Read Online The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window by Rachel Swirsky - Free Book Online

different. I like to think she would have finished it.
     
    Instead, she was drawn into the whirl of events happening outside the academy. She began leaving me behind in her chambers while she spent all hours in her salon, almost sleepwalking through the brief periods when she returned to me, and then rising restless in the dark and returning to her work.
     
    By choice, I remained unclear about the shape of the external cataclysm. I did not want to be drawn further into the academy’s politics.
     
    My lectures provided little distraction. The students were as preoccupied as Misa. “This is not a time for theory!” one woman complained when I tried to draw my students into a discussion of magic’s predilections. She did not return the following morning. Eventually, no one else returned either.
     
    Loneliness drove me where curiosity could not and I began following Misa to her salon. Since I refused to help with her spells, she acknowledged my presence with little more than a glance before returning to her labors. Absent her attention, I studied and paced.
     
    Once, after leaving the salon for several hours, Misa returned with a bustle of scholars—both men and women—all brightly clad and shouting. They halted abruptly when they saw me.
     
    “I forgot you were here,” Misa said without much contrition.
     
    I tensed, angry and alienated, but unwilling to show my rage before the worms. “I will return to your chamber,” I said through tightened lips.
     
    Before I even left the room, they began shouting again. Their voices weren’t like scholars debating. They lashed at each other with their words. They were angry. They were afraid.
     
    That night, I went to Misa and finally asked for explanations. It’s a plague, she said. A plague that made its victims bleed from the skin and eyes and then swelled their tongues until they suffocated.
     
    They couldn’t cure it. They treated one symptom, only to find the others worsening. The patients died, and then the mages who treated them died, too.
     I declared that the disease must be magic. Misa glared at me with unexpected anger and answered that, no! It was not magic! If it was magic, they would have cured it. This was something foul and deadly and natural.
     She’d grown gaunt by then, the gentle cushions of fat at her chin and stomach disappearing as her ribs grew prominent. After she slept, her headrest was covered with quills that had fallen out during the night, their pointed tips lackluster and dulled.
     
    I no longer had dialogues or magic or sex to occupy my time. I had only remote, distracted Misa. My world began to shape itself around her—my love for her, my concern for her, my dread that she wouldn’t find a cure, and my fear of what I’d do if she didn’t. She was weak, and she was leading me into weakness. My mind sketched patterns I didn’t want to imagine. I heard the spirits in The Desert Which Should Not Have Been whispering about the deaths of civilizations, and about choices between honor and love.
     
    Misa stopped sleeping. Instead, she sat on the bed in the dark, staring into the shadows and worrying her hands.
     
    “There is no cure,’ she muttered.
     
    I lay behind her, watching her silhouette.
     
    “Of course there’s a cure.”
     
    “Oh, of course,” snapped Misa. “We’re just too ignorant to find it!”
     
    Such irrational anger. I never learned how to respond to a lover so easily swayed by her emotions.
     
    “I did not say that you were ignorant.”
     
    “As long as you didn’t say it.”
     
    Misa pulled to her feet and began pacing, footsteps thumping against the piled rugs.
     
    I realized that in all my worrying, I’d never paused to consider where the plague had been, whether it had ravaged the communities where Misa had lived and loved. My people would have thought it a weakness to let such things affect them.
     
    “Perhaps you are ignorant,” I said. “Maybe you can’t cure this plague by building