Chapter 5

Hazel's POV

He said it the way you set down something breakable. Carefully, and with both hands.

I laughed. I couldn't help it. It rose out of me like a hiccup, high and brittle and horrible, and I pressed the ultrasound picture to my chest as if that might muffle it.

"That isn't funny," I said.

"No," said Roland. "It isn't."

He wasn't smiling. He wasn't doing anything, in fact. He sat on that low stool with his forearms on his knees and his hazel eyes on mine, not blinking, not softening, and I understood that he was giving me the one thing nobody in my life had given me in years: the plain truth, undressed.

"It's mint," I said. "It's Marin's tonic. It's mint and honey and..."

"Wolfsbane. Silverroot. And something called graveroot, which holds the other two in your blood." He unfolded a sheet of paper and laid it on the table beside my knee. Columns of numbers. Chemical names. A line at the bottom, underscored. "The doses are tiny. That's what frightens me. Poisoners are usually careless. This isn't carelessness. Whoever mixed this has done it many times, with very steady hands, to keep a wolf alive and asleep."

"My wolf."

"Yes."

"You're saying she isn't broken."

"I'm saying that in twelve years of practice I've never met a wolf who was born silent. I've met wolves who were frightened, or sedated, or hurt, or held down. I've never met one who was simply absent." He leaned in. "I felt her, Tuesday night, when I took your pulse. Very far down. Turning over."

The room was very quiet. The old machine hummed. Out in the corridor a trolley rattled and a child cried and life went on in its indifferent way.

"Eloise," I said.

I hadn't meant to say it. It fell out of my mouth like a coin.

Roland said nothing.

"Eloise held my hand when my grandmother died. She was twelve. She wrapped a blanket around both of us and didn't say a word, she just sat there." My voice sounded thin and far away. "She braided my hair the morning of my wedding. She was so nervous her fingers shook, and she kept dropping the pins. And the next morning, she started the tonic..."

I stopped.

The morning after the wedding. Not before, not the week of. I remembered it very clearly: a tray, a blue bottle, my sister in the doorway in a pale robe with her hair down and her eyes shining. Marin's tonic, Haz. For your nerves. You've been so brave. I remembered I had almost cried, because I thought it was love.

I stood up. Not gracefully. The floor did something odd.

"I need air," I said.

Roland was already on his feet. "Not in here. Come on."

There was a garden behind the obstetrics wing, if you could call it that: a square of grass, four benches, a maple that had gone the color of embers. Nobody was in it. I sat down on the nearest bench and put my head between my knees the way Mrs. Hale had taught me when I was small, and I breathed until the pavement stopped moving.

I heard him sit down at the far end of the bench. He didn't crowd me. After a while a paper cup came into my line of sight, held out by a steady hand.

"I was going to bring you tea," he said, "and then I realized what I was doing, and had to go and buy this from a machine instead. It isn't good. It's hot chocolate in the sense that a vending machine is a restaurant."

I looked at the cup. I looked at him.

And I began to laugh, and then I was crying, and the two things wouldn't separate. He didn't try to stop me. He sat at his end of the bench and looked at the maple as though it were very interesting, and he let me have every minute of it.

The chocolate tasted of burnt sugar and warm plastic. It was the best thing I had ever drunk.

"Who else knows?" I asked, when I could.

"You, me, and Harper. Harper doesn't count. Harper will take it to her grave and beat everyone else there."

"Why would she do it?"

"I don't know."

"You must have an idea."

"I have a dozen. None of them is evidence." He turned the paper cup in his hands. "I can tell you what's in a bottle, Hazel. I can't tell you what's in a person's heart. That's a different laboratory, and it takes longer."

I set my cup down on the bench between us.

"The babies?"

"Are fine. They've been fine all along. The dose was never large enough to hurt a child. Whoever did this wanted you alive." He said it carefully. "That's the part I keep turning over. They didn't want you dead. They wanted you quiet."

The Quiet Luna.

It went through me like cold water. Three years. The sniggering and the sympathy, the elders and their grace years, my father's practical voice. The long slow strangling of a name. And behind all of it, every morning, a pretty blue bottle.

"Blaine," I said. My voice was very small.

"Does he give you the tonic?"

"No. Eloise does."

"Does he know what's in it?"

"I don't think so." I pressed my knuckles to my mouth. "I think he thinks it's herbs. I think he thinks it's kindness."

"Then I'm not worried about him," said Roland. "But he isn't the one keeping you safe, either. I'll be direct, because I think you'd rather have it that way. Whoever is doing this is close enough to pour your tea every morning. If you tell the wrong person, you've told them. For now, the fewer who know, the better."

"Mrs. Hale knows something."

"Then Mrs. Hale is very good, and I'd like to shake her hand."

"And Astra?" I hadn't meant to ask that, either. "Blaine's mother. She's the only one who ever..."

"Do you trust her?"

"Yes."

"Then we may bring her in. But not yet. Ten days is very short, Hazel, and if she's as good as you say, she'll be watched too."

"Ten days," I said. The Blood Moon. The Moon Stone, the wolf, the one clear note.

"The poison has to leave your blood before your wolf can answer. I don't know how long that takes. I've never met anyone dosed like this, and I've certainly never met anyone who came out of it." He took a small bottle from his coat pocket and set it on the bench. Blue glass, with a cork. Identical. "I made this at two o'clock this morning. Peppermint, chamomile, honey, a drop of green dye. Utterly harmless. You keep carrying your sister's tonic upstairs, and you keep pouring it into jars, and you keep drinking mine. If she checks your cup, it will taste right and smell right."

I stared at the bottle. Something in my chest tightened.

"You made a copy," I said. "At two in the morning."

"I'm apparently a man who plans for the outcome he wants." A wry twist of the mouth. "Bring me the jars. I'll keep them here, labeled, dated, sealed. If this ever comes before a council, I'd like it to be more than just your word."

"Why are you doing this?"

"Because you're my patient."

"That isn't a real answer."

He looked at me for a long moment. The wind moved the maple, and a single leaf came down between us and turned end over end in the air, slowly, as if it had all the time in the world.

"It's the one I can give today," he said.

I ought to have pushed. I know that. But there was something in his face, an old, careful grief he wasn't hiding well, and I found I couldn't ask him to put it down just so that I could pick up my own. I put the blue bottle in my tote beside the ultrasound picture, and I said, "Thank you," and I meant a hundred things by it.

Mrs. Hale drove me home. She didn't ask what had happened. She kept her eyes on the road and her hands at ten and two, and somewhere on the long hill up to the ridge she reached across, without looking, and dropped a paper twist of ginger candy in my lap.

I held it in my fist until we reached the gates.

There were two cars in the drive I didn't know. Not strangers' cars. Night Howler's. I recognized the crest on the door, the black wolf in a ring of river reeds, before I recognized anything else. My father's driver was polishing a wing mirror with a chamois.

"They weren't expected until Saturday," Mrs. Hale said, very quietly.

I got out of the car.

My mother stood at the foot of the front steps under the gray afternoon, in her good coat, with a garment bag draped over her arm. It was long and white, the kind of bag that holds something you don't want creased. She saw me. She didn't lower it. Behind her, in the doorway, a maid was carrying a hat box and another was carrying shoes, and the whole household was moving in the bright, purposeful way of people preparing for a celebration.

"Hazel," my mother said. Her voice was perfectly even. "You look well."

I looked at the bag. I looked at her.

Somebody had sent for measurements. Somebody had ordered a gown in white, cut for a taller and thinner woman than me, and had it folded in tissue and carried three hundred miles.

"Mother," I said. "What's that?"

"Only a dress, darling," she said. "Only in case."