“Enough!” She pulls herself upright. “He didn’t poison them. Not exactly.” She swallows. “I… I did.”

I stagger.

What?

“Wait… no, you said…”

“Listen.” She darts another glance over her shoulder. “Taavi doesn’t want you knowing this. She thinks you won’t have anything to do with us if you find out. But this is my doing, not hers. Hush and listen.”

I can’t move, her words are like quicksand.

“We fell in love when we were young. I’d never had attention from someone like him before. He was Moyechi, and they were all really brilliant with large plats of land. My mother and her people were Tuki, a clan of mostly servant women. But I was born with an affinity for potions, you see. My mother didn’t believe in any of that sort of thing, so when she saw that my baubles were making strange things happen, she threw out all my things. Xire, the Chancellor, that’s his real name, found me dumping my stuff at the shore. The first thing he said to me was, “Bury it instead.”

“He told me that the reason the world wanted me to throw away my potions was because they made me special. Different from them. They were jealous. We buried them together and spent each night after under the stars. He told me about his family, how he’d love to let me meet them one day. But not any time soon. He always had a reason I couldn’t meet his people, come to think of it. I was a servant girl, so I didn’t question it. I lived for the thrill of skipping through the forest under the stars, skinny-dipping at the edge of the island by moonlight.” She blushes. “I was quite a looker, though you probably can’t tell it now.”

I fold my legs underneath me and sit beside her.

“And then one day he came to me with boar blood or something on his hands. He told me he wanted me to dig up those potion ingredients where we buried them and try out something. We’d all known of the brown-skinned people on the island with magic. The Ghizoni tribe. But that had nothing to do with any of us. Beyond trade agreements with them, they kept to themselves. But Xire had said he heard of a new strain of magic on the island outside of the Ghizoni, and he bet if there was any truth to it, the magic would be in me.”