“How about you?” he asked, his voice lower now that it could be.

“Same.” I sighed. “I just hate the feeling that something bad happened to both of us—all of us—and I don’t know what it was.”

The sun had been shining brightly, warming my skin, but clouds must’ve rolled in, casting shadows over us and cooling the air.

“The important thing is that we made it out, and we’re okay,” Pan said. “That’s what I keep reminding myself until we can remember what happened.”

“I think I remembered something new today,” I told him quietly.

He stopped short. “What?”

“It’s not much.” I turned back to face him. “Probably not anything important.”

“What was it?” he pressed.

“I was in a room I hadn’t seen before, full of vials and old books and plants.” I closed my eyes, concentrating on the snippet I’d seen in Ragnall’s office.

—a dark room with high walls that stretched up and up, and the ceiling was a stained-glass skylight. In each of the corners was an ouroboros in dark green, and that’s what I stared up at, what I always stared up at when they brought me there.

(How many times had I been there? How many times had they strapped me down to that bed?)

The whole room smelled sickly sweet, of lilies and potent copper. Restraints held me in place. I could feel them chafing my wrists and ankles and stomach, and no matter how much I strained at them, they didn’t give. Panic surged through me—there had been so few times in my life that I wasn’t strong enough to break free. With my strength, I could overpower most snares, but not this.

I craned my neck toward the voices, catching glimpses of the vials of currant-red liquid and Indu arguing with Lemak, the häxdoktor.

“This is taking too long,” Indu was saying. “We’re bleeding her dry as it is.”

“It takes time for a correct ratio,” Lemak protested. “But we’ve never been this close before.”

“Close?” Indu sneered at the häxdoktor. “Almost? Nearly?”

I could see them with my head tilted back all the way, so they were upside down. From this angle, Indu’s nose looked big, too large for his slender face, and his skin was noticeably weathered, with burst capillaries under his cheeks making him look like he was blushing.

The häxdoktor, Lemak, was thin and tall, a sliver of a man really, with long slender fingers.

(I had felt them on my skin many times before, probing my arms, his rough fingertips thirsty and demanding as they searched for viable veins.)

But now he shrank back from Indu, even though he towered over him, and Lemak held his arms up, as if shielding himself from expected blows.