“You asked,” she reminded him.
The ugly look on his face said that he hadn’t wanted to. The feeling was mutual. But she’d come north for every piece of the puzzle it could provide.
Her eyebrows rose at his silence. “Shall we continue this indoors?”
“By all means.” He didn’t move from the doorway, arms folded.
She pulled off her gloves,beshazalready active on her armilla in case this all went south. “I won’t play your games, Marus. We can speak indoors or I return to Sal Flumen, and you suffer whatever had you writing to me in such a tizzy.”
Red splotched his face. “You ruined my daughter’s life. You have no right to anything,patchworkcreature!” he snarled.
So much stayed the same. “Sal Flumen it is.” She walked over to Caelum when a brawny paw gripped her shoulder and pulled her inside.
Fear struck her with breathtaking speed. Memories arrowed through of the numerous times he had done this where she had ended up with some form of damaged or broken limb.
She jerked away and rounded on him. “Touch me again, and I’ll break that hand.”
A nasty laugh from a corner of the tavern. “Can you really?”
Sarai coolly examined Ethra’s pale, pinched features. The healer had been Marus’s bit on the side the last time she’d seen her. “Yes. But can you heal him?”
Ignoring the woman’s glower, she took in the tavern. The same sneering crowd assembled along the tables. Nothing had changed.
Wait.“Where’s Cretus?”
Marus threw his bulk into a chair. “Dead.”
“May his soul rest with the Elsar,” she recited automatically. “What of?”
“Same thing that’s taken many a good man here,” another man growled. “Whitesleep. Someone’s dosing us secretly.”
Whitesleep again?She leaned against the counter with a frown, pondering a connection to Edessa’s victims. “How did the dead look? Clustered together?”Raving of laughing skies and a reckoning?
Ethra gave her a withering look. “Blue skin and lips from respiratory depression. What else?”
No bloodbath. Just whitesleep overdoses then.But how had it made its way here? The cold kept Arsamea close to oblivion. Alcohol was their preferred drug for its illusion of heat.
“Only healers can legally prescribe whitesleep,” she murmured.
By the looks several in the tavern gave Ethra, this topic had been well-explored.
“I’minnocent,” the healer snapped. “This isn’t a joke. We have eleven dead.”
Well, shit. For a village as small as Arsamea that was a cull. “Who were the victims?”
“Our best trappers,” Marus snarled. “How the fuck are we to hunt without our men?”
“Ask the women,” Sarai said coolly to a round of snickering within the tavern.
The women dropped their eyes to their laps, wearing the bitter exhaustion of those who were tired of asking for respect.Wrath and Ruin. The north remained as immutable as the ice it was encased in.
She sighed. “You said someone was dosing you. Any suspects?”
“Plenty,” a man said. “Fucking tunnel rats are behind this. Nothing they wouldn’t do for coin.”
“We got rid of them all, but it keeps happening.” Ethra’s face hardened. “Should never have allowed them to take root. They must still be hiding here somewhere, now that we’ve emptied the tunnels.”
Hold on. Sarai went still. “Got rid of who?”
