Page 61 of Soulgazer

I can’t dwell on what happens if his fever doesn’t break.

Lorcan blows a breath between his lips, then drops the infected arm and shakes his head. “I could just cut it off?”

My body seizes at the suggestion just as Faolan snaps back into himself. “Absolutely feckin’ not.”

“Well, I can’t see another way around the gold spreading. Look at it, Captain. It’s already near the bend.”

Faolan scoffs. “Bollocks on that, it’s— Saoirse?”

I’m not a healer. I’d never been to Frozen Hearth before the Damhsa, or trained in medicinal arts. But when I was a girl, Mamwould let me go to the kitchens and work the gardens there. An older woman with poor vision taught me how to recognize plants by smell and feel, as well as sight. I never got to say goodbye before I was banished, but I continued my practices in the cottage by the sea.

“You should have a surgeon, Faolan,” I say, my voice a low, faraway sound. It carries behind me as I shove a cabinet open and retrieve the bag of fish scales tossed inside. “A real one. This is stupid and—avoidable, and—I don’t understand how someone can keeptapestriesand fifty different coats on their ship but can’t employ a single bloody healer?”

Anger is still a forbidden emotion. My fingers shake as I return to the mortar, tipping a handful of scales inside. One firm strike of the pestle, and they resemble the glittering powder streaked on some women’s cheeks that first night we met.

“Is that all, love?”

“No.” I grind the things further with a roll of my wrist. Ignore the stinging in my eyes.

Lorcan hesitates, then peers over my shoulder. “That’s a bit of a risk, using the same thing that—”

“I know.” I lock eyes with Faolan and watch something strange pass over his face, there and gone again in an instant. It’s a look that’s bound to keep me up at night. “Just…let me try. Please.”

The scales are hardly more than a paste now, but I keep going, just to keep my nerve from breaking. “Do you know how we treat the bites of the adders that fill our caverns on my home isle?” Curls cling to my forehead in sweaty strands. “We grind their fangs into a poultice, to draw out the venom.”

Faolan winces, and I wish for the first time in my life that my father were here. Or at least, the mushrooms he’s so carefully cultivated. One bite of the cap, and Faolan’s pain would vanish.

I glance at Lorcan, then test the texture of my paste with a slowroll of the pestle. The only comfort I have is that not a damn person besides myself has any better ideas. “Is the kelp ready along with the bandages?”

“Just about.” Lorcan pulls a strip free from the bucket of salt water drawn an hour ago, and bends it to test the flexibility. “It’ll be ready once the paste has set.”

“Thank you.” I shake my hair out of my eyes and slowly get to my feet, only to sink onto the bed beside Faolan’s trembling form. The fever is seeping back into his mind—I can see him slipping away.

“Hold still,” I whisper, and scoop the thick gold-blue mixture into my palm, spreading it over his wound. I use every last ounce I can scrape free. Once it’s done and the kelp’s secured all the way round his arm, we sit in silence and wait.

Wait for nothing, because for once in our entire time together, Faolan is silent and still. A corpse in a colorful tomb.

I jump when Tavin enters, a golden nautilus cradled in one hand. He asks something as he holds it out, but my tongue is too thick to relay Faolan’s injuries, hands clumsy and caked in half-dried paste. Lorcan takes the shell, words rolling across his tongue like thunder—I can’t concentrate. My gaze dulls, splitting between Tavin as he pours violet-tinged sand into the shell, and Faolan, whose chest rises and falls in shallow waves.

“She shouldn’t be here for this.”

“You try telling her that, mate.”

Tavin locks his jaw as he unfastens a small leather pouch, extracting a single gleaming red hair. It clings to the nautilus’s edge as he holds up a final offering: a shard of ice from the Isle of Frozen Hearth, held just below the lantern’s flame. One drop inside the shell, and purple steam erupts.

Lorcan drops a hand to my shoulder as I flinch, watching Tavinbreathe in the smoke until his lips turn lilac and his eyes roll back. “W-what is he doing?”

“Reporting to Kiara.” Lorcan squeezes once. “But you don’t have to listen. We could go on deck and—”

“He’s going to survive this.” My gaze leaps, frantic, from Lorcan’s kind eyes to Tavin’s closed ones. “Faolan is the Wolf. He can’t…hewon’t…”

Die.

The pity that blooms on Lorcan’s brow sets my stomach turning—or maybe it’s the smell of that plum-colored smoke. The way our seanchaí measures Faolan’s injuries against his vitality on a scale that seems rigged. Outside the window, sunlight teases the horizon toward dawn, but I feel like the world should be darker. Dimmer as Faolan straddles the line between this life and the next.

My body stiffens as Tavin relinquishes his message to the wind: a streak of lavender, and then nothing. Gone. He blinks twice, then turns my way.

“Saoirse—”