"You aren't supposed to say that name," Nehemia informed Kaltain in Eyllwean as the healer wrapped Lillian's newly glass-free and heavily salved foot. Lillian hadn't let her until she eased Chaol's knee back into place, though the healer said his body had done most of the work already.
"It worked, didn't it?"
"It isn't for you to say," Nehemia stressed. "It's for Lillian to say, that's the point."
When did Kaltain learn Lillian's declarative, anyway? Lillian wasn't surprised that she could mimic her mother's slight accent and intonation, but knowing her whole name was another matter.
"Secret names don't make sense," Kaltain said. "Somebody knows them."
"Somebody knows multiple," Lillian said pointedly, also in Eyllwean. "It is not a secret, it is - it is a reminder of who my mother wanted me to be. Sort of."
"I didn't know your mother was so traditional," Nehemia said, turning her back on Kaltain. Kaltain frowned.
"She used the archaic form and everything."
"She really is not," Lillian replied. "She said she chose to be here, but she did not want me to think she was ashamed of being…"
"Not Adarlanian," Nehemia finished.
That wasn't quite right, but Lillian didn't know how to explain that her mother could still be Adarlanian while being also, somehow, Eyllwean. She shrugged.
"Is she ready to leave?" Nehemia asked the healer in Adarlanian. The healer nodded.
"We are too," Dorian said, standing.
"I think some time apart will do all of you good," Nehemia told him. Lillian didn't think Dorian noticed that he straightened his spine as if he'd been scolded, but Chaol looked amused where he lay with his knee wrapped tightly and braced. "I will return her in the morning if she wishes."
"Do I get a say?" Lillian muttered to Kaltain in Eyllwean.
Kaltain snorted.
"I will have lunch with you," Lillian decided. "After I bathe and change my clothes. I have no intention of sleeping somewhere other than my bed."
Nehemia frowned at her. Lillian frowned back, and Nehemia, after a moment, sighed. "A long lunch."
Lillian accepted.
Lunch was soup and tea.
"Kaltain ordered?" Lillian asked Nehemia in an undertone.
"Soup is soothing," Kaltain said anyway. Lillian supposed the fae ancestry gave her an advantage when it came to hearing people talking quietly from across a room.
Was it the fae ancestry or how she'd grown up that made her talk about things like blankets and tea and soup being soothing as if the idea was an alien concept?
Kaltain served the food too, though they were in Nehemia's rooms. The three of them ate quietly - the broth was salty and tasted mildly of dill, with good-sized bits of chicken and noodles that had been cooked directly in it.
"It would take an idiot not to notice that your panic attack was caused by the treatment of the servants," Nehemia said finally. "Just as it would take an idiot not to know that you are not only the prince's mistress, and that Kaltain knows what that not only entails."
Lillian shot a glance at Kaltain, who looked determinedly out the window.
"I am glad you saved them," Nehemia said after another long silence.
"I didn't," Lillian replied. Her voice was as hoarse as it had been after the mines.
"Just because Amerie helped-"
"No, I didn't save them," Lillian clarified. She realized she was bending the spoon in her hand and put it down. She didn't look at Kaltain - Celaena - again. She didn't want to see the lack of expression or care about people being sent to Endovier. "It's better to die."
"Why would you say-"
"Personal experience," Lillian said.
Nehemia stared at her, and then at her hands, gloved now but underneath scarred and too still on the table so Lillian didn't do anything else with them.
"He always wins," Celaena said. "Whatever you do."
Lillian ground her teeth to keep from saying something about Celaena winning when it was Lillian who was sent to Endovier instead. The sound was audible.
"Lillian," Celaena began.
"You don't get to talk about it," Lillian said. "I put up with a lot, Cel - Kaltain, but I'm not going to listen to you talk about it."
She was mildly surprised that Celaena didn't push it.
"Will you talk to me about it?" Nehemia asked, voice small.
Lillian cracked a smile she knew was unpleasant. "They put us in lightless cells at night and gave us not quite enough food and beat us if we didn't mine enough salt, or even if we did and they'd had a bad day, and the only times we were a little bit clean were when we scrubbed the barracks or overseer's building, and that was just our hands - lye isn't good for your skin, you know. I think more of us died of infection thanks to split skin or burns than anything else, though of course there were the fevers and no doctors for us -"
She stopped. Nehemia's teeth had bitten into her lip to the point blood began to well up, and her face had gone tight. Lillian still couldn't look at Celaena, but she didn't want to hurt Nehemia.
"Dorian will stop it," Lillian said with all the conviction she could muster. "You wanted to know why I was here, Nehemia, and that's why. Dorian will make it better. I'm going to help him."
"You have a lot of faith in a man who took you out of a salt mine because he thought you were someone else," Celaena said, as if she couldn't help herself.
"Better than someone who knew who I was and left me there," Lillian retorted.
Celaena flinched, a full-body recoil, as if Lillian had actually hit her, only Lillian had actually hit her before and the reaction had never been so bad.
Lillian had meant the king, but she supposed it was true of Celaena too.
Having alienated both of her friends with her trauma - never mind that one of her friends could technically be counted as causing her trauma - Lillian stood to curtsy and leave.
"I can leave," Celaena said. "You don't have to."
"I want a bath," Lillian said, even though she'd already had one. "You stay."
She bobbed her curtsy to Nehemia and walked out.
Elaine had already detached the lace and started cutting up the dress when Lillian returned, though she dropped it on the breakfast table and stood up and away as if she was doing something wrong.
"I'm going through a lot of dresses," Lillian observed. "I'm never going to wear any of that again, either, I'm sorry. If you want the cloth or the lace feel free."
"I'll probably sell it," Elain said baldly.
Lillian shrugged. "I'm giving it to you. Do what you want. I'm taking another bath."
"Philippa was looking for you earlier. She said she'd come back by."
Lillian nodded and went into the bathroom, filling the tub, sinking into it, and closing her eyes.
Twenty minutes later the door opened and closed.
"If you're going to try to drown me for hurting Dorian, Philippa, I wish you wouldn't," Lillian said. "I won't take it well. I've had a difficult day."
"Drown you?" Philippa inquired.
"It seemed similar enough to smothering."
Philippa snorted, and Lillian opened her eyes and sat up to see her leaning against the door, arms crossed.
"I'm not going to try to drown you," Philippa said. "You weren't trying to hurt him. And honestly, explaining your disappearance would be difficult."
"That's fair," Lillian said, and lay back again.
"Lillian," Philippa said, and hesitated. "Dorian wouldn't like it if you disappeared either."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"Not even after the servants?"
Lillian could hear the water move with her breathing. She said nothing.
"Because," Philippa continued, "We're taking care of it. Well, my people are. Well, they're arranging it. There are some people in the city who - Lillian, at least put on the robe, you're going to scandalize Elaine."
Lillian did, but only because Phillipa threw it at her on her way out of the bathroom and it seemed churlish to just shrug it off.
"Your foot!" Elaine called. Lillian waved her off as she threw open the door to Dorian's room.
"Hello, Lillian," Chaol said dryly from the bed.
Dorian, at the desk, had half stood at the sound of the door opening but sat again when he saw who it was. The left side of his face was shiny from whatever the healer had put on it.
"You took off your bandages," she said.
"I don't think you have room to talk," he replied with a pointed look at her foot.
Lillian looked at Chaol. "At least you're doing what you're supposed to."
"One of us has to," he said, just as dryly as before.
"He tried to walk earlier and fell over."
"You are a tattle-tale," Chaol told Dorian.
"You're saving the servants," Lillian said, closing the door behind her.
"Technically," Dorian said precisely, "Philippa may know people who know people who may learn when the prison wagons are leaving and the route they're taking. I don't know anything about it, mostly because Chaol can't go do something about it himself."
"Don't look at me like that," Chaol said when Lillian did indeed look at him. "It would have been incredibly stupid to ride off still in uniform to rescue people because you were sad."
"Really it's for the best you knocked him around," Dorian agreed. "I don't think he owns clothes that aren't uniforms. He would have been caught in ten seconds flat."
"You have actually seen me in regular clothes," Chaol said.
"I was probably busy removing them, I can't be expected to think about anything else in those circumstances."
Chaol buried his face in his hands.
"Stop being idiots, I am trying to thank you," Lillian snapped.
Dorian stared at her. "Thank us? Why?"
Suddenly at a loss for words, Lillian gestured, trying to encompass the rooms, her friends, Glory, the plans. Adarlan as a whole, maybe.
"Oh, Lillian," Dorian said, suddenly serious. He stood, holding out his arms, and wrapped her in a hug when she walked into them.
"Don't thank me," he said into her hair. "You don't thank somebody when they finally start doing their job. You say 'finally' and let them get on with it. Adarlan is supposed to be my job. What's the point in being the heir if I don't do the job?"
