“If it’s prison glower,” the physician explained, “he’ll lose the sight in that eye, and if the infection spreads, he’ll be blind in both.” He shrugged helplessly.
Two servants bearing ewers of warm water slipped into the room behind the queen.
“You can’t treat it?”
“I’m not an oculist. I’ve sent for one in town, but as far as I know, there isn’t a treatment. There’s a man in Attolia who says he has an ointment that will keep the infection from spreading, but whether he does and whether he’d come here…” He held up his hands.
“He’ll come if I say he will,” said Eddis.
“He’s Attolian, Your Majesty.”
“He’ll still come,” she said.
The physician looked up. The queen gave him a brief hard smile. She wasn’t joking. She’d have the Attolian abducted and dragged up the mountain if need be.
“Your Majesty, it may not be glower. The oculist from town should be here soon.”
“How soon?”
“An hour or two. Until then, Your Majesty, I do have work to do.”
Eddis nodded. “I leave you to it then. I want to know what the oculist says.”
When Eddis was gone, the physician looked down at Eugenides and saw the glint of his eyes through his lashes. He looked closer. “You’ll need more lethium,” he said.
“I won’t,” Eugenides whispered.
The physician looked at the bandages that still needed to be changed.
“You will,” he said, and went to mix several drops of the medicine with water in a tiny horn cup. When he came back, Eugenides’s eyes were open, and he was watching the physician carefully. When he raised the cup, Eugenides turned his head away.
“No more trouble, please, young man.”
“Galen,” he whispered, “do you think that if people are crippled in this life, they are crippled in the afterlife as well?”
The physician lowered the cup. “You would know that better than I,” he said.
“No,” said Eugenides. “I don’t know.”
Galen raised the cup again, but Eugenides continued to turn his face away. “Galen, I don’t want to be blind when I die.”
Galen sat silently with the cup held in his hands and his hands resting in his lap. His assistants slipped away.
“You aren’t going to die for a long time.”
“I don’t want to be blind when I die, if I live to be a hundred.”
“Do you imagine I am going to pour a cup of lethium down your throat and let you go?” Galen asked finally.
“I’d appreciate it,” Eugenides said.
“I took an oath to heal people.”
Eugenides didn’t argue. He only turned to look at the physician, with his eyes underlined by black bruises and bright with fever. The scar on his cheek showed against the yellowed skin around it.
Galen sighed. “It might not be glower, and there’s no need to talk about breaking oaths yet.” He raised the cup in his hand. “Drink this for now.”
When Eugenides woke, it was dark and the oculist had come. The room was lit by candles that reflected in the many panes of the glass windows and shone on the two men sitting by the bed. Galen had awakened him with a gentle touch on his arm, but even that gentle touch had worsened a hundred different pains, and the dull ache in his head, and the burning in his eye. Both of his eyes felt as if full of hot sand, and the rest of his body hurt so badly he couldn’t be sure where the pain came from.
The oculist examined him as gently as possible, holding a lighted candle close to his face, then moving it away again.
“When did you notice the infection?”
Eugenides could only shake his head and then regret it. He didn’t know what day it was or how long he’d been in the queen’s prison cell. He tried to think, but his thoughts teetered on the edge of a black pit filled with memories that threatened to drown him.
“Before she cut off my hand,” he said finally.
The oculist looked at the physician.
“Say a week ago,” he said. “Maybe ten days.”
The oculist lifted his candle again. Eugenides flinched but didn’t complain. “Sticky-eye,” said the oculist finally. “If it were glower, the eye would be more red by now and much more sensitive to the light. Keep it clean; try to get some decent food into him.” He looked down at Eugenides and said firmly, “Hundreds of little children survive this every year with their eyesight intact. You have nothing to worry about on that count.”
On that count, Eugenides thought, and when Galen offered him another dose of lethium, he drank it and slept.
In Attolia, the queen sat at dinner. The hall was lit with the finest candles, the food was excellent. The queen ate very little.
“Your thoughts seem elsewhere tonight, Your Majesty,” said the man seated to her right in the place of honor.
“Not at all, Nahuseresh,” Attolia assured her Mede ambassador. “Not at all.”
Eugenides’s fever grew worse. He slipped into the pit of his memories, and Galen repeatedly dosed him with the lethium to give him some rest. No longer recognizing Galen or his assistants, he fought every dose as he’d fought the first. He had to be held down, and Galen, with most of his weight on Eugenides’s chest, tipped the lethium into his mouth as Eugenides screamed. To keep the lethium from spilling out again, Galen covered the boy’s mouth with his hand, and covered his nose as well. Eugenides couldn’t breathe until the lethium was swallowed, and he fought with all his strength, struggling to turn his head away. Galen could feel his body arching underneath him as he tried to throw the weight off his chest. Not until he was exhausted and nearly unconscious would he swallow.
Eddis sat, white-faced, in the library.
“He won’t thank you for listening to this,” said her minister of war, sitting down beside her. He, too, had come to the library to check on his son.
“Have you ever…?”
“Heard him make a noise like that? No.”
Eddis couldn’t remember a time herself. His screams sounded as if they were dragged out of him with a hook. “Is he getting worse?”
Eugenides’s father shook his head. “The same, I think.” He settled into his chair. “If he fights this much when they try to get the lethium into him, I suppose he’s got some strength in him yet.”
“Is it like this every time?”
Her minister of war nodded. The queen left her chair abruptly and went to stand in the doorway of the bedchamber.
“Eugenides!” she snapped.
Galen looked up, meaning to send her away, but the struggling figure on the bed had frozen. Eugenides opened his eyes, blinking them in bewilderment. The people around the bed relaxed.
“Stop making an ass of yourself and swallow the lethium,” she told him.
Eugenides swallowed and shuddered as the bitter draft went down. Galen took his hand away. “My Queen?” Eugenides whispered, still confused.
“Go to sleep,” ordered Eddis.
Eugenides, obedient to his queen and the lethium, closed his eyes.
“Effective,” said the minister as she returned to sit next to him in the library.