Page 44 of Zenith Tower

The door closed. The lock followed.

The steward’s footsteps faded toward the courier stair. I folded my father’s letter back into its envelope and slid it beneath the thin mattress.

Then I sat beside the false window with my thumb resting over Astra’s line and waited for the midday bell.

Astra

The first day passed without word from the infirmary.

Meals came through a hatch in my new door. The room had no adjoining wall, no voice from Kieran on one side or Caspian moving on the other. When I pressed my palm to the stone, I felt only the chill of it.

I paced until my legs ached, then sat on the bed and examined the three lines at my wrist. Caspian’s remained dark and steady. Hale’s lay quiet beside it. The green-gold line still ended unfinished against my skin.

None of them told me whether Delphine had kept down a meal or whether Kieran’s shoulder had worsened after Marrow hurt him.

By the second morning, the bread on my tray had already begun to harden at the edges. I wrapped it in the clean corner of my napkin and put it in my pocket.

Marrow arrived shortly after midday.

He opened the door himself and waited in the corridor. “Moreau has been approved for a supervised visit.”

I was on my feet before he finished.

“How is she?”

“The healer says she is stable.”

“Is she awake? Has she eaten? Does she know I’m coming?”

Marrow met my eyes. “She ate this morning. She has been asking when you would come.”

It was enough to get me into the corridor without arguing over the guard who fell into step behind us.

The infirmary lay above the junction where the supply cart had first caught Hale’s attention. Its walls carried the same water-light as the occupied levels, but the air smelled of boiled linen, bitter herbs, and the sharp spirits the healers used to clean their instruments.

Marrow stopped outside a narrow room at the end of the ward.

“The door remains open. The healer stays.”

“And you?”

“In the corridor.”

It was more privacy than I had expected. I went in before he could reconsider it.

Delphine lay beneath two gray blankets with her injured arm resting on a folded cloth. Someone had washed her hair and trimmed the worst of the uneven ends. She was still painfully thin, but there was color in her face that had not been there in Wing C.

She smiled when she saw me.

It was the same hesitant smile she had given me across the dining hall at Zenith Hall.

“You didn’t disappear,” she said.

“I considered it. The corridor was inconvenient.”

Her smile widened.

A healer sat at a table near the wall, grinding something with a stone pestle. He glanced up when I approached the bed, then returned to his work.