FIA
I sat on my bed, staring at nothing. My mind kept circling back to the same question: why had the cure worked the first time but not the second?
The answer felt obvious now that I thought about it. The ingredients. We had not used Thorne or Maren's stash. At least not all. It was mostly the dead witch's stash. Most of the herb, most of the powder, and even the root had belonged to her. That was from a real witch. Someone who could actually do magic.
Of course they'd worked. They probably still had traces of her power in them. Some of them had to have been alchemized. Magic clinging to dried leaves and crushed petals like residue. That was the only explanation that made sense.
I adjusted my bedsheet. It had bunched up under me. The fabric pulled tight across the mattress as I smoothed it down. Outside my window, the sky was darkening. Purple bleeding into deep blue. Stars were starting to prick through.
