Chapter 15: The Tea Idris Kept

Idris filled the cup and slid it across the table before Noah had his coat off.

The court's order hung on the scriptorium door behind them, four corners bitten into the wood by iron nails.

Noah put his hand around the clay before he sat down.

It was warm through his palm, weak, the way Idris always brewed it.

'They wrote it out fair,' Idris said.

'No vessel shared from a priest's hand, signed by the chancellor, sealed by the court.'

He did not look at the door.

He looked at the cup in Noah's fingers.

'I read it,' he said.

'Then I boiled the water.'

Adrian held the door open behind them, one arm braced against the frame.

The hinges creaked once and settled.

Noah drank.

'Even the locked rooms get called guest chambers,' Idris said.

Noah laughed into the rim.

It came out of him before he could weigh it, raw and short.

The sound landed in the room and stayed there.

Adrian had never heard it.

He stood at the threshold with his hand still on the door and did not move.

Idris poured himself nothing and sat down across from Noah.

'The boy in the east cell,' he said.

'Sat up this morning and asked for the healer by name.'

Noah's grip eased on the cup.

'He ate,' Idris said.

'Half a bowl, and he kept it down.'

The old man turned his spoon over once on the table.

'The man in the next cell died of the same fever while you were in the hall.'

Something opened along Noah's wrist, thin and gold, a seam of light under the skin.

Heat climbed his forearm toward the elbow.

He set the cup down and folded his sleeve over it.

The glow sank back under the skin and went dark.

'Which one of them was I supposed to save,' Noah said.

'Both,' Idris said.

'That is the whole of it.'

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