“You might need a different medicine,” she says, reaching into a shelf for a jar. “It’s a delicate balance, curing this poison. I don’t want you to move, but I also don’t want to stop your heart.”
An image comes back to me. Taran, collapsed on the ground. He had been poisoned too. I look around, but I don’t see another table in the room. “Taran?” I ask her.
“He’s fine,” she says. “They found him first. He’s with the king.”
At least there was that. Taran and Ronan must be trying to do something about the poisoner.
“Here,” says Zara. She lifts a spoon of something to my mouth. It smells foul and musty, like the inside of a barn.
I clamp my lips shut. It’s possible for me to do so, I realize. Whatever was keeping me from moving must be wearing off a little.
“I know, it smells awful. But it will help.”
There’s another image. This time, I’m being carried through a darkened hallway. I’m fighting with my captor, someone wearing brown robes.
My heart races. Something is wrong here.
I shake my head at Zara. I begin to push myself up, and she shoves the spoon in my mouth.
“I guess we’re doing this the hard way,” she says. Then she calls out behind her. “Hermes, get in here.”
I spit out the spoon and try to pull myself upright, reaching for whatever is in my arm. But I’m too weak. She forces me back down onto the table and holds me there, trapped under her arm.
“What are you doing?”
My muscles are seizing under me. Whatever fight I had drains out of my body as however much of the elixir that I ingested reaches me.
“That’s better,” she says as I freeze. She releases me, and though I try with all my might to move, I can’t. “Truly, I am sorry about this. It’s not how this was supposed to go.”
My eyes dart with fear.
Hermes enters the room. “Problem?”
“Not anymore. She should be finished draining soon. Start the boilers, would you?”
I look down in horror at my arm. The tube is dark inside. Dark red.
She’s draining the blood from my body.
All of it.
Chapter Thirty-One
“Why?” I croak.
Why is Zara, the head of the Alchemists’ Guild, the person who helped me during the Festival of Sport, a close confidante of Ronan and one of his most trusted advisors, trying to kill me?
Not trying. Actively killing me. She’s killing me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she says.
I couldn’t stop if I tried.
“I didn’t want to do this. You gave me no choice. Don’t worry; I won’t be killing you today. I need you alive to use the blood, so it’ll be a day or two. Honestly, it’s a shame to have to kill you at all. A shadow-born as powerful as you? I have such high hopes for your blood. But Ronan has been enough of a nuisance with just those spies of his missing. I’d never have taken them, of course, but they were getting too close as well. But you? You’re going to need to turn up dead so we can finish what we started.”
“What?” It’s all I can manage to say. I have no idea what she’s talking about.
Zara sighs. “I’m just trying to do what he asked me to. You understand that, right?”
