"We have a bath prepared for you," Lillian said. "And there will be food. Anything you'd like. For now, I have this." She lifted a delicate cup on a small plate, both painted and touched with gold. A dense and delicious fragrance floated to me from the cup, and my mouth watered. "What is it?" I asked. "Chocolate," Lillian said, with a secretive smile. "When Asterion told us what you'd need to recover, this was the first thing I thought of." The space between us was vast, all dense and soft bedding for me to climb over, but neither the woman nor the basilisk so much as twitched in my direction.
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