“And you slept,” she says, more to herself than me.
“Quite heavily, as I understand it,” I say dryly.
She steps toward me. “May I feel your forehead?” she asks.
I nod, and she presses the back of her hand to my brow. “You aren’t warm,” she says before reaching out to touch the single tendril of white in my auburn hair.
“It was there before,” I tell her. “After the poison.”
She nods. “I remember. Not like the Kaiserin’s hair, is it? But I suppose you have Artemisia to thank for that—if she hadn’t used her own gift on you so quickly to negate the poison, it would have affected you far more. If it hadn’t killed you on the spot, the mine certainly would have.”
“You didn’t see Cress—the Kaiserin—yourself,” I say, changing the subject. “But you must have heard stories of her power by now.”
Mina considers this. “I’ve heard stories,” she says carefully. “Though I find stories are often exaggerated.”
I remember Cress killing the Kaiser with just her scalding hands around his throat, the way she trailed ash over the desk with her fingertips. She radiated power in a way that I have never seen equaled. I’m not sure how anyone could exaggerate what I saw with my own eyes.
“It’s as if…she doesn’t even have to call on her gift. She killed the Kaiser in a few seconds with just her hands,” I say.
“And you still don’t feel strong enough to stand against her,” Mina guesses.
“I don’t think anyone is,” I admit. “Did you ever hear of Guardians killing with that little effort?”
She shakes her head. “I didn’t hear anything about Guardians killing at all,” she says. “It wasn’t their way. If a person’s crimes ever warranted execution, it was carried out by more mundane means. Guardians never did the deed with the gifts given to them by the gods. It would have been its own kind of sacrilege, a perversion of something holy.”
I think about Blaise going out into the battlefield, knowing he could have died but determined to kill as many Kalovaxians as possible before he did. Was that a perversion of his gift? Or are the standards different now, in times of war?
“The children I saw before, the ones you were testing,” I say, remembering the boy and girl with the same unstable power as Blaise. “How are they?”
“Laius and Griselda,” she supplies. “They are as well as can be expected, I suppose. Frightened and traumatized by the horrific experiments the Kalovaxians did on them, but they’re strong in more ways than one.” She pauses for a second. “Your hypothetical friend has been helpful. They like him, standoffish though he might be. It truly is something, to discover you aren’t as alone in the world as you thought.”
When I told Mina about Blaise, I only ever referred to him hypothetically, though she saw through that quickly enough. Now, it seems, she knows exactly who he is. But she isn’t afraid of him, at least, or of Laius and Griselda, either.
“Have you told anyone else about your findings?” I ask her.
She purses her lips. “I have no findings, Your Highness,” she says, shrugging. “Only a hypothesis, and that is not enough cause to get everyone riled up. People fear what they don’t understand, and in times like this, fear can lead to dangerous decisions.”
If people knew how strong and how unstable Blaise and Laius and Griselda are, they might kill them. It’s no more than I already knew, but hearing her imply it like that knocks the breath from my lungs.
“Everyone saw what Blaise did on the ship,” I say. “They saw how he almost destroyed himself and everyone around him. They didn’t hurt him after that.”
“No,” she agrees. “In fact, I’d imagine they’ll be singing folk songs about that act for some centuries to come, but no one was hurt. He’s a hero to them now. A hero who was so powerful, he couldn’t control himself, but a hero all the same. Never forget—that can change in an instant.”
MINA SUGGESTS A WALK MIGHT do me good, and though my body protests strongly against the idea, I take her advice. I have to lean most of my weight on Heron, and even still my muscles scream with each step, but I can’t deny that the fresh air in my lungs and the sun on my skin are worth the pain. And as I walk, my muscles begin to loosen and the aching in my limbs becomes somewhat more bearable.
It’s strange to see the mine camp so empty, a deserted city of empty barracks with only a handful still occupied by the ill and the injured. Heron points out which ones are acting as infirmaries when we pass by, but I don’t need him to. It’s clear in the sounds that seep out from their walls—the hacking coughs, the soft cries, the wails of pain. The sounds threaten to drown me in a sea of guilt.
So many more are alive and well, I tell myself. So many more are free.
Heron tries to distract me, pointing out other buildings that survived the battle. Food is rationed and served in the old mess hall, he says, and a group of men and women who stayed behind have volunteered to hunt and gather to keep our stores from depleting too quickly. When we leave to catch up with the troops, we’ll take more food with us.
Even the old slave quarters have been put to use, though understandably no one is keen to sleep there—instead, they’ve been cleared of furniture and shackles and repurposed as weapons storage and places to train away from the overwhelming heat of the sun.
“Who is training?” I ask Heron when he points out one of the newly repurposed training rooms to me. “I thought the troops left.”
“Not all of them,” he replies carefully. “Most of the people we found who’d been blessed in the mines took to the training quickly, and there were a couple of elders who went along to help continue their training, but there were others who needed more assistance.”
Blessed. There were over a dozen blessed Astreans the Kalovaxians had been keeping in this camp. Experimenting on, I remember, though the thought makes me shudder. I saw the evidence of it myself: sliced skin, cut-off fingers and toes—one man had even had his eye taken out.
“They trained so quickly?” I ask, surprised. When I went into the cave, none of them had been fit to walk across camp, let alone fight.
“I helped with the physical healing,” Heron says, shrugging. “But the mental and emotional wounds are another matter. Many of them viewed the training as a way of healing. They wanted to. Art, Blaise, and I saw to it, along with a few of the Astrean elders who were familiar with the training, even if they weren’t Guardians themselves. They aren’t fully trained, of course, but they made good progress during what little time we had. And they should be continuing, even as we speak.”