Mahit scooped it up. It was fresh-cut, oozing a whitish sap that had gotten onto the Information Ministry infofiche and stuck to her fingers. She hadn’t seen anything like it in Nineteen Adze’s apartments, or even out in the rest of the City, filled with flowers of every shape and color and kind—and yet, it couldn’t have been cut more than fifteen or twenty minutes previous.
She lifted it up to her face to see if it had a scent.
“Don’t,” said Nineteen Adze with a whip-crack urgency Mahit had never heard before. She dropped the flower back into the bowl. Her fingertips felt stinging-hot where the sap had made them sticky. Turning, she saw Nineteen Adze standing in the archway at the end of the hall, and had no idea how long she’d been there. Or that she’d been there at all.
“Did you breathe it?” Nineteen Adze asked, coming to Mahit’s side. Her face was more expressive than Mahit had ever seen it, mouth twisted and tense. It was like looking at a mask dissolving. The stinging in her fingers was transmuting to pain.
“No, I don’t think I did,” she said.
Nineteen Adze snapped, “Show me your hand,” like she was addressing a soldier or a disobedient child, and Mahit did. Nineteen Adze took her wrist, the band of her much-darker fingers closing around the bones as if she were gripping a snake behind its head. The touch should have been warm but Mahit felt it as ice. Her extended fingers were red where she’d held the flower, and even as she watched they began to blister.
“Well, you won’t lose it,” said Nineteen Adze.
“What?”
“Come with me,” Nineteen Adze said, “you have to get the sap off before you touch any other parts of yourself. Or sustain nerve damage.” Still holding Mahit’s wrist, she stalked off down the hallway, dragging Mahit in her wake.
“What was that flower?”
“A very pretty death.” They turned a corner, through a door which had always been closed to Mahit but which slid open to Nineteen Adze’s gesture, and emerged abruptly into what could only be the ezuazuacat’s own bedroom. Mahit caught a glimpse of a tangle of unmade white sheets, a stack of infofiche and codex-books piled on the pristine side of the bed, and then Nineteen Adze had pulled her into the en suite bathroom.
“Hold your hand over the sink but don’t turn on the water,” she said. “Water will just spread the toxins.”
Mahit did. The blisters on her fingers were puffy, glassy-clear, the skin beginning to split. She felt as if her hand were on fire, the stinging spreading up her wrist like the City’s electricity had spread up Three Seagrass’s. She was still too shocked to feel anything but a distant sort of horror. Who had left that flower for her? How had it gotten into the walled garden that was Nineteen Adze’s office complex? Someone would have had to bring it—someone less than twenty minutes away, the flower had been oozing—one of the blisters on her index finger burst as she watched, and she made a tiny, helpless sound between her teeth.
Nineteen Adze reappeared over her shoulder, an open bottle in her hand. Unceremoniously she poured the contents over Mahit’s fingers.
“Mineral oil,” she said, picking up a washcloth. “This will probably hurt a great deal. Hold still.” She scraped the cloth over the blisters, stripping the oil into the sink. Mahit was sure she was stripping her skin away with it. She tried not to pull away. Nineteen Adze poured oil and scraped it off twice more. At the end of it Mahit was shaking, tremors up the backs of her thighs. Nineteen Adze took her upper arm in an iron grip and sat her down on the closed lid of the toilet.
“If you fall and crack your skull open,” she said, “there will be no point to my having fixed your hand.”
Whoever had left the flower couldn’t have been Nineteen Adze—why would she have tried to kill Mahit and then dragged her off into the bath and kept her alive? She had been so sharp, when she said don’t.
(So sharp, and so close. Had she been watching? How long had she been watching? Had she waited to see if Mahit would actually breathe in the scent of the flower—decided only then to prevent her—)
Did it matter?
Nineteen Adze had gotten down on her knees next to her, and was wrapping her fingers in individual gauze bandages, as attentive as a battlefield medic. Mahit wondered if she’d been one, once, fought at the side of the Emperor in person, his sworn companion—she was getting epics into her analysis, Teixcalaan was a modern multiplanetary empire, if ezuazuacatlim fought they’d fight from starship bridges.
“What flower is full of contact poisons?” she asked. Her voice caught in her throat, around the edges of the receding pain and the adrenaline shock.
“It’s a native planetary cultivar,” said Nineteen Adze. “The common name is xauitl, for the hallucinations it’s supposed to bring you right as you die from breathing in the neurotoxins.”
“That’s cheerful,” Mahit said inanely. She wanted to put her head in her hands, but it would hurt too much.
“Before we had spaceflight, Teixcalaanli archers would dip arrowheads in blooms to poison them,” Nineteen Adze went on. “And now the Science Ministry distills the oils into some kind of treatment for palsy. What can kill can cure, if you like that sort of thing. You should be flattered; someone wants you dead artistically, Ambassador.”
There would be a certain satisfying circularity to the Science Ministry trying to kill every Lsel ambassador. Mahit didn’t trust it—it was like a ring composition in an oration, the same theme coming around again at the end of the stanza. It was too Teixcalaanli, and even if Nineteen Adze hadn’t meant her to think of it, she could guess that she had come up with it because of exactly that kind of overdetermined thinking. Echoes and repetition. Everything meaning something else.
It was the first time she wondered if Nineteen Adze—if any Teixcalaanlitzlim—could compensate for the sheer thematic weight of how Teixcalaanli logic worked. Wondering felt like being thrown into cold water, shock-bright clarity as the pain in her fingers began to fade. Even if the flower had come from the Science Ministry, it had been brought into Nineteen Adze’s office by someone with full access: Nineteen Adze herself, or one of her assistants. At absolute best they had decided to allow it to be delivered to her; at worst, one or more of them was actively seeking her death right this moment. Artistically.
Artistically, and flowers. Blooms, Nineteen Adze had just said. The same word as the one in Thirty Larkspur’s poetic epithet. He’d been solicitous, at the reception—had rescued her from the drunken grasp of that courtier, even—but she didn’t trust his motivations. Their conversation had been barbed, apologetic, ever-shifting. And the war was on, now: a war Mahit was fairly sure Thirty Larkspur did not want, or did not want in the hands of One Lightning—the calculus of loyalties had changed—perhaps she was too dangerous to him, alive. (As Yskandr had been?)
Not ring composition, this time, but allusion, wordplay. She was over-reading. It was impossible to over-read a Teixcalaanli text. One of her instructors in imperial literature had said that, at the beginning of the course. It had been meant as a warning and Mahit, age fourteen, had seized it like it was instead a balm.