“You would have done it for me,” I point out.

He hesitates but doesn’t deny it. “Maybe I would have,” he says softly. “But it would have been a foolish decision. You are many things, Theodosia Eirene Houzzara, but you aren’t a fool.”

I bite my lip. “Erik thought I wasn’t acting because I didn’t care. He thought I was indifferent to your suffering. I wasn’t,” I say. “I’m sorry I didn’t do more. Maybe if I had, he wouldn’t have lost his eye.”

He shakes his head, dropping his gaze. “You don’t owe me any apologies, Theo. You don’t owe them to Erik, either. You aren’t responsible for his faulty plot,” he says. “Besides, you’ve saved me plenty of times before, and you did so again today. I don’t think it’s a debt I’ll ever be able to repay.”

“There are no debts,” I tell him quietly. “Not between us, S?ren.”

His eyes find mine again, and without a word he holds out a hand to me and I take it, stepping into his arms as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. He buries his face in my neck, and I hold him as tightly as I dare to, carefully avoiding his wounds. Somehow, beneath the blood and sweat, he still smells like the sea, and that makes him feel a little more real to me.

For a moment, neither of us moves. We just stand there, holding one another, and I wish that the moment would last a lifetime, but eventually S?ren pulls back, fixing me with an imploring look.

“Your skin is warm,” he says slowly. “Not hot. Not feverish. But warm—warmer than it used to be.” He pauses, weighing a question he knows he doesn’t want the answer to. “What did you do, Theo?”

“What I had to,” I say, stepping out of his arms to retrieve the ointment and bandages that Heron left, though it’s also an excuse to not have to look at him when I say the words. “I went into the Fire Mine.”

He gives a sharp inhale, like he’s been hit. “And here I was, saying you weren’t a fool,” he says, shaking his head. “It could have killed you.”

I shrug, but I still can’t meet his gaze. “Cress could have killed me. The Kaiser could have killed me. There were times when I think even King Etristo wanted to kill me back in Sta’Crivero. Believe me, the mine was a less frightening prospect after all of them. Besides, I trusted that the gods had other plans for me. They wouldn’t have let me die like that, not in their domain.”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Instead he watches as I open the jar of ointment and spread it over his wounds, starting with the ones on his face. The second the cool salve touches his skin, he flinches.

“I know, it hurts,” I say. “It’s the same kind Hoa would use on me. But the pain will go away in a moment, and then it won’t hurt at all.”

He relaxes slightly and I move on to his chest, tracing Cress’s handwriting on his right clavicle. Betrayer she wrote there, the lines of her script hard and inelegant. Angry.

“What was it like?” he asks me. “The mine?”

My hand stills and I realize that no one ever asked me that. Most people don’t want to know, and the only people who would have asked already know from their own experiences. I take a deep breath, the mint from the salve stinging my nostrils.

“I don’t remember most of it,” I tell him. “It comes back in flashes sometimes, but there are still parts where I don’t know if it was real or not. I saw my mother, as real down there as you and I are now. Some days, I’m not sure I ever left the mine at all. It feels like I’m still there.”

His hand comes to rest on top of mine on his chest. “But you did make it out,” he says. “And you came out stronger, didn’t you? Gifted?”

I nod. “I’m not as strong as Cress, but I’m stronger than I was. I hope it’ll be enough when we meet again.”

He drops his hand and lets me continue my work, wrapping the rolls of white gauze bandages around his shoulders. I leave them off his face for now—in part because they will be uncomfortable but also because I think if I can’t see his face, I’ll be less able to believe he’s here.

“What—what about you?” I ask him, stumbling over the words. “What did…what did she do to you?”

I’m not sure I want to know the answer, and S?ren doesn’t seem inclined to give it, but after a moment he speaks.

“Her claim on the throne is weak. Many of the nobles were in awe of her power to begin with. They feared her, and that was enough that she was able to seize power after my father died. But the novelty of it wore thin quickly. As powerful as she is, she’s still a woman, and Kalovaxia has never had a female ruler. There have been whispers about overthrowing her, plots even to free me and put me on the throne instead. She thought that if she married me, she could consolidate power, that no one would question her claim to the throne then. But she couldn’t control me, she knew that. She could have forced it, but that would have backfired—as soon as I was out of the dungeon, she would have been assassinated and I would have been crowned Kaiser. She seemed to think I wanted that. So she endeavored to convince me to marry her willingly—though willingly isn’t an apt term when it comes after torture.”

I flinch, picking up the jar of ointment again and dabbing it onto the traitor branded over his heart, then the weak scrawled over his ribs.

“And since she couldn’t make you an ally, she got rid of you,” I say. “Better to have you far away, to have you dead, so your supporters couldn’t use you against her.”

He nods, not speaking for a moment.

“I thought of you, you know,” he says quietly. “When I thought I might break. I thought of you and how you’d survived worse. I thought that you were watching me from the After you believe in, and that if I broke, you would be ashamed of me.”

I shake my head. “There’s no shame in breaking,” I tell him. “Gods know I did often enough. You just have to put yourself back together again.”

His torso is more burns than it is unmarred skin, and I use almost half of the jar of ointment there alone.

“Turn around,” I tell him. “I have to get your back.”

He does as I ask and I have to stifle a gasp. However bad I thought it might be, it’s worse. Though the lines of the burns are thin—done by one of Cress’s fingers, I would guess—she’s crafted what looks like an elaborate spider’s web from his shoulders to his lower back. Lines are layered over one another, some going so deep that his flesh peels back like pages of a book.

I dig into the tub of ointment and take a steadying breath, willing my stomach to settle.

“It’s going to hurt,” I warn him.

“It already hurts,” he admits. “Just…keep talking to me. It’ll distract us both.”

I nod before remembering that he can’t see me. “I think Cress and I are sharing dreams,” I tell him. It still sounds ludicrous to say out loud, but he doesn’t laugh like I expected he might.

“What do you mean?” he asks instead, through clenched teeth, emitting a low hiss of pain after the words.

“In my dreams, she talks to me, as clearly as we’re talking now. The things she says…I couldn’t make them up. She told me she was keeping you in the dungeon. She said that she was trying to convince you to marry her—essentially she told me exactly what you just did. It could be a coincidence, a few lucky guesses, but…it doesn’t feel like that.”

“You think you’re really speaking to her in your dreams?” he asks. The subject must be distracting him, because this time he doesn’t even react when I smear ointment over one of the rawer burns.

“The poison she gave me was made from her blood,” I explain. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but I know what I know. It’s her.”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment, and when he speaks again, his voice is low.

“But she still thinks you’re dead.”

“She thinks I’m haunting her,” I tell him. “But it’s strange. In these dreams, she talks to me like a friend. Like we used to talk. Even when we talk about the things we’ve done to one another, she doesn’t sound angry. She just sounds tired.”

“She isn’t well,” S?ren says. “There were rumors that made their way down to the dungeon—noble girls found dead in the palace after they were seen with her. Their throats were always charred, lips black. Like…” He trails off.

“Like they’d drunk Encatrio,” I say, pieces beginning to fall into place.

He nods. “Everyone knew that she was responsible, but she’s untouchable—at least for now. They were too frightened to accuse her out loud, but everyone knew.”

I think about her offering the potion to me—to Amiza—how she’d hoped that in taking it, Amiza would become like her. That they could be rulers together in a changed world.

I tell S?ren about that as I finish up with the ointment on his back.