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“Who can treat this?”
“No one.”
“That answer ceased to be acceptable when you collapsed.”
I grip the edge of the mattress. “The curse cannot be removed.”
“Removal is not the same as relief.”
He turns toward the door.
“Joran.”
He stops.
I know whom he intends to summon.
Fiona has already seen too much. Bringing her here will give her access to a weakness Varrus would kill to expose. She is my wife by law, but trust does not arise from a signature or an Arbiter’s chain.
Another spasm tears through the scar.
Darkness closes around the edges of my sight.
“Bring Briar,” Joran orders the guard outside. “Tell her to find Lady Fiona.”
The guard runs.
I try to rise. My arm fails beneath my weight.
Joran presses me back against the bed. “You can punish me when you can stand.”
Briar reaches the chamber moments later. Her brown eyes widen when she sees me, but she wastes no time on questions.
“Get Fiona,” Joran tells her. “Now.”
Briar turns and races toward the solarium.
I remain in severe pain, unable to command my own magic, while Fiona comes to witness what I have spent a decade concealing.
15
FIONA
Briar runs so fast down the servants' passage that I lose sight of her twice before we reach the private stair.
"He collapsed in the practice hall," she says over her shoulder. Her breath saws in her chest, and I want to tell her to slow down, that she is barely three days recovered, but there is no time for either of us to be careful. "Joran carried him up. He would not let anyone summon the keep's healer."
"Of course he wouldn't."
"My lady, his face—"
"I know what a bad flare looks like."
I don't, not on him. I have seen fever and broken bone and the grey slackness of a body giving up. I have never seen whatever it is that a necromancer leaves buried in a dark elf lord's side, and the not-knowing sits under my ribs like a swallowed stone as we climb.
The chamber doors stand open. Joran fills the gap, and when he sees me his shoulders drop the smallest measure, as though I am a rope thrown to a man already underwater.
"He forbade the Zagfer physician," he says.
