Chapter Twenty-Six #3
Finally, she finished with the last of the new arrivals, who was then herded by the two snarling guards over to where the others waited, after which they all mercifully left the infirmary, Bones and the Butcher included.
They were someone else’s problem now, Kiva thought, relieved that she hadn’t been assigned orientation duties again, unlike with Jaren.
Though ... that hadn’t worked out too badly, in the end.
“That w-was intense,” Tipp said, collecting the discarded clothes and placing them in a pile. “I don’t know h-how you do it.”
“Lots of practice,” Kiva said, moving to help him.
She picked up a dirty tunic that had belonged to one of the men, wrinkling her nose as she shook it out and then folded it.
She nearly missed the small, fluttering item that drifted to the floor, nearly didn’t act fast enough to cover it with her boot before Tipp saw.
Her pulse leapt into her throat, but she remained calm, continuing to fold the clothes until they were all done.
“Can you run these over to the entrance block for sorting?” Kiva asked Tipp, praying that he didn’t notice the waver in her voice.
“I’ll be r-r-really fast,” he said in answer. “They’ll be c-coming to get you soon. I don’t w-want to miss it.”
Kiva barely spared a thought to how it was nearly time for her next Ordeal.
All she did was hold her breath until he took off out of the room, after which she glanced around quickly to make sure she was alone, aside from the sleeping Tilda.
Once certain, Kiva shifted her foot and bent to pick up the scrap of parchment that had fallen from the man’s tunic.
This was it, she thought. Her family had received the note she’d sent through Raz, and they’d finally replied to give her news of the coming rescue.
With shaking hands, she unfolded the message. It was one word, the code scrawled this time in her brother’s messy, hurried hand.
Kiva frowned, reading it again, wondering if she was mistranslating.
It was a name. A town.
Oakhollow.
If she recalled her basic geography lessons, it was down south, close to Vallenia.
But why would he—
Kiva sucked in a breath as understanding hit her.
Her brother was telling her where he was. Where her family was.
Where she could find them, if she survived the Ordeals, if she earned her freedom.
It filled her with hope, with warmth, that he believed she could triumph where so many others had failed.
And yet ... that hope dissolved as devastation overcame her. Her third Trial was today, and they still weren’t there to save her. She’d told them that she needed a rescue, and this was their only reply.
We are coming .
Lies.
All lies.
Because they weren’t coming.
She drew in a deep breath, seeking to control the tears that wanted to spring to her eyes.
She couldn’t blame them. No one had ever broken into Zalindov. No one had ever escaped. She knew it had been an impossible task, an impossible ask . But she’d hoped ... with the help of the rebels, she’d hoped ...
It didn’t matter.
It was up to Kiva now. If she wanted to see her family again, she would have to make her own way to them. Her brother’s note told her two things:
They were waiting for her. And they wanted her to join them.
Two more weeks.
Two more Ordeals.
Then she could be free.
Then she would be free.
“Oh, sweets, you’re still here.”
Kiva scrunched up the note and kicked it under the bench before spinning around to find Olisha walking through the infirmary doorway.
“What are you doing here?” Kiva asked, her voice hoarse with all that she was feeling.
Olisha patted the rucksack she held, the tinkling sound indicating shifting glass, and answered, “Just came to top up the supplies.”
Kiva blinked. “Supplies?”
Olisha headed over to the worktable and knelt before it, opening a panel at the front. Kiva gaped, having never realized there was a cupboard built into the wood.
“Supplies,” Olisha repeated, reaching into her bag and pulling out a vial of clear liquid, waving it at Kiva. “You know, the immunity booster.”
A cold feeling gripped Kiva as she walked on numb legs toward the other woman. “Immunity booster?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Olisha said, her voice muffled from her head being half in the cupboard as she cleared a space around the other identical vials that were already in there. “I wish I wasn’t allergic to goldenroot. Nergal, too. Otherwise we’d be downing these by the bucketful.”
“Can I—” Kiva cleared her throat. “Can I see one of those, please?”
Olisha was just about to place a new vial in the cupboard, but she instead handed it up to Kiva and reached for another one, continuing to fill the space.
With a shaking hand, Kiva unstoppered the lid, raising the vial to her nose. One whiff was all it took for panic to seize her, but she forced her voice to remain steady as she asked, “Where did you get these, Olisha?”
“Hmm?” the woman asked, distracted by her task.
“These vials—where did they come from?”
“Nergal gave them to me, sweets,” Olisha said. “He’s heading out with the others to watch your Trial, but my nerves can’t take that. I offered to drop them off since I was on my way here anyway. Someone has to watch over the patients while you’re gone.”
“Nergal ... gave you these ... immunity boosters?”
“Well, yes,” Olisha said, and something in Kiva’s voice made her pause what she was doing and look up at her. “But he got them from someone else. We’ve been handing them out all winter. Anytime someone comes here to see us, we make them take one. Just like you do.”
“I—what?”
Olisha’s brow furrowed. “You have been giving them out, haven’t you?”
When Kiva shook her head slowly, horror beginning to coil within her, Olisha frowned fully and said, “You should know better, dear. With this sickness going around, we need all the help we can get. Not everyone is allergic to goldenroot. You of all people should have been shoving these down the throats of your patients. Not the sick ones—we tried that, and it only made them worse. But the people who come here with wounds or colds or ... or ... the healthy ones. They’re the ones we’ve been giving the boosters to, trying to give them a fighting chance.
As you should have been doing.” Olisha’s lips pressed together. “I’m disappointed in you, Kiva.”
But Kiva had stopped listening. Instead, she was hearing Cresta’s voice, her accusations from just yesterday: everyone who comes to see you for the smallest thing ends up getting sick—explain that, healer!
Everworld help them.
Kiva knew what was causing the sickness.
Olisha was right—there was goldenroot in the vial, a natural immunity booster.
But Olisha was also wrong, because there wasn’t only goldenroot in the vial.
The smell was still lingering in the back of Kiva’s nose, bitter almonds with a hint of rotting fruit. The spicy goldenroot almost masked it, enough that untrained healers like Olisha and Nergal wouldn’t realize, wouldn’t know.
High fever, dilated pupils, headache, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach rash—they were all symptoms of a stomach sickness. But they were also classic side effects of something else, something that smelled of bitter almonds and rotting fruit.
Wraithweed.
More commonly known as Death’s Embrace.
The immunity booster—it wasn’t medicine.
It was poison.
The prisoners weren’t catching an illness. They were being given one.
“Time to go.”
Kiva spun away from Olisha and toward the infirmary door, the shock of what she’d just realized causing trembles to overtake her body.
“Where’s Naari?” Kiva choked out at the sight of Warden Rooke striding toward her.
The man raised a dark brow. “You’ve become quite familiar with her, haven’t you? Be careful, healer.”
Kiva stared at him, still reeling from what she’d learned. She opened her mouth to tell Rooke, but then saw the guards with him, one who had walked in at his side, and others standing just beyond the doorway and within hearing range. Olisha’s words came to her again: he got them from someone else.
Kiva couldn’t risk giving away what she’d discovered, not until she was certain the person responsible would be caught.
Olisha and Nergal had been nothing more than pawns.
Idiotic pawns, but pawns nonetheless. Until their supplier was revealed, Kiva had to be careful who she told.
She couldn’t just blurt out the truth to Warden Rooke, not while others were listening.
The prisoners weren’t the only gossips at Zalindov.
The rumor mill ran rampant among the guards, too, and word always traveled back to the inmates.
This needed to be taken care of—but quietly . Zalindov was already a powder keg waiting to explode. If people discovered that the illness wasn’t an illness ... that someone was deliberately poisoning them ...
“What’s that you’ve got there?” Rooke said, peering at the liquid in Kiva’s white-knuckled grip.
Kiva sought a calmness she didn’t feel, lying through her teeth as she handed the vial back to Olisha and said, “Nothing important.”
Rooke’s eyes narrowed and Kiva felt a spark of hope, knowing how good he was at reading people. Surely he would recognize the panic on her features enough to see that something was wrong, and demand a private audience with her. Then she could tell him the truth without listening ears.
But he said nothing, oblivious to all she was thinking and feeling. All he did was turn away and gesture for her to follow. “Come. We’ve a walk ahead of us.”
“Wait!” she cried, unable to stop herself. “Can I have a quick word? Alone?”
Rooke’s strides didn’t even slow as he called over his shoulder, “We’re running late. Whatever it is, it can wait until after your Trial.”
“If you’re still alive,” snickered the guard who had walked in with him, stepping closer and giving Kiva a hearty shove forward. “Move, healer.”
“But—”
“Walk, or I’ll carry you.” The guard shoved her again. “Your choice.”
Kiva ground her teeth together but stomped obediently toward the door, silently cursing Rooke for not seeing how desperate she was to speak with him.
Her thoughts spiraled as she stepped outside, the still-snickering guard speeding up to flank the Warden alongside two others.
A further three joined them on the path, but none were Naari.
Kiva was desperate to see her and share what she’d learned, certain that Naari, unlike the Warden, would listen, and confident that the guard would know what action to take.
People were dying because of a poison. Someone needed to know, needed to figure out who was behind it and bring them to justice.
Kiva’s first thought was Cresta. If inmates were able to get their hands on smuggled angeldust, then other items could be obtained, too.
Especially by the leader of the prison rebels.
But ... Cresta had seemed so enraged when she’d confronted Kiva yesterday, claiming that her friends were getting sick and dying.
If she was the one supplying the poison, then surely she’d have kept it from harming those she cared about.
It had to be someone else, some motive other than to spread fear and animosity, which Cresta didn’t need a poison to do. But, who —
Kiva’s concentration unraveled when a voice called out for the Warden, prompting their small group to pause. She was so relieved to turn and find Naari striding toward them that her knees nearly gave out.
“Arell,” Rooke grunted. “I wondered where you were. Did you know the infirmary was left unguarded?”
“A wagon came in this morning,” Naari said. “I was told it was covered.”
The Warden’s lips tightened, but her answer must have satisfied him, since he continued walking.
Kiva didn’t follow until Naari nudged her forward, and even then, she trailed as far back from the Warden and his entourage as possible.
“I need to talk to you,” Kiva whispered from the corner of her mouth.
“You need to focus,” Naari whispered back.
Kiva’s eyes flicked sidelong toward the guard, noting her pallid expression, her tense features, the anxious way she was holding herself.
“It’s urgent,” Kiva whispered. “It’s about—”
But Kiva cut herself off when she realized that something was wrong.
They weren’t walking toward the tunnel entrance, toward the aquifer.
They were walking toward Zalindov’s gates.
Suddenly, all thoughts of the poison fled her mind, fear overtaking her as she remembered she was about to face her third Ordeal, and it could very well end in her death.
She’d been nervously confident while thinking she would have to swim across the aquifer, especially with Mot’s energy potion flooding her veins, but now . ..
Now she had no idea what was happening.
“Where are we going?” Kiva whispered.
Naari’s tone was as grim as her face when she replied, “I don’t know, but I don’t like this.”
Kiva didn’t like it either. But as they walked through the gates behind Rooke, followed the rail tracks past the farms, and continued on, she began to get an inkling of where they might be headed.
Saliva pooled in her mouth, and more than ever, she felt a frantic need to share what she’d learned, so she reached for Naari’s leather sleeve and leaned in to whisper, “It’s poison.”
“What?” the guard asked, before giving a swift hand gesture indicating silence, just as Rooke turned around to look at them.
“Keep up,” the Warden said. “Everyone’s waiting for us.”
Kiva knew he was referring to the rest of Zalindov’s inhabitants.
She wondered if Tipp had been ushered away with the crowd on his way back from the entrance block, hoping he was with Mot or Jaren and not lost among a sea of burly lumbersmiths or quarry workers.
But she also knew the young boy could fend for himself, so she chose not to worry about him and instead sought to make sure Naari had comprehended her message.
Rooke, however, had now noticed they were lagging behind and slowed his steps, forcing them to catch up. When Kiva looked over at Naari, she didn’t seem alarmed, revealing that she hadn’t understood what Kiva had said, or the importance of it. She needed to find a way to explain, and fast.
But then Rooke turned off the main rail track line, heading further east, somewhere Kiva had never traveled before, and she realized she was right about where they were taking her, her heart leaping into her throat with the dreaded confirmation.
The abandoned quarry.
A flooded deathtrap.
The perfect place for her Trial by Water.