I shouldn’t be daydreaming about Weston. It’s the least productive way to spend my time. I should be focusing on measuring thimbleweed for Mistress Solomon’s ointments, or thinking about how many houses we missed this morning since Wes said it wasn’t safe to sneak into the Royal Sector. I should be thinking about how many coins I have in my purse, and whether it would be too indulgent to buy some sweets from the baker.
I should be mourning Mistress Kendall and Gillis. But thoughts of their deaths ll me with more rage than sorrow, and my hands begin to shake, until it’s all I can do to avoid inging rocks at the patrolmen myself.
oughts of Wes are safe, and nearly as indulgent as the sweets would be. He was pressed so tightly against me yesterday morning, his palm against my cheek, his voice so so in my ear.
When we were in danger, my brain whispers at me. It was not a romantic moment.
I don’t care.
Karri, the other assistant, is grinning at me over her own scale. We’re the same age, but instead of the freckled tan skin and brown hair that I have, Karri’s skin is a rich, deep brown, with shiny black hair she wears twisted in a rope that reaches her waist. “What are you blushing about?” she says.
I bite the inside of my lip. “Nothing.”
She leans in against the table and drops her voice, because Mistress Solomon doesn’t like it when we gossip. “Tessa. Do you have a sweetheart?”
I try not to blush. Instead, my traitorous cheeks burn hotter. “Of course not.”
I would never hear the end of it if Weston knew I was blushing over the idea of him being my sweetheart. Never.
“What’s his name?” she says.
I blink at her innocently. “Whose name?” “Tessa!”
I add some thimbleweed to my bowl and begin to smash it with the pestle, grinding it against the stone. “It’s nothing. ere’s nothing.”
She pouts, but her brown eyes are twinkling. “Tell me about his hands.” Unbidden, my thoughts summon the image of the apple held between his
ngers.
I sigh. I can’t help it.
She bursts out laughing. “You have a sweetheart.” I glance at the front of the shop. “Shh.”
“If you won’t tell me his name, will you tell me what he looks like?”
Words come to mind so quickly that it’s a miracle they don’t fall out of my mouth. He looks like revolution. He looks like compassion. Blue eyes and gentle hands and quick feet and a core of strength and steel.
I grind hard with my pestle, and Karri laughs again. I wonder how dark my cheeks have gotten.
“I can’t wait to meet him,” she says.
at will never happen. I sigh for an entirely different reason now. “Is he from Artis?” she asks.
I have to give her something, or she’ll never stop rooting for information. “Steel City,” I say.
“Steel City! A metalworker, then.”
“Hmm.” I add more thistleroot to my bowl.
“Steel City?” says Mistress Solomon. She’s caught wind of our conversation, and she leaves the front of the shop to come peer at what we’re doing. “Are you talking about the smugglers?”
“What smugglers?” says Karri.
“ere was an announcement from the Royal Sector at midday. ey caught a pack of smugglers from Steel City. Ten of them, all from the same forge.”
My blood goes cold.
Mistress Solomon tsks under her breath. “We’re lucky the night patrol looks out for the people, you know. ose criminals deserve everything they get. We all get our allotment of medicine. No one needs to be greedy.”
I bite my tongue. Not everyone gets an allotment of the Moon ower petals, and she well knows it. Only those who can pay for it. at’s how she
makes such a market from her ointments and potions—it’s cheaper to buy from her. It’s cheaper because it doesn’t really work, but I can’t say that if I want to keep my job. Back when the healing effects of the Moon ower was
rst discovered, there were hundreds of charlatans who tried to pass off other leaves and petals as the Moon ower—but when the king put as strict a penalty on fraud as he did on smuggling, the fake petals quickly went away. It’s easier to just steal it than to grow and nurture something that simply looks the same.
ere are plenty of shop owners like Mistress Solomon, though. People who can’t cure the fevers, but who claim to “help” with symptoms. I wouldn’t work for a true swindler, but Mistress Solomon seems to mean well. Most of the potions we create are for frivolous things like clear skin or shiny hair or trouble with sleep. Sometimes her mixtures won’t work, but I know what will, and I adjust my measurements accordingly.
I keep notes in my father’s notebooks of what cures the fevers—the Moon ower—and what doesn’t: everything else.
My ears are still ringing with what Mistress Solomon said: ten smugglers were captured. All from the same forge.
Weston. He doesn’t work with anyone else. I know he doesn’t.
But Weston isn’t even his real name. And if that’s not real . . . maybe I don’t really know anything for sure. Maybe the ten of them are people like Wes, who pretend to be working solo with friends in other sectors who don’t know the truth.
I have no way to nd him. No way to ask. I swallow. “Did they read off names?”
“No. Six men, four women. Two of the men died in the capture.”
I feel dizzy. “When—” I have to clear my throat. “When were they captured?”
“ey didn’t say. Yesterday, today, does it matter?” She sniffs haughtily. “You’re overgrinding that thistleroot, Tessa.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” She’s wrong, but she won’t like me saying so. She doesn’t like the idea of an impertinent young woman telling her how to run her business—which is how the last girl was let go. I need this job. No one thinks an eighteen-year-old girl from the Wilds could be a real apothecary. My father would have found these tinctures and remedies ridiculous, and he would have told Mistress Solomon to her face—but my father isn’t here to
pay my rent, so I obediently drop the pestle on the worktable and scrape out the powder.
When she moves away, Karri is eyeing me. Her voice drops very low. “Is your sweetheart a smuggler?”
“What? No!” I’m sure my face is redder than re now.
She goes back to her herbs, tossing a small handful into her bowl. “Mother says a lot of them are just trying to feed their own families. She’s heard stories of men who promise the moon, getting women to help them, and really it’s all for a half-dozen mouths to feed at home.”
I scowl into my bowl. My stomach is churning, tying itself into knots. I don’t know what’s worse: Wes dead at the hand of the King’s Justice, or Wes having a family at home.
What a thought. Dead is worse. Of course.
I always thought he was close to my age, but maybe he’s older. I only ever see him in the dark, with kohl-smudged eyes hidden behind a mask. He could easily be twice my age, I suppose.
“Be careful, Tessa,” says Karri.
I glance up. “I’m always careful,” I say. And then I perfectly measure my medicines to prove it.
 |
Once the dinner bells begin ringing through the streets, Karri and I are free to go. She lives at home with her family, while I’ve lived alone in a rented room in a boarding house since my parents died. She watched me all aernoon and invited me to dinner, probably thinking my “sweetheart” must have been one of the captured men. I can’t take her pitying glances for one more moment, so I turn her down and head home.
I stop in at the confectioner’s anyway, deciding it isn’t too much of an indulgence if I can hear any more gossip. As I hand my coins across, I say, “Can you believe they caught so many smugglers?”
e clerk nods sadly and says, “ey’ll all be put to death tomorrow, I reason.”
at icy grip on my spine refuses to loosen, especially when she adds, “I understand they’ll be doing it at the gates. You know that will draw a crowd.”
I wish I had a way to nd out if Wes is part of it. He can’t be.
But . . . Steel City. A forge. at’s too close.
I try to bide the time in my room, but the air is too sti ing and my nerves are too jangled. I’ll never sleep. I head for our workshop hours before we’re supposed to be there and light the re. I thought this would be better, to sit somewhere and wait, but it’s worse. Every inch of this space is wrapped up in two years’ worth of memories of Wes. at’s where he sits while I measure.
at’s the spot where he burned his nger on the woodstove. at’s the window that broke during the winter storms, the one Wes boarded over while the snow swirled in.
I fall asleep in the chair, sitting up, tears on my face. When I sleep, I dream. I dream of my parents, the night they were caught by the night patrol. I remember how I was ready to burst from my hiding place, ready to tackle the patrolmen myself. Wes caught me and kept me out of sight that night—but in my dream, he’s caught, too, his body jerking as arrows pierce his esh. I dream of Wes’s body hung from the gates or his head on a stake. I see him broken and burning in a pile of bodies, while onlookers yell, though some cheer. I dream of him screaming for me, shouting warnings while they beat him with clubs, smashing his bones.
“Tessa. Tessa.”
I open my eyes and there he is. For a moment, I think this is a new dream, that I’ve been so worried that my imagination has conjured him into this space, and I’ll wake up for real and the workshop will still be empty.
But he’s not. He’s real and solid and his blue eyes are bright as ever behind the mask. My eyes well with relief, and I don’t even bother to stop the tears from running over.
“You’re crying?” he says, and he sounds so startled about the fact that I’m crying over him that I want to punch him right in the face.
Instead I lurch forward and throw my arms around his neck. “Tessa,” he says. “is is so sudden.”
“Shut up, Wes. I hate you.” “Ah yes. Quite obviously.”
I giggle through my tears against his shoulder. I should let him go. I don’t.
He doesn’t either.
I want to ask if he knows about the people who were arrested, but instead, all that comes out of my mouth is, “Do you have a wife and a house full of
children to feed?” “No. Do you?”
I sniff and draw back to stare at him. For all his teasing, his eyes are serious, searching mine.
“You were right,” he says. “About the children?”
He grins. “No. No children.” He shakes his head at me like I’m addled. “No, you were right that I should see you without your mask.”
I gasp and slap my hands to my bare cheeks.
Weston’s grin turns wol sh. “I regret not taking you up on the offer earlier.”
I sink back into the chair and press my hands over my eyes, but of course it’s too late now—and truly, he was the one who never wanted to see me. “I was . . . upset. I wasn’t thinking. I was so worried.” My voice breaks on the last word.
He drops into the opposite chair. “Tell me all your fears.”
“I thought you were one of the smugglers who got captured.”
His face goes still, and his eyes seem to shutter. “I’m not a smuggler, Tessa.”
“I know. I know you’re not. We’re not.” I have to swipe at my eyes. “I just— they were from Steel City, so I thought maybe—”
“You see every single petal I take from the Royal Sector.” His eyes have gone cold. “I’ve never sold anything that we’ve taken. What we do—”
“Wes! I know.”
“What we do,” he repeats, his tone as sharp as I’ve ever heard it, “is not the same as what the smugglers do. I’m not in this to line my pockets.”
“I know,” I cry. “Wes, I know.” I sniff. “Me too. But it’s all the same to the king and his brother.”
He draws a long breath, then runs a hand down his face. When he looks back at me, his eyes are no longer so hard. “You’re right. Forgive me.”
I press my ngers into my eyes. “And I know you always tell me not to grow attached, but you’re the only true friend I have, especially since—since
—” My voice breaks again. “Since my parents—” Wes takes hold of my wrists, so gently. “Tessa.”
When he pulls me against him, I don’t resist, and he holds me for the longest time. We hold each other. is is so different from the other day,
when we were pressed into the shadows beside a house, hiding from the night patrol. Now it’s just me and Wes, in the warmth of the workshop, our workshop, holding on as if we can keep out all the evils of the world.
“ey’ll be executed.” His voice is so quiet. “At midday.”
I nod against him. “I heard.” I draw back and look up. “Do you think they deserve it?”
He hesitates, and his eyes are shuttered again. is isn’t something we ever talk about. Our conversations revolve around how to avoid detection. How effective the medicines are, and whether a little browning on the petals makes a difference. How frivolous and wasteful the elites are. We discuss the people we lose to the fever, and the people who live.
We don’t discuss what could happen, because I’m right. e king wouldn’t care that we’re stealing to help people. If we’re caught, we’ll be executed right next to the smugglers.
“I think . . . ,” he begins, and then he shakes his head. “I think we’re wasting time. Do you have your mask? e patrols have doubled because of
—”
“Wes.” I swallow and catch his arm. His voice was so harsh when he said, I’m not a smuggler, Tessa. “Do you think they deserve it?”
“I think that very few people truly deserve what they get, Tessa.” He pauses, and for the briefest moment, sadness ickers through his eyes. “For good or for bad.”
I think of my parents, executed in the street for doing the very thing Wes and I do. I think of Gillis, dying for lack of medicine, and Kendall, killed to leave an example. I think of the executions to come, and what that will mean for the people le behind.
I think of Weston risking his life to save mine, once upon a time, stopping me from falling to the same fate as my parents. I think of how he risks his life every night to bring medicine to people who need it.
“You only deserve good things,” I whisper.
He gives a small laugh without any humor to it and looks away. “Do you think so?”
I catch his face in my palm and turn his gaze back to mine. As usual, his jaw is a little rough and a little warm, the fabric of the mask so under my
ngertips.
“I do,” I say.
I wait for him to pull away, but he doesn’t. Maybe we’re both shaken. Maybe what happened to Kendall and Gillis has le us both reeling. e air between us seems to shi, and his eyes ick to my mouth. He inhales, his lips parting slightly. “Lord, Tessa . . .”
My thumb slips under the edge of his mask, shiing it higher.
Weston hisses a breath, and his hand shoots out to capture my wrist. I give a small yip of surprise at the suddenness of it.
His eyes clench closed. He lets me go. Takes a step back.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. I’m such a fool. He’s always been so clear about where we stand. About where he stands.
“Put your mask on,” he says roughly. “We’ll lose the darkness.”
I swallow and turn away, digging between the books in my apothecary pack until I nd it. I tie it into place over my hair with shaking ngers. When I reach for my hat where it hangs on a hook by the window, Wes catches my arm and turns me around.
I suck in a breath, but he puts his hands on my cheeks to lean in close, and I all but melt into a puddle on the oor. My back hits the wall of the workshop, and my head spins.
en Wes’s mouth hovers above mine, and I lose all rational thought. His thumb traces my lower lip.
“Not never, Tessa,” he says, and his voice is so rich and deep that he could be speaking straight to my heart. “But not like this.”
I stare into his eyes, wide and guileless and pleading. And ever the fool, I nod.
He pulls me forward and kisses me on the forehead. I sigh. “I really do hate you.”
“Always for the best.” He takes a step back, puts my hat on my head rmly, then icks the brim of his own up an inch. “Eight people will die at midday. Let’s see if we can get enough medicine to spare twice as many this morning.”
