Yrene considered. “Bring in mirrors. Catch the sunlight through the window, and focus it upon the vial. Adjust it a few times a day to match the path of the sun. The cooler temperature and more concentrated sunlight might have the tonic ready sooner.”

A little, pleased nod. Yrene had come to cherish those nods, the light in those brown eyes. “Quick wits save lives more often than magic,” was Hafiza’s only reply.

She’d said it a thousand times before, usually where Yrene was involved—to her eternal pride—but Yrene bowed her head in thanks and set the vial back upon its stand.

“So,” Hafiza said, folding her hands atop each other on the near-glowing rosewood desk, “Eretia informs me that she believes you are ready to leave us.”

Yrene straightened in her seat, the very same chair she’d sat in that first day she’d climbed the thousand steps to the top of the tower and begged for admittance. The begging had been the least of her humiliations that meeting, the crowning moment being when she dumped the bag of gold on Hafiza’s desk, blurting that she didn’t care what the cost was and to take it all.

Not realizing that Hafiza did not take money from students. No, they paid for their education in other ways. Yrene had suffered through endless indignities and degradations during her year working at the backwater White Pig Inn, but she had never been more mortified than the moment Hafiza ordered her to put the money back in that brown pouch. Scraping the gold off the desk like some cardplayer scrambling to collect his winnings, Yrene had debated leaping right out the arc of windows towering behind Hafiza’s desk.

Much had changed since then. Gone was the homespun dress, the too-slim body. Though Yrene supposed the endless stairs of the Torre had kept in check the weight she’d gained from steady, healthy eating, thanks to the Torre’s enormous kitchens, the countless markets teeming with food stalls, and the dine-in shops along every bustling street and winding alley.

Yrene swallowed once, trying and failing to glean the Healer on High’s face. Hafiza had been the one person here whom Yrene could never read, never anticipate. She’d never once shown a display of temper—something that couldn’t be said of many of the instructors here, Eretia especially—and had never raised her voice. Hafiza had only three expressions: pleased, neutral, and disappointed. Yrene lived in terror of the latter two.

Not for any punishment. There was no such thing here. No rations held, no pain threatened. Not like at the White Pig, where Nolan had docked her pay if she stepped out of line or was overgenerous with a customer, or if he caught her leaving out nightly scraps for the half-feral urchins who had prowled the filthy streets of Innish.

She’d arrived here thinking it would be the same: people who took her money, who made it harder and harder to leave. She’d spent a year working at the White Pig due to Nolan’s increases in her rent, decreases in her pay, his cut of her meager tips, and knowledge that most women in Innish worked the streets, and his place, disgusting as it had been, was a far better alternative.

She’d told herself never again—until she’d arrived here. Until she’d dumped that gold on Hafiza’s desk and had been ready to do it all over, indebt and sell herself, just for a chance to learn.

Hafiza did not even consider such things. Her work was in direct opposition to the people who did, the people like Nolan. Yrene still remembered the first time she’d heard Hafiza say in that thick, lovely accent of hers, nearly the same words that Yrene’s mother had told her, over and over: they did not charge, students or patients, for what Silba, Goddess of Healing, gifted them for free.

In a land of so many gods that Yrene was still struggling to keep them all straight, at least Silba remained the same.

Yet another clever thing the khaganate had done upon patching together the kingdoms and territories during their years of conquest: keep and adapt the gods of everyone. Including Silba, whose dominance over the healers had been established in these lands long ago. History was written by the victors, apparently. Or so Eretia, Yrene’s direct tutor, had once told her. Even the gods seemed no more immune to it than mere mortals.

But it didn’t stop Yrene from offering up a prayer to Silba and whatever gods might be listening as she said at last, “I am ready, yes.”

“To leave us.” Such simple words, offered with that neutral face—calm and patient. “Or have you considered the other option I presented to you?”

Yrene had. She’d thought about it endlessly in the two weeks since Hafiza had summoned her to this office and spoke the one word that had clenched a fist around her heart: Stay.

Stay, and learn more—stay, and see what this fledgling life she’d built here might grow into.

Yrene rubbed at her chest as if she could still feel that viselike grip. “War is coming to my home again—the northern continent.” So they called it here. Yrene swallowed. “I want to be there to help those fighting against the empire’s control.”

At last, after so many years, a force was rallying. Adarlan itself had been sundered, if rumors were to be believed, by Dorian Havilliard in the north, and the dead king’s Second, Duke Perrington, in the south. Dorian was backed by Aelin Galathynius, the long-lost queen now ripe with power and ravenous for vengeance, judging by what she’d done to the glass castle and its king. And Perrington, rumor also claimed, was aided by horrors birthed from some dark nightmare.

But if this was the only chance at freedom for Fenharrow …

Yrene would be there to help, in whatever way she could. She still smelled smoke, late at night or when she was drained after a hard healing. Smoke from that fire those Adarlanian soldiers had built—and burned her mother upon. She still heard her mother’s screaming and felt the wood of that tree trunk dig beneath her nails as she’d hidden at the edge of Oakwald. As she watched them burn her mother alive. After her mother had killed that soldier to buy Yrene time to run.

It had been ten years since then. Nearly eleven. And though she had crossed mountains and oceans … there were some days when Yrene felt as if she were still standing in Fenharrow, smelling that fire, splinters slicing under her nails, watching as the soldiers took their torches and burned her cottage, too.

The cottage that had housed generations of Towers healers.

Yrene supposed it was fitting, somehow, she’d wound up in a tower herself. With only the ring on her left hand as proof that once, for hundreds of years, there had existed a line of prodigally gifted female healers in the south of Fenharrow. A ring she now toyed with, that last shred of proof that her mother and mother’s mother and all the mothers before them had once lived and healed in peace. It was the first of only two objects Yrene would not sell—even before selling herself.