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Heal him first…then ask questions,I thought. Night nettle wasn’t a common poison. It was used only by certain individuals on Allavar, individuals who most knew to steer clear from. Even if one could afford the raw ingredients, it still needed to be extracted and prepared by a practiced hand, the process taking weeks.
If someone poisoned you with night nettle…theywanted—or needed—you dead.
There was a building dread in my belly which told me what I thought I already knew. That I didn’thavethe antidote, that I’d sold my last vial to a dark-eyed Ernitian who’d offered me a price I couldn’t refuse at the last market day.
The Kylorr was huffing, his breathing labored, as we trudged closer and closer to my cottage. But it was slow going. His legsseemed like they were heavy and the Black Veil didn’t make our path easy.
Every sound made my head whip to the side. Every branch blowing in the breeze or skittering of an animal’s retreat held me on edge. Whoever had done this…they couldn’t be that far away. Were they watching us, even now?
A chill went down the back of my neck, just as I felt the Kylorr’s muscles bunch tight against my arm, where I had it wrapped underneath his wings.
Glowing white eyes were watching us. A tall, winged figure, shadowed underneath the canopy of a nearby tree.A Sever?It would be the closest I’d ever been to one.
They had sharp horns like Kylorr, but they were tall like the Allavari. A black cloak billowed out from its large body. I couldn’t make out its features, but those eyes were eerie and they watched us steadily, spurring me to pick up my pace.
“Ignore him,” the Kylorr grated to me, making me shoot him a sharp, incredulous look even as my heart raced. “Don’t even look at him, little witch.”
The Sever followed us to my cottage, always staying in the darkness, never stepping foot into the moonlight. When we finally jolted over the protection spell, the safe boundary of my property, I felt like I could finally breathe.
My glowflies were quiet, the hush ominous. When we finally made it inside my cottage, I shouldered the door closed, scrambling with the lock, before the male stumbled over to a chair at my dining table. His body was laughably large for the chair, but I was concerned when I saw the sheen of sweat covering his forehead and the dulled, ashen pallor of his usually luminous skin.
Taking a deep, steadying breath to calm my shaking hands, I hurried to my storage shelves lining the left wall next to my cauldron. Pulling open drawer after drawer, my eyes soughtout the familiar cerulean vial of the brightbell-infused antidote. Every drawer ratcheted up my anxiety and the abysmal sense of failure.
“You don’t have it,” he commented, almost nonchalantly, behind my turned back. “Fuck.”
Fuck, indeed,I thought.Think, Marion. There’s always a way…
Brightbell. What properties made it an antidote for night nettle?
It thickened the blood, slowing down the night nettle in the veins. And in Kylorr…
A jolt of a realization spurred me into motion, and I snagged carrowroot extract, a bottle of keeper’s bone, and dried wrathweed from last season’s harvest. It wouldn’t be perfect…but it would besomething. I couldn’t sit and watch him die. No healer who had taken the oath, bound in blood and magic, would be able to do that.
I didn’t have time to extract the marrow from the keeper’s bone, so I snagged a sizeable piece out of the jar and handed it over.
“Bite through this,” I ordered him. “Get to the marrow. Quickly.”
Luckily he didn’t question me, and I turned my back on him, hearing his fangs crunch through bone. I dumped wrathweed into my mortar, grinding it down with practiced motions of my pestle before mixing it with the carrowroot extract, the liquid sizzling on contact with the fine dust. My eyes watered at the pungent smell, nausea rising in my belly.
I thickened it into a paste, thick enough that it clung to the stone pestle. Then I scurried out to the garden, not looking once into the forest to see if the Sever was still lingering nearby. I went to the wrathweed bed, to the tiny little grave I’d pressed theglowfly into earlier in the night. Rich soil stuck to its body when I unearthed it. I didn’t have time to dry it out.
“I’m sorry, little one,” I whispered, “but you just might save a life tonight.”
A life for a life. Maybe there was a reason why this glowfly had died tonight of all nights.
Keeping the cold glowfly cupped in my palm, I returned to the cottage, catching movement out of the corner of my eye. The Sever was still there. Strangely enough, his white eyes weren’t on me. They were on my garden.
Bolting the door once more, I returned to my mortar, dropping the glowfly’s lifeless body into the mix, soil and all. When I ground him into the paste, his blood shimmered blue, a dark dye against the sickening gray mixture.
Turning toward the male—whose name I didn’t even know but had imagined a thousand different ways—I set my mortar on the table, eyeing the arrow.
“You’re going to hate me for this,” I informed him, keeping my voice low and steady.
His jaw tightened. There was understanding in his gaze. He knew the arrow needed to come out.
“Do it,” he said. “I’ve had worse, I assure you.”
His lips even quirked up in a half smile, and I nearly believed him.
