***
I placed a cup of coffee in front of her, and she thanked me before returning her eyes to what looked like a cigarette burn in her forearm. It was much too large, though, to be only a cigarette burn. Her green eyes, still so piercing, even after all she had suffered, bore into mine when she caught me staring.
“He is smoking cigars now.” She told me lightly, “Big and powerful man that he is, why wouldn’t he be granted the privilege of sharing cigars and brandy with Paul and Tyre’s other closest allies?”
“Lucy…” I said, because I knew that inside, she still must have been reeling from what they had done to her, though I knew she would never tell me what it had been exactly. I had asked before, and every time, she had denied me an answer or even a vague suggestion. It was none of my business, I knew, and why did I even need to know? It would only hurt me to know how they hurt her.
I gestured to the burn that she was struggling to wrap on her own.
“Do you want me to do that for you?”
“No.” She replied, “Violet… You must stop thinking that I have been weakened by this. What they do to me they do to my body, nothing more.”
“So, what? Your mind escapes? It blocks them out?”
“Your tone tells me that you think I am lying. That it is not possible to escape physical pain by retreating deep into oneself.” She told me almost absent-mindedly. My eyes were fixed on her hand as it wrapped the bandage around her arm, “I will let the salve sink into the burn and then I will remove the bandage and allow it to breathe.”
She was telling me that to reiterate for the millionth time what to do in the event that I was burned. Lucy did that frequently, with various treatment procedures for various injuries: Broken bones? The green-salt seaweed wrap from the dead seas; black eye? Snow and Slumber Root; internal injuries? Elixir. She told me all of this so that in the event of us being separated indefinitely, I would know how to take care of myself. She had taught Illa those things, too, before Illa had been taken away. Wherever she was, if she was still alive, I hoped that she was making use of her mother’s advice.
“So you don’t, like, scream or anything?” I asked her, and I didn’t know why I was asking. I didn’t want to know. But I did want to know. Why did I want to know what they did to her even though I knew how it would make me feel when she told me? If she told me. She had never told me even the tiniest detail.
She looked up at me, her green eyes ignited with small, indignant sparks of red in the center of each. I had done it now.
“Violet Mae.” She said, her voice terrifyingly calm, terrifyingly even, terrifyingly firm. “I will not discuss this any further. Drop it now. Let it go.”
If her tone of voice was terrifying, then the look of fury in her steely eyes was downright petrifying. I managed to tear my gaze from hers and look down at the table first and then at her bandaged arm. To my great surprise, I saw that her hand was shaking very slightly, and when it came to rest over mine, I felt that her palm was somewhat damp with sweat. She thought that I wouldn’t notice, but I had. Lucy Miletus was known for being essentially an automaton who never showed even the slightest flicker of human emotion. She was a brilliant doctor, despite her icy nature. When she needed to be kind, she could be. I had seen more of her kindness than I had ever expected to see, given that I was not her child. I was not related to her at all. She and Macie had taken me in, had cared for me in the same way that they cared for Illa. But I had never seen Lucy shed a tear since that night in the bunker, I had never seen her scream or cry, except after their husband had been killed, and even then, I could see her trying to shut off her grief and regain her cool composure.
“Something is troubling you besides this.” She told me, “Tell me.”
That was one of her other skills: detecting any kind of emotional upset in me and rooting it out.
“I just hate when they take you away. It is so unfair, Lucy.” I whispered, so quietly that I thought she hadn’t heard. “I hate that no matter how hard I try not to picture it, I find myself thinking of all these ways in my mind that they are hurting you, and I am always so afraid that they are doing the worst to you, the way they did the worst to Maura…”
“He has never hurt me that way, Violet.”
“Not even that night I can’t remember?” I whispered, and when my eyes met hers again, my tears began to fall, because I remembered a few moments from that night with Caspar back in Shadow Village. I remembered watching him push her face-down onto her desk, hold her there by the back of her neck, and press himself up against her. I remembered holding her down in the dirt at the edge of the ash-circle and laughing as she begged me not to push her over. I remembered hearing her making her a deal with Caspar, though I could not remember the details of it.
“No.” She told me, and both of her hands enclosed over one of mine. She brought my hand to her lips and kissed it. “No, sweet girl. I do not want you to think of that night anymore. You don’t need to remember it. By the One God’s grace, you don’t remember much.”
“I still feel this awful guilt over it, even now. It’s been twenty-three years, Lucy.”
“Yes.” She said. She grasped my chin gently and raised my head so I was looking at her. “I wish your darling sister were here so that she could affirm this, because I told her when she came to see me right after it happened. When she promised me that she would take care of it. I never blamed you for it. I was never angry with you. I pitied you, Violet. I was afraid for you. You were so close to him at that time, and you did not see what he was. I wanted him away from you. But I was never able to blame you for any of what happened. I knew that he had not told you how far things were going to go, and I knew that he had given you something to make you enjoy the experience with no guilt.”
“He didn’t tell me that’s what it would do. He didn’t tell me what he was going to do to you…”
“I know.” She told me softly, “You are telling me everything that I have known for all of these years.”
I nodded, and she wiped the tears from my eyes. All she had said certainly reassured me, but I could still feel the hollow pit in my stomach as I looked at her bandaged wrists, and at the bandage around the burn in her arm. Once again, I vowed to find the strength inside of me to kill Caspar.
Once again, I scolded myself angrily for not taking his head when I had had the chance.