Page 106 of The Scarlet Alchemist

The Moon Alchemist sighed. “I know you don’t want help, but—”

“It’s not that,” I said. “I think there’s a problem, but I don’t think I actually fainted.”

The Moon Alchemist frowned. “Explain.”

I tugged my sleeves, picking at the loose thread. “Sometimes, I feel like a piece of driftwood carried out to sea,” I whispered. “I see myself from far away, or I see places that I’ve never been. I don’t feel ill, I just feel like I’ve gone somewhere else. Is it because of...” I trailed off, wary of the prince waiting outside the door. “...what we talked about before?”

The Moon Alchemist’s expression pinched down further. “Come here,” she said, waving me closer. She pressed one thumb to the space between my eyebrows and the other to the shell of my left ear, then closed her eyes. I listened to her breathing and tried to remain still. After a few moments, she drew back.

“Your soul is loose,” she said.

I stiffened. “What does that mean?”

“Soul tags are supposed to tether your soul to your body like a sheep on a short lead, so it can’t go anywhere. Your lead is too long, and the sheep is wandering out into the fields to eat flowers before it deigns to come home.”

Coldness burned through my chest. My soul could just drift away? What if it drifted too far and never came back?

“How can that happen?” I said, trying to keep the tremor out of my voice.

The Moon Alchemist gestured for me to turn around and started unbuttoning my dress, pulling it down until it revealed the scar on my spine. “You grew so tall that your scar stretched and faded. I’ll trace over it again.”

“And that will fix it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, pulling a sharp needle from her bag, which she held over a candle until the tip started to glow. “The revived dead don’t normally last as long as you.”

Any other questions I might have asked left my mind as soon as she pressed the needle to my skin and started carving the name into my spine. I waited for the moment my soul would snap back to me, when my vision would clear and my body would stop feeling like a pile of soggy rags, but the Moon Alchemist set down her needles and I felt exactly the same. She wrapped my back in a thin layer of gauze and buttoned my dress again before calling to the prince.

“Her elements are unbalanced,” she said when he returned, tightening the drawstring on her bag and standing up. “I corrected it with needles.”

The prince thanked her for an embarrassingly long time before she managed to escape, then sat on the bed, plucking Durian from his box and petting him anxiously.

“I can get you out of your alchemy training if you need time to rest,” he said.

“I don’t need rest, especially not from alchemy,” I said, frowning.

The prince sighed, resting his hand on top of mine. “Ever since I met you, I’ve done nothing but ask more and more of you,” he said.

“You know I don’t do anything I don’t want to,” I said.

His gaze dropped to our hands. “Oh?” he said, smiling. “So you want me to hold your hand right now?”

Before I could answer, the prince yelped and wrenched back, standing and flapping his left arm like a crooked bird.

“What are you doing?” I said. “I didn’t even answer yet.”

“Durian bit me!” the prince said, outraged.

I rolled my eyes. “Hold still,” I said as I grabbed his sleeve, then reached inside until my fingers closed around the baby duck. He came out clinging to a golden thread in his beak, more of it unraveling as I set him on the bed.

“No way you’re still hungry after all he feeds you,” I said to Durian, pulling the thread away.

“I thought he liked me,” the prince said, sitting heavily on the bed and crossing his arms.

“Be grateful that at least one person in here likes you. Two is pushing your luck.”

“So you admit you like me?” he said, raising an eyebrow.

He leaned toward me, but I moved to the left and transformed his sleeve with my iron ring, tying him to the bedpost. “Don’t kiss me while I’m thinking about how to kill your mother,” I said.

---