“Do you have the elixir?” Abalone demanded.
“No, Mother.”
“Naiadum is dying because of you. You abandoned us in the most difficult week of our lives, and now you’ve returned empty-handed. Don’t you have any shame?”
Abalone snapped out of her chair and hovered before Coralline. Perhaps it was because she was wearing the black of mourning, but Coralline had the sense that it was not her mother, but her mother’s ghost, in front of her. The feeling evaporated when her mother’s hands landed on her shoulders and shook her until her teeth rattled—
“Stop it, Abalone!” Trochid said, as he arrived between them and wrenched them apart. “It’s not Coralline’s fault she couldn’t find the elixir. She did everything she could.”
“It’s all right, Father. It is my fault. I found the elixir, but I lost it. I’m sorry.”
With a sob, Coralline darted out of Naiadum’s bedroom, then out the living room window. “Coralline!” her father called after her, but she did not look back.
She swam aimlessly through Urchin Grove, aware only dimly that Pavonis was swimming above her. She did not stop to notice the shops she passed, the houses, the lanes through which she’d swum countless times over the years. She did not stop to talk to anyone, not even people she recognized. They didn’t seem keen to talk to her either—whispering behind cupped hands, they refused to meet her eyes.
Coralline stopped only when she found herself at the door of The Irregular Remedy. It had previously formed her whole world; now, she saw that it looked no different than any other place in Urchin Grove: It was a low mound of gray shale rising from the seabed. Previously, the distance between her home and the clinic had seemed substantial; now, after her endless swimming over the course of the Elixir Expedition, Coralline felt as though The Irregular Remedy was practically next door to her home.
But there was no place for her at The Irregular Remedy anymore, she remembered—it was simply habit that had brought her here. Turning away, she found herself facing a patch of desmarestia that sprouted close to the clinic. She was about to swim over the side of it, in order to avoid the Doom of Desmarestia said to come from crossing over it, but Pavonis said, “You know better now than to follow senseless misconceptions!” Nodding up at him, Coralline started to traverse the olive-brown fronds, but she stopped with a gasp.
Her desmarestia-sea-oak solution had healed Izar’s wrist completely, almost miraculously. What if desmarestia’s use was not limited to healing external wounds? Could desmarestia’s toxins, when reversed, heal all manner of things? Specifically, could desmarestia, in combination with sea oak, cleanse contaminated blood?
It was possible, but it would be risky, more for her than Naiadum. Without the solution, he would certainly die; with it, there was a sliver of a chance he would live. But Coralline would suffer whether he lived or died. If he lived, she would be condemned under the Medical Malpractice Act for having practiced without a badge—in which case she would be barred for life from practice again. If he died, a second murder charge would be added to her name—Naiadum Costaria in addition to Tang Tarpon—and she would be imprisoned for life in the Wrongdoers’ Refinery.
Was she willing to take these risks? Yes, she decided, if there was a possibility to save him.
Coralline rushed through the door of The Irregular Remedy. Rhodomela was not there, to her relief. She must be visiting a patient at home, likely someone sickened by the black poison Izar had spewed all over Urchin Grove.
Coralline’s gaze fell on the white-gray limestone urns on her shelves: Swelling Softener, Rash Relief, Gill Gush, Cough Cure. . . . The urns had meant everything to her when she’d worked here, the medication in each prepared painstakingly by her own hand, but she found they meant nothing to her now—she could just as well be looking at another healer’s work. Why had Rhodomela not disposed of her urns? Coralline wondered, before leaping into action.
Grabbing her snippers, she swam out the window into the remedial garden. She sheared straggly golden-brown strands of sea oak, then moved outward to the patch of desmarestia and snipped several fronds. Stuffing the two algae in separate vials, she rushed back inside The Irregular Remedy and ground sea oak and desmarestia one after the other in her mortar and pestle. She returned the two algae to the vials and lidded the vials. When she looked up, a face was staring at her from the window.
It was not Rhodomela but a mermaid Coralline wished to see even less: Rosette. “Who are you trying to poison?” Rosette demanded, eyeing the vial of desmarestia.
“That’s none of your business.”
“How was your lover?”
Coralline looked at her in stunned silence.
“I told everyone you left Urchin Grove for a lover,” Rosette said slyly.
Now Coralline understood why the people she’d passed on her way to The Irregular Remedy had whispered behind cupped hands and refused to meet her eyes.
“My rumor became reality, didn’t it? I can see it in your eyes!”
Coralline placed the vials of desmarestia and sea oak in her satchel, along with an empty flask, then she pushed past Rosette out the window. Her swim home was a blur—she was aware of nothing, not even Pavonis, above her. Her senses returned only when she was sitting again at Naiadum’s bedside and extracting the two vials and the flask from her satchel. She emptied the vials into the flask. The two algae started to sputter and spew and screech, like people shrieking at the top of their voices. The shriek was disturbing but also reassuring—the reaction was exactly as it had been in Izar’s case. Coralline placed the flask to Naiadum’s lips, but a hand snaked around her wrist.
“What’s this?” Abalone asked.
“A solution that may save Naiadum.” Coralline tried to wring her hand free, but her mother’s grasp tightened.
“If something could save Naiadum, Rhodomela would have told us. What, precisely, is in the flask you’re putting to my son’s lips?”
“Sea oak and desmarestia.”
“Desmarestia? You’re poisoning Naiadum? Is he not dying quick enough for you?”
“I believe sea oak can reverse desmarestia’s toxins, Mother. I tried it once before, and it worked.”
“Nothing can reverse desmarestia’s toxins. If anything could reverse them, someone smarter and more experienced than you would have figured it out before now. You can give this so-called solution to him only if you also take it yourself.”
“Don’t be absurd, Abalone!” Trochid interjected.
“I insist,” she yelled. “It’s Coralline’s fault he’s in this condition; I want to be sure she isn’t trying to poison him.”
Coralline bit back her tears. It would not do to cry now, even though her mother’s words felt like pinpricks all across her body. It would be dangerous for Coralline to take such a strong dose, given that she wasn’t sick, but she could see no other choice: The reaction was starting to fizz, the flask in her hand no longer rattling. It was losing potency by the second. There was no time to argue with her mother or explain to her the medical risks of what she was proposing. Coralline would have to act now, or it would be too late. “All right. I’ll drink the solution, too.”