I sit with him for a while. He closes his eyes, but I can tell by his breathing that he’s not yet fallen asleep. After a short time, he speaks again, and his voice has a dreamy quality. “The fever usually doesn’t return so soon, does it, Zivah?”

Typically it would be hard to answer a question like this, but there’s a freedom in talking to someone in this state. “Not usually,” I say.

He breathes in deep through his nose and then lets it out. “I know why it has,” he says. “I know why.”

The shadow in his words stirs a feeling of foreboding in me. “Why is that?”

“Guilt.”

My breath catches. I have an opportunity here, one I should not take. The Goddess’s commands are very clear. Herbal knowledge is for healing. The tools we’re given are not meant to be used for our own agendas.

But it would be so easy.

“Why do you feel guilty?”

“A minister of health is supposed to protect the people. But I didn’t say anything. I stayed silent, and Hefana punishes me now.”

There’s a tingling at the base of my neck. Whatever lingering doubts I have, I smother them. “What did you see, Utana?”

He tosses back and forth on his bed. “Baruva. Kiran. The soldiers. It wasn’t right to turn the plague against their own people.”

Kiran? “What do you mean?”

“Just the right amount of weak vinegar…to sicken the troops…”

Weak vinegar…Baruva’s method of strengthening the rose plague essence. “What troops?”

“Troops for Monyar. It was just what Kiran needed to start a war….”

My heart knocks against my rib cage. “It’s Kiran who wants the attacks?”

“The emperor was happy to rest, but the son wanted more….But it wasn’t supposed to be his mentor’s battalion. It wasn’t supposed to happen so soon.”

The smoke in the room suddenly feels impossibly thick. I have trouble breathing, and I feel an overwhelming compulsion to get out. “Rest, Utana.” I don’t wait for a reply before I leave the room.

The servant waits outside.

“He should be fine to sleep with no danger,” I tell him. “If you need to enter for some reason, cover your face with a damp cloth and open the windows to disperse the smoke.”

My mind spins as I make my way home. It was the prince, all along, who’d sickened the troops, and he meant for our people to take the blame. My stomach rolls as I think of everyone back in Dara, of Leora and her new husband starting a life together, of young Alia, of my parents—all of them unaware of the machinations against them, of the punishment heading toward them for a crime they knew nothing about. I need to tell Dineas. We need to tell Gatha.