The woman who reaches the cave mouth twenty minutes later is small and gray-haired, with hands that look like Ruelle’s will look in thirty years, worn, weathered. She carries a leather satchel and a walking stick and the expression of someone who has climbed a mountain she was too old to climb and is not going to discuss it.
“You’re hard to find,” she says to Ruelle.
“I wasn’t trying to be found.”
“I know. That’s why it took me four months.” Magnelle looks at me, studying me the way Ruelle studied me in the auction hall. “Ophidian. Venom sickness. Scale deterioration, though it looks like someone’s been treating it.” She looks back at Ruelle. “Your work?”
“Yes.”
“Good work.”
Two words, and Ruelle’s shoulders drop.
I bring water.
“I need to tell you something first,” she says. “Before anything else.” She drinks, sets the cup down. “There’s a warlord in the eastern territories. Gereth. He uses poisoners as weapons. The willing ones get a workshop and a wage. The unwilling ones get a cell and a list of the names they love, read back to them until they cooperate. And when a poisoner stops being useful, he makes the next one watch what that costs. One of his scouts was at the bride market the night you were chosen, and the scout reported a poisoner with multiple tolerances, guild-trained. Gereth sent a retrieval team. They’re on this mountain.”
Ruelle looks at me, and I nod. “We’ve seen tracks. We didn’t know who sent them.”
“Now you do.” Magnelle looks between us. “They’re not here to talk. Gereth doesn’t negotiate with assets he wants to acquire.”
The word ‘assets’ lands hard. Ruelle’s mouth flattens into a line. “How long before they move?” she says.
“I passed their camp two days below. Six people. Professional.”
Ruelle nods, turns to the workbench. I watch her shift from the fear to the work; the fear goes behind her eyes and the hands start moving and the voice comes out even.
“As long as they don’t come right now, I have things to show you.”
She walks Magnelle through the workbench: the assay stone data, the color charts, red and gold, the sulfur compounds, the salve. Magnelle looks at each piece and asks sharp questions, the questions of someone who has been doing this work longer than Ruelle has been alive.
I watch the dynamic and understand something about Ruelle I didn’t before. She misses this. Another mind that works like hers, pushing back, asking the next question, treating her as a colleague.
“The gland damage,” Magnelle says, holding the assay stone up to the glow-stone. “The dark trace. You identified it as a foreign contaminant.”
“Mineral deposit from a mining operation. The dust got into his gland tissue. Broke the regulation.”
Magnelle nods and turns the stone. “Your approach is right,” she says. “But where’s it plateauing?”
“Deep tissue. The sulfur alone won’t penetrate past the outer channels.”
“What’s available on this mountain that could carry it deeper?” Magnelle sets the stone down and waits, letting the student find the next step.
Ruelle looks at the sulfur crystals on the shelf, then toward the cave mouth, the hot spring vent, the mineral deposits she’s been scraping for compounds. “Calcium carbonate,” she says. “From the hot spring deposits. If I process it into a substrate, it could open the channels for the agents to follow.”
“Now you’re thinking.” Magnelle picks the stone up again. “I’ve been working on gland tissue repair at the guild. Mineral contamination, specifically. I couldn’t test it because I didn’t have a subject.”
“I have a subject,” Ruelle says, and she looks at me.
I look back, eyes widening despite myself. “I’m sitting right here.”
“I’m telling her you’re cooperative.”
“Mostly cooperative.”
“Mostly.”
Magnelle watches the exchange, her eyes moving between us. “I’ll stay tonight,” she says. “We’ll work through the modification together. I need to leave before the soldiers get close enough to see me.”
