It hurt to see her like this. Ranka put a hand on Aramis’s shoulder. “I know you wanted to save her. But—”

A scent filled the room, like a body finding new breath. The new leeches wriggled, but there were no blisters. They were alive.

Aramis drew another vial of the vaccine and injected it carefully into the Kerth. “What did I say, witch girl? I may not be good for much—but I am good at this.”

Ranka looked past her, to the witch, who finally looked peaceful in death, her pained snarl smoothed away.

And then the witch’s finger twitched.

That’s not possible.

The last of the leeches fell away—and the Kerth gasped.

Aramis looked at her the way acolytes looked at their goddess. “She’s alive.”

The Kerth kept breathing. Asleep or comatose, Ranka wasn’t certain. But she was absolutely, impossibly alive.

Joy broke across the princess’s face. She flung her arms around Ranka, hugging her in that ecstatic manner of people who were so thrilled, they didn’t care whom they celebrated with, only that they did. Ranka went rigid, startled, and then relaxed and hugged her back.

“This changes everything,” Aramis whispered, tilting her head back. She smelled of exhaustion, of fear, of ink and mint and a strange acidic chemical that hurt Ranka’s throat but drew her in all the same. The flecks of gold in her eyes gleamed copper in the half-light.

Some foolish, self-punishing part of Ranka wanted to lean down like she had in the tavern.

Percy cleared his throat, and they leapt apart.

Aramis drifted back to the unconscious Kerth, smoothing the hair away from her face. The cure hadn’t totally worked. Sores still covered her body, and the nails of her left hand still ended in sharp black claws, but she was breathing. Aramis hovered over her, drinking in the sight of the witch she had half saved, a thousand more questions flitting across her face.

“Are the sores growing?” Percy asked, coming to stand alongside her.

“No. It’s like we… paused it.” Aramis made her way around the chair, inspecting every inch of her newest patient, her dark lashes fluttering. She took her pulse and looked skyward, counting the beats. “Her heart is barely moving—but she’s breathing fine.” She knocked the witch on the knee, and her leg kicked up as her muscles responded. “Reflexes are still fine too.”

Percy and Aramis exchanged a long, thoughtful look. It had irritated Ranka so much when she’d met them—the way they read each other at a glance, the symbiosis between their movements. Galen may have been Aramis’s twin by blood, but Percy was one by choice, and they often seemed like the cruelest mirror images of each other—the boy who had unleashed a terror upon a nation, the girl who sought to stop it.