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“What do you have?” I press. “There has to be something. Dried stores of herbs, imports, whatever has been preserved.”

Kylian’s brow furrows, and I watch him work through the question, his gaze moving across the room in a sweep that takes in every occupied bed, every coughing child, every mother holding a feverish infant, and the weight of all of it presses his features into something that looks older. For the first time, he looks like a man, not a vampire.

“I’ll show you,” he says. “Come.”

He moves past me toward the exit, and I follow. We pass through corridors and down a staircase I don’t recognize, the castle shifting around us as we descend. The air grows cooler and then warmer again as we reach a door that opens into outside light. Actual light. Gray and overcast, the sun hidden behind clouds thick enough that Kylian steps through without flinching, and the wind that greets us carries the salt of the ocean and something else. Something sour and wrong that I’ve been smelling since we arrived on this island. I couldn’t place it until now.

Decay. The land itself smells of rot.

Eagan silently falls into step behind us, and Kylian leads me away from the castle walls onto a path that cuts between the pines, trees that should be green, even in the heart of winter. Instead, they look dead and gray. Their bark hangs in curling strips, and their needleless branches twist feebly toward the sky.

I follow the king into the dying forest, taking in the devastation of this island. Eagan said the land was dying but this is unnatural.

“How long?” I ask, and my voice sounds too loud out here, too alive against the silence of a forest without the rustling of small animals.

Kylian doesn’t look back. “It gets worse every year.”

We walk for another few minutes, and the trees thin ahead of us, their trunks growing sparser and more twisted as if they are trying to lean away from whatever waits beyond the tree line. I pull my sleeve across my nose and mouth because the smell is thickening with every squelching step, the sweetness of decay giving way to something sharper, more mineral, a tang so strong I can taste it on my tongue.

Then the trees end.

A clearing stretches before us, wide and flat, the long furrows still visible in the dirt, remnants of planting rows running in long parallel lines toward a fence that has collapsed under its own rot. But nothing grows here now. Nothing.

Whatever crop was once here is unrecognizable, reduced to thick sludge that could be any plant or no plant at all. The soil between them isn’t brown or black or any color that soil should be. It is red sludge. An unnatural rust-red that stains the earth the way blood stains cloth, spreading from the furrows in dark veins that reach outward across the clearing.

“There’s nothing,” I say.

Kylian stops at the edge of the clearing, his posture rigid against the dark gray sky. “Fish,” he says, answering the question I haven’t asked. “And whatever we can import from the mainland, which becomes less reliable every season. The trade routes are stretched thin, the other kingdoms are hoarding their own resources, and the cost of importing enough food to sustain a population that keeps growing while the island keeps shrinking . . .” He trails off.

“You tried to grow things,” I say. It isn’t a question. The furrows and the fence and the careful layout of this field tell me that someone, at some point, had tried to grow crops.

“We’ve tried everything,” he says. “Fresh crops, different irrigation systems, filtered water, imported soil layered over the existing ground. The iron in the water table poisons everything. It seeps up through the roots and kills whatever germinates. We project the iron concentration to be twenty times the maximum a plant can tolerate. The water looks clean until you let it sit, and then it turns red, and anything it touches dies.”

I stare at the red-stained ground, and my body moves before my mind gives it permission. I drop to my knees at the edge of the nearest furrow and scoop a handful of soil into my palm.

The metallic smell is overwhelming, hitting my nostrils with enough force that my stomach heaves, and I have to swallow hard against the gag that rises in my throat. The dirt is heavy in my hand, dense and cold, and its texture is wrong, too fine, lacking the grit and variation that healthy soil carries. It feels dead in a way that goes beyond the absence of nutrients. Like the ground is rejecting the very concept of life, pushing it away, poisoning it before it can take hold, like the land opened a vein and is bleeding out on everything it touches.

Madam Dahlia’s perfume boutique on Purgatory comes to mind, the one she ran alongside her estate. I spent three years coaxing life into soil that no one else saw value in.

The ground there was compacted clay and rock, salted by ocean spray, baked hard by the sun. Every gardener before me had done what Madam Dahlia asked. She wanted roses, tulips, delicate flowers that were hard to grow. But nothing would take root.

My mother’s words came to me then, just as they do now.

When the earth refuses what you ask of it, find something that belongs there.

So for weeks I walked the shorelines collecting seaweed to nourish the soil, and one day I spotted a tiny burst of purple just inside the hollow of a weathered rock where soil had collected. Sea thrift. I picked the seeds and carried them home.

Because no soil is hopeless if you learn to listen instead of demand.

I stand and let the dirt fall from my fingers in clumps, leaving my palms gritty and stained like rust. I don’t wipe them clean. I stare at the dead field and the poisoned furrows.

“I’ll need help,” I say, but a man’s voice carries over mine.

“My king, sorry for the interruption. May I have a word?”

Kylian walks toward a man nearby, who carries an uncanny resemblance to Eagan. He says something to the king, who looks back at me apologetically before leaving to follow the man.

The guard standing at the edge of the field doesn’t hide his expression when I turn to him.