragged the blade slowly across my forearm, doing my best not to wince at the sharp bite of pain. For the span of several heartbeats, I saw Ceren’s face, just like I had the time I caught my hand on the splinter, but it was gone before I could make out where he was or what he was doing.

“Nor!” Adriel reached for one of her clean cloths and grabbed my arm, clamping the cloth onto the wound. “What were you thinking?”

I shook my head to clear it. If it wasn’t just drinking my blood that brought about the visions—if I really could bring them on myself by bleeding—then I might have more control in this situation than I’d thought. “I’m fine,” I said to Adriel. “Go ahead and remove the cloth.”

“I have to staunch the bleeding. Honestly, I would never have considered taking you on as an apprentice if I’d known how careless you are.”

I placed my hand over hers until she looked up at me. “You were going to make me your apprentice?”

She shook her head in annoyance. “I had considered it, yes. But now...”

Gently, I pushed her hand aside. As the cloth moved, it wiped the blood away, revealing my already healed arm.

Her eyes flashed to mine. “What is this?”

I shrugged, unable to keep the lopsided grin from tugging at the corners of my mouth. “Magic.”

“How?” She pulled my arm closer, struggling to see in the dark.

“I’ll tell you everything. But first I need to know something.”

She nodded, eyes still wide with surprise and fascination. “All right.”

“If I asked you to do blood magic for me, would you?”

She ran her fingers over my forearm where the cut had been. The skin was as smooth as if nothing had happened. “I don’t know, Nor. As far as I can tell, you’ve already dabbled in it yourself.”

“I haven’t,” I assured her. “This came to me naturally, from a blood coral.” I told her about the incident when I was ten, how I’d cut my cheek on the blood coral saving Zadie. “No one ever understood why I can heal the way I do. As far as I know, no one else has sustained that kind of injury and survived, let alone gained powers from it.”

“I suppose it could work in the same way some medicine does,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Take foxglove, for example. The plant, not the cat,” she clarified with a laugh. “The entire plant is toxic, including the roots and seeds. If ingested, it can cause vomiting, hallucinations, delirium, convulsions, and even death. It’s sometimes known as dead man’s bells or witch’s gloves.”

I shuddered. “That’s what you chose to name your cat after?”

She grinned. “That’s just it. If used in properly controlled doses, various parts of foxglove can also be used to treat internal bleeding, regulate an erratic heartbeat, and cure dropsy.”

I raised a questioning brow.

“Swelling from fluid buildup. In other words, a substance that can be deadly in large doses can be beneficial when diluted.”

I thought about the connection between the blood coral and the Varenian pearls. No one understood how it worked; we only knew that one was deadly and the other healing. But if the toxins released by the blood coral were diluted by enough seawater, as Adriel said, then perhaps whatever was beneficial in it accumulated safely in the pearls. Or, in my case, in my blood.

“You said the fruit of the bone trees was poisonous, but the seeds could be made into healing teas and tinctures, right?”

She nodded. “I never heard of anyone eating the fruit and surviving, but I suppose it’s possible. Perhaps they had powers like yours, too.”

There was a strange comfort in the idea of someone else out there being like me. “There’s something else,” I said. “When Ceren drank my blood, it gave him my healing abilities. I stabbed him with a blood coral blade and he survived. What if...” My voice trailed off. I was too afraid to say it out loud.

Adriel took my hand. “What’s the matter?”

“If a wound of that magnitude didn’t kill him, I’m not sure what can.”

“What are you saying? That he’s immortal?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps.”

I couldn’t voice the last part, the part I hadn’t ever wanted to consider. Because if Ceren was immortal, what did that make me?

* * *

Unlike when we had camped on the journey to Galeth, on our way south the horses stayed with us through the night. Each rider rolled out their bedding near their horse, who lay down next to their rider. Titania seemed relieved when I didn’t try to tie her up to a tree branch.

“What if they roll over?” I asked Roan, remembering Talin’s concern. The dun gelding had chosen a spot right near my mare, to my dismay.

“They won’t,” he said, tucking his hands behind his head. “In twenty years, I’ve never heard of it happening.”

“How do you train them?” I asked, turning on my side to face him. His features were so chiseled that I sometimes couldn’t read his expression.

“Any Galethian horse that is going to belong to a soldier is taken from its mother the day it’s born.”

“That seems cruel,” I said. “Surely they need their mothers.”

“Their rider becomes a mother figure to them. We feed them from bottles and sleep in their stalls with them. Those first few weeks are the most important. If the rider and horse don’t bond immediately, they’ll never form the kind of connection they need to fight together.”

I glanced up at Titania, who seemed to be watching me in the dark. “Never?”

Roan smiled. “Titania is well trained. But if it came down to it, I can’t say whether she would lay down her life for you.”