Chapter 474: Gone.
The scent reached him before consciousness did.
Herbs. Medicine. The sharp, clean bite of something antiseptic beneath the sweeter undertones of dried flowers and something else he couldn’t name. Familiar in the way that a place becomes familiar when you’ve been desperate enough to need it.
Nero knew where he was before he opened his eyes.
He lay still for a moment, letting awareness seep back into his body the way water seeps into dry ground. Slow. Unhurried. His body ached with the deep, pervasive soreness of someone who had been comprehensively broken and then imperfectly reassembled. Not the sharp, immediate pain of fresh injury, but the duller complaint of healing things that hadn’t quite finished the process.
He was alive.
That fact still managed to surprise him sometimes.
His vision, when he finally opened his eyes, came in blurred and uncooperative. The ceiling above him was familiar. The quality of light filtering through the room’s small window was familiar. Even the particular way the mattress beneath him compressed under his weight was familiar.
Lyon’s infirmary.
He blinked several times, his vision gradually stabilizing as his eyes adjusted. The room resolved itself into sharp detail. The rows of shelves along the walls, crowded with vials and jars containing fluids of every conceivable color. The desk in the far corner, its surface buried under apparatus that served purposes Nero couldn’t begin to guess at. Strange tubes of glass connecting vessel to vessel, small flames burning beneath copper containers, the soft sound of liquid being processed through mechanisms that seemed to operate on logic entirely their own.
And standing at that desk, his back to Nero, was Lyon.