Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 84840 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 424(@200wpm)___ 339(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84840 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 424(@200wpm)___ 339(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Olyn’s brow furrows. Slowly, she nods. “Yes. Most of them. Now some are being held hostage . . .” She trails off, her face pale in the moonlight.
“Where are the vespertines when you need them?”
I expect her to say they’re busy, spread thin across Kastoria helping the weak—but instead, she grimaces. “Half of them are hostages. It was an ambush. Poison.”
“Bastion?”
She shakes her head. “He left the day before to get more information in the capital.”
I grimace, but she’s not finished yet.
“For every death they suffer,” she continues, “they’ve killed one of ours.”
I slam a fist against the tree trunk. Fear might be the most frightening effect of all. I glance at the luminarium, where those dying patients are waiting and will take healthy ones with them. There is no time to get angry. This sickness is only going to keep spreading. “How many fall sick each day?”
Olyn shudders. “A dozen today. But it’s doubling every day.”
Doubling.
I grip the trunk so hard splinters sink into my palm, but I don’t care. I can’t look past the horror of that number. Horror—and nauseating guilt. To win against the Wyrd army, we faked a plague. We toyed with fear like it was a game. We tricked people into believing the poxies would spread. We used terror to win a war.
And now? This sinister sickness is real. It’s spreading faster than we ever imagined.
Is this the price of our deceit? The consequence of our deception? Our punishment?
My impersonation of one with Lindrhalda’s touch, my idea to mimic plague—had it all tempted the gods?
My stomach clenches so violently I double over, bile burning the back of my throat. I brace a hand against the luminarium wall, swallowing hard to keep from heaving.
Olyn whips out her needles and presses them into three acupoints, relieving the sickness in my stomach but not the one in my heart.
“This is bad, isn’t it?” she murmurs.
“If there’s sickness here,” I say on a thick swallow, “It’ll be elsewhere. This will spiral exponentially out of hand.” I shove myself towards the luminarium, rolling up my sleeves. “Let’s take a look; ease symptoms where we can. At dawn, we leave.”
“Leave? We can’t leave.”
I meet her eye firmly. “If we don’t, we may not save anyone.”
The night stretches on in fevered whispers and dying breaths. When dawn breaks, frost glazes the luminarium’s dome, and in the distance three towers of smoke plume towards the heavens. A sharpened scythe halts an inch from my throat.
The farmer gripping it has skin shining like turquoise shells and yellowed eyes burning with fever. Behind him, more block the way, their cracked nails scraping against wood, against their own arms, against each other.
The metal at my throat is cold. I don’t move.
“Where do you think you’re going?” the farmer demands, voice raw.
Olyn grips my sleeve. I don’t dare let my hands tremble.
“We won’t find a solution sitting here,” I say, measured but firm. “We need to see the villages where you came from.”
“One of us will escort you.”
“No.”
The tension sharpens and glints like their curved blades. I raise my hands before they think to use the rusting weapons. “You’re sick,” I say quickly. “You’ll infect the healthy. You must remain here at the luminarium.”
They don’t like that. A cough rattles in the air, followed by whispers, then arguments, then nails digging into skin.
In the end, they strip us of everything—our money, our packs, even my dromveske, everything except my healing bag—before stepping aside.
“If you don’t come back by sundown,” the man with the scythe growls, “we’ll kill two more of your lot.”
I bow stiffly, biting back a curse. My fingers twitch toward my belt, where my dromveske should be. Mine. Quin’s. The loss sinks deep, but now isn’t the time to fight for it.
I’ll get the dromveske back. It won’t be long. It can’t be.
The sick and the not-yet-sick are counting on us.
We follow the canals into the river that cleaves through the forest, then race through the woods, the dappled light blueish from a cold dawn. A very cold dawn; I’ve been shivering since I left the boat. I curl my cloak deeper around me.
“This isn’t the most direct route,” Olyn says, pointing to the distant hills and more smoke rising from them.
I don’t slow. “I need something first.”
The ruined fortress looms ahead, blackened stone swallowed by vines. My breath comes quick. He has to be here.
I step carefully over the rubble, my voice cutting through the ruins. “Nicostratus.”
The silence tightens. A cold certainty coils in my chest.
He wouldn’t have left. Not yet.
Not until he knew what had happened to me—
A flash of red. A rush of wind. He lands before me.
For the first time since leaving the luminarium, my chest loosens. Just slightly. Just enough to breathe again.
His expression is unreadable but his gaze drinks me in—whole, unhurt. The tension in his shoulders unwinds, and a slow, quiet sigh escapes him. “You’re unharmed.”