Bursting from one of the castle’s side doors, I sprint across the lawn toward the south gate, where the road will lead me back to Laista. Fear drags at my feet, and my thin indoor shoes immediately soak through with snow. But I know if I stop running, if I even slow down, the fear will overcome me. You don’t have to do this, something in me whispers.
Caro will die, another voice says, and it will be your fault.
I run.
I reach the time lender’s shop, a thin, simple wooden building tucked into an alley lined with the ugly back sides of Laista’s storefronts, all willfully blind to its business. A crude sign by the entrance marks it—an hourglass symbol burned into an unpainted square of wood. The dark, narrow alley is heaped with dirty snow and smatterings of old blood. Laista’s time lender—Wick, I learn from the guard posted at the door—is busy today. He smiles grimly as he lets me pass.
In the dimness, few people look up at me as I take my place in line. Unlike the rest of Laista’s citizens, the likes of whom I drank with the night before, the people in line are gray, shivering. Ahead of me, the table is heaped haphazardly with a burnished knife and silver bowls, and a simple kiln smolders farther back. The cheap balsa wood inside it gives off a sour, acrid scent as it burns. The man moving behind the table must be Wick. Lank hair and ragged, bloodstained apron aside, he looks young and healthy compared to the people using his services, his eyes pale from the consumption of blood-iron. My skin crawls, but it’s not as if I have another choice.
After a time that seems like forever and also entirely too soon, it’s my turn to step up to the table. The older woman ahead of me hobbles away, cradling her bandaged hand. I approach the table and sit down on the rickety stool. Wick ignores me as he shakes a few stray droplets of blood onto the tabletop and wipes his knife clean with a rag.
For a moment, I think I’m going to vomit all over the instruments of bloodletting. I’ve seen enough of this in Crofton, but now, watching Wick hold his blade over the leaping flame of an oil lamp to prepare it for my skin, I know why Papa made sure that I’d never had it drawn myself.
When Wick takes my arm and lays it out on the table. I clamp my lips shut, bite the inside of my cheek. Caro risked everything for me. To try and bring me something—anything—of my father’s. Some tiny piece of a memory. One small act of justice.
It’s my fault what happened to her. My duty to save her.
I expect Wick to say something, try to comfort me before he cuts, but Wick is all business. “How much?” he asks.
“What?”
“How much time d’you want to withdraw?” he repeats impatiently.
My voice cracks when I say, “Forty years.”
Wick’s face draws together in a moment of shock, then disapproval. “You’re joking,” he says. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.” My whole life stretches out in my mind, seventeen years filled with memories and pain and everything that makes me who I am. For the span of a breath, I don’t think of Everless or the Queen or darkness or anything but small, pearled moments of pure joy: Roan’s hand held tight by mine and a child’s shriek of laugher, Amma’s smile as she sends Jacob away, the smell of charcoal as my father tamed my hair with his fingers and a length of ribbon.
I’ll have those, always—but what moments am I about to bleed, and how many—if any—will I have left?
“I’ll have to measure the time in your blood first,” Wick tells me, apparently seeing the determination on my face. “I don’t want anyone dropping dead at my table.”
I nod mutely. My heart is beating fast, making my pulse hammer away in my wrist and throat, try as I might to quiet it. As if my blood is afraid to leave me. But Wick just shakes his head wearily and lowers the knife.
“Don’t look,” he tells me.
I look—how can I not?—and gasp and shudder as he pricks my finger with the knife tip, catching the drop of blood in a glass vial. He turns, and I watch in horrified fascination as he fiddles with the mess of instruments on the makeshift tabletop. He has a contraption consisting of a little glass dish held with wire over a candle, and presently he lights the candle and tips the drop of blood into the dish. Finally, he sprinkles a pinch of green powder into the blood; we both watch as it hisses and smokes. He checks a watch at his waist, I wonder how much of this is for show, and how much is real alchemy.
The mixed blood and powder in the dish ignites, and burns with a small, steady flame like at the head of a match. Wick studies it with a businesslike air, glancing briskly between the flame and his stopwatch. But as the seconds tick on, he slowly lowers the timepiece, and a deep frown furrows his face. Though I’ve never seen timeletting before, I know from his expression that something is wrong.
“What is it?” My voice rises as I try to interpret the look on his face.
He shakes his head. “Give me your hand,” he says.
Reluctantly, I extend my hand, and he squeezes another drop of blood from the tip of my finger. He repeats the process, mixing my blood with the powder in a new spot on the dish and setting it alight, all with the same result. He watches with confusion as the two flames burn and burn.
“What’s happening?” My voice is brittle with fear and frustration. “What’s wrong?”
Wick purses his lips, considering. At length, he says, “It’s supposed to burn out. That’ll tell us about how much time you have left—for instance, if it had burned out quickly, you might have less than a year.”
I was meant to have a long life. It’s a small comfort. “So I would have lived a long time. I can afford forty years.” Perhaps I can earn the years back, or some of them.
“No one can afford forty years,” Wick snaps, still staring at the candle flame.
Out of the corner of my eye, I notice an old man in line peering curiously at us. I shiver, anxious to be back within the walls of Everless.
“This isn’t right.” He raises the pocket watch, taps a nail against its glass face. “It should have stopped by now, even if you lived to be a hundred . . . Maybe something’s wrong with my powder.” He pulls out a second set of instruments and before I realize what he’s doing, nicks his own finger with the knife. He doesn’t bother with the vial, just flicks the drop of blood into the dish, sprinkles the powder in, and lights the candle. The blood ignites.
While Wick and I watch, I find myself counting—one, two, three, four, five, six—and the flame dies halfway through seven. Wick blinks.
“See,” he says without feeling. “I reckon fifteen years.”
I don’t know how to react to this—Wick’s seeming carelessness about the time of his own death—but my eyes are drawn back to my own blood, still burning. Now Wick is watching me with suspicion and distrust on his face, his mouth flat and arms crossed over his chest. Around us, I see, the few other people in the store have gone still, watching.
“I don’t understand,” I say weakly. Does he think me a Gerling, my blood running with hundreds of years? “I’m not—I’m from Crofton. I’ve never taken time, not once.”
Wick raises his eyebrows, but as the seconds pass, something in my face seems to soften him. “Maybe something is wrong with my instruments,” he says doubtfully.
“But can you still withdraw time?” I press desperately. Have the forty years been taken from Caro’s blood already? “It’s for my friend. She needs it.”
“I can try,” Wick says after a moment. He studies his instruments—an array of knives and needles that makes my stomach contract queasily—and chooses a short knife that seems to be made of blue glass. Next he picks up a small, tarnished-looking tin cup and wipes both objects down with a cloth.
“Hold out your hand,” he instructs, and I obey, suddenly thankful that I haven’t eaten this morning. My stomach is heaving.
Wick holds my wrist down with one practiced hand, and with the other, makes a long shallow cut along the skin of my palm. The pain hits me a second after the blooming blood, a thin line of fire. Wick holds the cup beneath my hand and catches the rivulet of blood inside.
As red splashes against the glass, my strength begins to go out of me—far more than the small amount of blood in the cup would seem to suggest. I feel like I’m aging even as I sit on this stool, watching dazedly as my blood fills up the cup.
When it’s full, Wick tilts my hand up, stopping the flow, and sets the cup aside before wrapping a bandage expertly and neatly around my hand. I realize I’m gripping the table with my other hand to stay upright. My head is spinning, and I remain in the stool as Wick goes about his procedure, afraid to rise.
I’ve witnessed the process of blood minting but now it seems to take eons. I fall into a kind of haze, watching as he pours my blood into the cup on the scale, bright as rubies even in this dim store. He adds a careful spoonful of a different powder, this one dark and glittering like obsidian. As soon as the powder comes into contact with my blood, the contents of the whole cup ignite with a flash of white flame. A blast of heat hits my face, along with the smell of copper.
The flame burns bright for several long moments and then dies down. When it’s extinguished, Wick takes the cup and tilts it so I can see. Through darkness at the edges of my vision, I stare at the bright liquid in the bottom of the cup. It shimmers like oil, shines like mercury—if mercury was red-gold. When Wick moves the cup, it rolls around slow as honey. Pure time. My time.
“Now I’ll make it into coin,” Wick says, his tone a little kinder after seeing my distress. He picks another item, a heavy lead block on which I can see inverted versions of the Queen’s insignia, the symbol appearing on every blood-iron in Sempera. On his desk are molds for every kind of blood-iron, from tiny, flimsy hour-coins the size of my thumbnail to the one he’s holding: molds for year-coins, each circle’s diameter almost as wide as my fist.
Wick carefully pours a bit of my time into the mold, and I watch, dizzily fascinated, as the coin takes shape before my eyes, the metal cooling and slowing even as he pours. The block has ten molds; Wick fills each of them with molten time. Twice, he has to stop to remelt my cooling time over the flame. “Come back later and I’ll take another ten,” he says gruffly. “Don’t want to do it all at once.”
By the time he’s finished, the first of the coins have cooled completely, until they look exactly like the blood-irons I see every day. My stomach turns as I consider the fact that for every coin I’ve ever spent, handled, even touched, someone had to suffer as I’m suffering now. Someone had to sit and watch as their life was bled out of them, to be transformed into coin to buy that night’s thin strip of dried meat or a pint of beer or a thatched roof over one’s head.
When all the coins have cooled, Wick turns the block over and shakes it a little so that the new blood-irons tumble down to the wooden table with heavy clinks. I reach out to take one in hand, eyeing it with equal fascination and revulsion. This time has flowed through my veins for seventeen years. And now it’s outside of my body, and I am diminished. The metal is hot against my skin. If it weren’t so horrifying, it would be almost beautiful.
“How are you feeling?” Wick asks, but I’m already pushing back from the table. I can’t—I don’t have the time, I think grimly—to sit in this shop and ponder the unfairness of life. Even now, Caro’s years might be draining from her. She could be dying, if she’s not already dead. Because of me. For me. Going to the vault for me was more than an act of bravery—or foolishness—on Caro’s part. Something deep inside me knows, it was an act of true kindness. No one has cared for me like that other than Papa. And Papa’s gone.
I have to get these blood-irons to her.
I stand as Wick bags up the coins in a cloth and hands the package to me. They are still warm through the fabric.
He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Easy there,” he says. “You just lost a lot of time. You could pass out or worse if you overexert yourself.”
The sudden movement has made me dizzy, the close walls momentarily melting in my vision. But I have to go. “I’m fine,” I manage, my voice coming out a little slurred. “I’ll be fine.” I shrug his hand off and stand to go, realizing as I do that he may be right, that the distance to the door seems like a mile. But I can’t sit and recover. I have to go. For Caro.
Dimly, I feel a rough pallet of lumber under my back and a gentle, steady swaying, up and down, up and down. For a moment, I think I’m at sea, and reach my arm out to skim the water with my fingers—but then, the blurred smear of a face appears above me, and a pair of arms props me upright. I realize it’s only a merchant’s cart dropping me at the gates of Everless.
I blink against the gray light, remembering I’ve never seen the sea. With the time drained out of me—just ten years now, but thirty more to come—I most likely never will.
I walk, as fast as my unsteady legs will let me, to Caro’s room.
Having ten years drained from one’s blood is a little like being drunk, but without the pleasant warmth of madel. When I stumble and reach out to the wall for support, I’m racked with shivers. The servants’ quarters feel strange and threatening, twisting and claustrophobic. I can sense people passing me, fellow servants going about their day, but I can’t make out their faces. They give me a wide berth, maybe thinking me drunk. Against the torchlight illuminating the corridor, their shadows rear like monsters, warped limbs and sharp teeth, all reaching out to me.
I fall, and someone catches me. A hope blooms in my throat; I give it voice. “Roan?”
“No, love.” The voice is soft, gentle, laced with sugar. Bea. I slump against her. “You’re too good for that snake,” she says, her voice distant. Snake. I’m overtaken by the feeling of falling backward through time, just like in the hedge witch’s shop. The rotten smell of sulfur fills my nose, and I’m somewhere else, somewhere dark and cramped. Cold. The smell of sulfur again, sending a wave of nausea over me. But it’s mixed with the scent of lavender—Bea’s hair, Bea’s hair, I tell myself, trying to remember where I am. I reach for her, my mind and sense scrambling for purchase. “Now tell me what you’ve done . . .”
Whose voice is that? Bea’s, I tell myself, it’s Bea calling me.
What have you done? Underneath Bea’s high, panicked voice is a different one—deeper, angry, like someone is speaking over her shoulder to me.
I feel fingers turn my wrist. A sharp intake of breath. “Jules, you haven’t—you’ve done this for Caro, haven’t you? Jules!”
Caro. The name brings Bea and Everless into focus. I straighten up, still gripping Bea’s forearms. She stares at me, her eyes wide with concern. “Jules, you need rest. Come to the dormitories—”
“No.” The harshness of it makes Bea’s mouth a thin line. She steps back from me. “I have to get to Caro,” I say, instead of sorry.
Bea begins to speak, but I turn in the direction of the Queen’s suites. She doesn’t follow.
Somehow I get to the corridor that runs behind the suites of the Gerlings and their guests. By now I know which of the heavy oak doors leads to Caro’s chamber. I wipe the sweat from my face and do my best to stand up straight as I approach, holding my head high and clutching the bag of blood-irons tightly below my cloak. I press the door with my palms. Pain shoots through me, but the door swings open.
The mood in Caro’s bedroom is somber. The curtains are drawn, shutting out the afternoon light and turning Caro’s cozy room into a place of strange shadows, which dance thanks to the small fire crackling in the hearth. Briefly, I wonder who would have arranged this for the scorned handmaiden—but then I see Caro in her bed, asleep and shivering with each breath, an empty chair at her side. I collapse into it. Caro shifts in her sleep but doesn’t wake.
I’d wondered whether they’d taken her time so soon, immediately after she was sentenced, but looking at her drawn features, the answer is plain. Part of me hoped that there would be more time—that Caro, with her prized place at Lady Gold’s side, would have a trial, a chance to prove her innocence. Or the Queen would have intervened on her behalf. But I should have known that that was not how Captain Ivan’s justice worked.
She’s young, I tell myself, trying to stay calm. Had she ever said how many years she had left? She must have had far more than forty years before they took this time. Of course, Ivan wouldn’t have checked how much time was in her blood, as Wick did with me. Nor would Ivan have cared that no one can afford forty years, as Wick advised me. My head spins with the thought; Caro could be in mortal danger even now. It’s not unheard of for young people to withdraw time, thinking they surely have plenty left, only to drop dead a year or a month or a day later.
I take the pouch of blood-iron and put it on Caro’s nightstand. “This is for you,” I tell her, as if she can hear my gratitude and guilt for caring so much about me. “Ten years.”
Caro, of course, doesn’t move or react. She’s scarcely breathing, and my skin prickles. What if she is dying?
I’ve never consumed time before, but I know well enough how the process is supposed to work. So I cross the room to Caro’s shelves, and return with a small bottle of wine. I pour the wine into a kettle and heat it over the fire. After a few minutes, when a heady, aromatic steam is rising from the kettle, I remove it from the flame and bring it to the nightstand. I take the simple wooden cup that waits there and stack three of my fresh-minted year-coins from my purse inside the cup, then watch in fascination as I pour a measure of steaming wine over them.
There’s a hiss where hot liquid and metal meet, and smoke rises from the cup, smelling like sugar and ash. I stir the mixture with a spoon and then set it aside and gently shake Caro’s shoulder.
She comes awake gradually, blinking and shivering despite the room being both dark and warm. Her eyes focus slowly on me. “Jules,” she says, sounding more exhausted than surprised as she lifts herself up to a sitting position. “You’re here.”
“I’m sorry, Caro,” I say miserably. I take up the steaming cup of wine and blood-iron and offer it to her. “Drink.”
Caro accepts the cup, her movements slow and punctuated by winces. I’m still dizzy from my loss of time, my body as tender as a bruise, and I can’t imagine how she must be feeling, having lost four times as much. Her hands aren’t bandaged, like mine—Ivan must have pulled it from her arms. My stomach makes a fist. Her wrists are covered by her thick velvet dress, so I can’t see the marks. “Thank you, Jules,” she says, her voice a hoarse whisper, and drinks.
The effect is immediate. Points of color appear in Caro’s white cheeks, and her grip on the cup tightens as she swallows the mixture of wine and time. Even her posture seems to change, her back becoming straighter in the bed. She sighs, the sound of her breath stronger than it was before, and moves to put the empty cup back on the nightstand.
Before her hand reaches the table, Caro stops abruptly. The room is thick with heat—her arm hangs crooked in midair, and her fingers uncurl from the cup until it falls, cracking against the floorboards. Caro gasps in pain and brings her hand to her throat.
I lean forward, pulse spiking in my blood. “Caro, what’s wrong?” Had I melted the blood-irons enough? Did I administer them wrongly somehow?
Caro opens and closes her mouth, but nothing comes out. She doesn’t seem to be able to breathe; her face twists in pain and she goes rigid, then begins thrashing in the sheets, spluttering and choking. The sounds are harsh and urgent, gasps that are cut off uselessly before the air can reach her lungs. Her face has turned bright scarlet, and her eyes are bulging in her skull.
She’s choking.
“Caro,” I hear myself shout. Panic swelling my throat, I cup her head with one hand and force her jaw open with the other. Something glints in the back of her throat.
Shaking with fear, I push Caro’s head to the side and reach into her mouth with two fingers, but with her struggling, I can’t reach the object, can’t dislodge it. Caro spasms, her face turning redder and redder, and I hear myself begging to the Sorceress for Caro’s life and internally screaming to hurry, please hurry. My own heart is pounding so hard I think it will splinter my ribs and burst out through my chest.
Caro’s eyes roll up in her head, and she goes slack in my arms.
The world falls silent.
She has passed out. My own breath comes in gasps. The rest of the room is quiet—a quiet so thick that it settles into me like stone.
I look up and almost scream.
Nothing looks immediately wrong about the room, but something about it has turned to terror. The gauzy curtains don’t wave in the wind, but stick in their billowed-out shapes as if they’re made of ice. From the rose in a vase on Caro’s vanity, one falling petal is frozen in midair, halfway to the ground.
And Caro’s not moving—not in the slightest. Her body is still as a statue—no movement of her chest as she breathes, not even a blink. The wrongness of it makes the hair stand up on my arms. I don’t know if she’s alive or dead. As I look down at her, I notice a droplet of sweat gleaming on her cheek. It’s stretched, poised to drip from the ridge of her cheekbone down to the floor. But it doesn’t fall. And doesn’t fall. It’s only when I brush it away with my hand that it drops, hitting the floor with a plink audible in this dead silence.
Certainty takes hold of me, cold and terrifying.
Something is wrong with time.
In the silence and the stillness, I feel more alone than I’ve ever been, with my friend lying as still as death in my arms. She doesn’t stir when a sob, formerly held back by adrenaline, bursts from my chest.
When I release Caro and sink to my knees beside her bed, she slumps back into the pillows, her face bright red but utterly still. The floorboards creak under my weight, the mattress rises back into place when I take my weight off it, but everything else in the room remains as motionless as if it has all become suddenly encased in glass. It’s dizzying, nightmarish; and my tears come hot and fast. I’ve felt time slow before, but never this full stop, this eerie space where I alone can move. What if I’m stuck, like the town of Briarsmoor?
Fear clears my mind. Taking a deep breath to master myself, I get to my feet and bend over Caro. I grip her shoulder and hip carefully and turn her onto her side. Then I climb up beside her and, remembering some instructions from Lora on choking victims, strike her between the shoulder blades with the heel of my hand.
Nothing changes. I steel myself and hit again, harder. And again, until my recently bandaged hand screams and aches and begins to bleed.
On the fourth blow, something gives. A blur of gold bursts from Caro’s lips—I gasp with shock and relief—and the thing hits the floorboards with a heavy thud before rolling under the wardrobe. Though my eyes are blurred with sweat and tears, it looks bigger and heavier than a year-coin.
A strange, strangled sound comes from beside me—the second half of a sob. I turn my head to see Caro draw in a ragged, painful-sounding breath.
“Thank the Sorceress,” I say, and bend over her. She’s breathing hard, her chest heaving, and there’s blood on her lips—but her face is going slowly from red to pink, and I can feel her pulse where I grip her shoulder, strong and alive. I look to where the gold thing fell on the floor. “You were choking.”
Caro’s crying quiets. She stares at me, her eyes ringed with red. It’s more than surprise, I realize as she follows my gaze to the floor—it’s suspicion.
No, something else—betrayal.
I don’t understand. Does she think I meant to hurt her?
Finally tearing her eyes away from mine, Caro leans over and tries to grab the object, but she’s too weak. I bend down, thankful to be free of her eyes on mine. But the relief in me twists back toward dread at the thought of what I will find beneath the wardrobe.
It’s not a coin. I kneel down to the floor, both to look closer and to hide my face from Caro. On the floor, trailing blood and spit but immaculately clean itself, is a gold sphere the size of a walnut. It’s new blood-iron—that’s obvious from the sheen of the metal—but it’s as if the three coins that I had dissolved in the wine have reformed into this sphere.
Slowly, something takes hold of me again: the feeling that I’m trapped on the board of a game I can’t begin to understand. The thing sickens me and calls to me at the same time. I reach out for it.
The metal, when I close my hand around it, isn’t hot but gently warm, as if it’s been sitting in the sun. It’s smooth and seems almost to be humming, as if there’s something alive inside. It’s heavy and—
I gasp as I my fingers sink into its surface, as if the metal is melting under my touch. I drop it and scramble back.
“Hold on to it.” The voice is a whisper, barely audible, but unmistakable.
I look up at Caro, who’s weakly pulling herself to the edge of the bed. Her face is still flushed and shining with sweat, but she’s staring down at the ball of metal with wide, alert eyes.
“See what happens,” she adds, meeting my eyes again. There’s a flicker of something there, some emotion I can’t identify, but in a moment she’s cast her eyes down and is looking at the gold sphere again. I want to protest, go and hide until I can puzzle out what in the name of the Sorceress is happening, but Caro is waiting expectantly. And she’s alive, for now, which is all that should matter.
Reluctantly, I reach out and touch one fingertip to the gold sphere.
For a moment, nothing happens. Then the surface begins to shift, my finger sinking in, as if it’s melting without heat. As it softens, the half-liquid metal starts to move up my finger. I shiver, but force myself not to pull away as the gold crawls up to reach my knuckle, my palm. I can hear both of our ragged breaths as the strands of gold creep up and disappear beneath the bandage Wick recently wound around my hand. It feels like warm water, trickling upward.
Soon the sphere is entirely gone, and strands of liquid metal run up my skin like veins.
“Take off the bandage,” Caro says softly. Something in her voice makes me obey; I unwind the bloodstained cloth. It falls away to reveal the cut the time lender made, still fresh and angry red, and a tiny rivulet of gold—of blood-iron—of my time slipping into it, back beneath my skin where it belongs.