“No,” she answered. “Stay, Torin. We shouldn’t be alone tonight. And I have something I need to tell you.”

Why did his stomach drop? He braced himself and motioned to the countless dishes, scattered across the kitchen. “We both need to eat. But you should change into some dry clothes first.”

She nodded. While she went to the bedroom, Torin perused the offerings. He eventually brought a bannock, a cauldron of cold stew, and a bottle of wine to the table, careful not to disturb Sidra’s herbs.

She returned a few moments later, dressed in a floor-length chemise. Torin noted that she had laced the collar tight, to conceal the bruises on her chest as if they didn’t exist, and he felt a lance of pain in his stomach. He didn’t want her to feel as if she had to hide things from him.

She looked at the stew he had chosen.

“Should I heat it?” she asked.

Torin should have thought of that. He wordlessly stoked a fire in the hearth, and Sidra set the cauldron over the iron hook. While they waited for the food to warm, he glanced at her.

“You have something to tell me?” he prompted.

“Yes,” Sidra said, rubbing her arms with a shiver. “I know what the Orenna flower does.”

He frowned as she brought the red flower to him. The very one he had once carried to her.

Slowly, she told him everything. The legend she had read in the tattered book. How she had planned to come home today to fetch her herbs and thought otherwise when she saw the crimson flower. How the petals had tasted, and how they had opened her eyes to the spirit realm.

Torin’s shock gave way to anger. “You should have spoken to me first, Sid. Before you ate this. What if it was poison?”

Sidra was quiet. There was something far worse lurking in her eyes. “I think it saved me, Torin.”

He listened as she continued about the reflection in the loch. Torin went cold with dread. He imagined Sidra swimming down into the darkness, only to return after a hundred years had passed. He would be long dead, his bones in a grave. He would have never known what had befallen her. He would have lost his daughter and his wife in the span of a day, and it would have obliterated him.