Chapter 5 · Poison and Cold Steel

The knock should have saved me. It didn't.

Vane's fangs were still against my old bond scar. Two points of pressure, right where his mark used to be. His breath came hot and ragged against my neck. One more second and his teeth would have gone through skin.

Three raps on the door. Polite. Patient.

"My lord." A man's voice, smooth as oiled leather. "Your tonic."

Vane went rigid behind me. A growl rolled up through his chest and into my spine. I felt it in my ribs.

"Leave it outside."

"Healer's orders, my lord. You skipped it last night. And the night before."

I knew that voice. Two years ago it stood three steps behind Vane on the Severed Ridge, calm as a priest, while the elders read my name out like a debt.

Garrick.

Vane peeled himself off me. It took him a second. His hand dragged down his face, and when he turned, his eyes were ringed in gold, pupils blown wide. Sweat shone on his collarbone. The fire behind him roared, and the whole room felt like the inside of a mouth.

"Enter," he said.

The iron cuff on my ankle bit when I scrambled back against the bedpost. The chain gave me about six feet of floor. Not even enough to reach the door.

Garrick came in carrying a silver tray. Tall, neat, hair slicked back like the storm outside had never touched him. His eyes found me on the furs, then the chain, then the red mark on my neck.

His mouth curved. Just barely.

"The rogue's still breathing," he said. "I'll admit I'm surprised."

"She's useful," Vane said. Flat. Like I was a coat he'd found in a closet.

That shouldn't have stung. It did anyway.

Garrick crossed the room and held out the cup. Steam curled off it, dark and thick. Vane took it in one big hand, and his knuckles were bruised and split like he'd been punching stone.

I smelled it before it reached his mouth.

Clove. Bitter root. Wolfsbane tincture, the ordinary kind that dulls a fever. All of that was normal. I'd brewed a hundred cups like it back when I was somebody's healer.

But underneath, thin and sharp, sat something else. Metallic. It tickled the back of my throat and made my gums ache.

Silver. Filed so fine it would dissolve in hot liquid and sit in a wolf's blood like glass.

Vane lifted the cup.

"Don't," I said.

Nobody looked at me.

"Vane. Don't drink it."

He lifted it higher. Garrick watched him with the patience of a man watching a candle burn down.

I didn't think. I lunged.

The chain snapped taut and nearly tore my leg out of the socket. I caught myself on one palm, stretched my other arm as far as it would go, and my fingertips hit the rim of the cup.

It flew. It hit the hearthstones and burst.

The tonic splashed across the stone and hissed. A thin gray smoke rose off it, and the flames beside it spat green for one second.

Then everything went quiet except the fire.

"She attacked you," Garrick said, soft and quick. "My lord, you saw it. Put her back in the Ironroot cells before she tries something worse."

"It was silver." My voice came out cracked. "Smell it. There's silver in that cup."

"A rogue who's spent two years eating bark and rabbit thinks she knows my recipes?" Garrick's boot came down on the biggest shard and ground it flat. Then he crouched, scooped the wet fragments onto his tray, and wiped the stone with his sleeve. "Healer Orrin made it himself. Ask him."

He was cleaning the proof. Right in front of us.

I looked at Vane. Willing him to see it.

He wasn't looking at the floor. He was looking at my hand. I'd caught it on a shard when I fell, a clean slice across the palm, and blood was running down my wrist in a bright thin line.

His nostrils flared. His chest dragged in one long, shaking breath.

"Out," he said.

"My lord, the girl—"

"Out."

Garrick bowed, perfectly, like a man who had lost nothing. At the door he glanced back at me. His eyes were pale and totally empty.

"Sleep lightly, rogue," he said.

The door shut. The lock turned. Three heavy bolts slid home, one after another, and the sound rang through my teeth.

It was just the two of us now. The fire. The heat. The smell of my blood.

I pressed my bleeding hand against my thigh. "Vane. Listen to me. That wasn't medicine. He's been feeding you silver. That's why the fever keeps getting worse."

He didn't answer. He was walking toward me. Slow. Each step landed heavy on the stone, and his shadow stretched up the wall behind him and bent across the ceiling.

"You think I'm stupid?" he said, very low.

"I think you're sick."

"I think," he said, and he crouched in front of me, close enough that I could feel the fever pouring off his skin, "that you hate me enough to knock a cup out of my hand."

"That's not—"

"Two years you've wanted me dead. Don't pretend you haven't."

I had. Every night. Every time the scar on my neck burned in the dark like someone had pressed a hot coin against it.

But I'd also just thrown myself across a room on a chain for him, and that made me angrier than anything he could say.

"If I wanted you dead," I said through my teeth, "I'd have let you drink it."

Something crossed his face. Doubt, maybe. Or pain. It was gone before I could be sure.

Then his hand shot out and caught my bleeding wrist. His grip was hot enough to burn. He dragged me up off the furs, spun me, and my back hit the carved post of the bed so hard the air left my lungs.

He seized my other wrist. Both of them, one in each fist, and he hauled them up over my head and held them there like I weighed nothing.

I kicked. The chain rattled. He didn't even flinch.

His mouth came down beside my ear. His breath scalded the edge of it, and his voice went rough and ruined and hungry.

"You spill my cup, rogue," he whispered. "You pay in blood."