13
Chapter
Open Doors
Darian
The mud of the eastern outskirts smelled neither of Asteria’s clean stone nor of the citadel’s winter gardens.
It smelled of rotting stubble, ox dung decomposing beneath the frost, and the sour smoke of peat chimneys that farmers kept burning day and night to keep their newborns from freezing.
Twelve days had passed since we rode out from the capital with two companies of the guard and Iven Ardel’s apothecary wagon.
The mobile command post was a waxed-canvas tent twelve feet across, pitched in a stony bend of the district road, a stone’s throw from the wooden bridge over the Siel River.
Inside, a cast-iron stove consumed green pine with wet pops, filling the space with thick steam that fogged the pewter cups and made the felt roof drip onto the map of the farming districts spread across the field table.
I pulled off my riding gloves, dropped them on the leather tabletop, and walked over to the bench where Iven was examining a row of twelve earthenware jars lined up on an oak plank.
“Tell me you’ve made progress, Iven,” I said, resting my knuckles against the edge of the wood.
The royal physician looked up from his ledger. The skin beneath his eyes was bruised with fatigue, his fingers stained with silver nitrate reagent.
“The only thing I know for certain is that your soldiers are terrorizing the tenant farmers for nothing, Darian. Out of the forty-two apothecaries, mills, and farmsteads we searched between Day Forty-Three and Day Fifty, thirty-five held nothing but salve for cattle mange, ram’s urine for dyeing cloth, and ash-bark decoctions for toothaches. ”
“The order was to seize unregulated substances, not the old folk’s medicine,” I answered, cold and sharp. “Thorne has explicit instructions not to touch a single sack of grain without an inventory signed by your hand.”
“Instructions on parchment look very clean, my lord,” Iven said, setting his quill across the horn inkwell.
“But when six men in mail coats with halberds march into a tenant’s kitchen at six in the morning, the tenant doesn’t read Crown seals.
He thinks we’ve come to butcher his sons or haul his daughters off to the frontier barracks. ”
Before I could reply, the entryway canvas parted with a creak of damp leather harness.
Captain Riven Thorne crossed the threshold.
His black wool cloak was spattered to the shoulders with dried mud, an iron helm tucked under his left arm.
In his right hand, he gripped the collar of a boy of about eighteen, dressed in a patched homespun doublet, hands bound behind his back with hemp rope.
“We have an unlicensed apothecary in the willow hamlet, my lord,” Thorne announced, shoving the prisoner toward the center of the tent with a rough jerk that dropped the boy to his knees on the straw mats.
The boy let out a muffled groan, shivering so violently his teeth chattered in the gloom.
I turned toward the captain without shifting my stance.
“Who is he?”
“His name is Joram, a linen weaver in the lower parish,” Thorne answered, drawing two green glass bottles sealed with black pitch from his pouch.
“We found him hiding these flasks beneath the floorboards of his loom when my patrol began searching the block. He was carrying three silver coins without an Asterian mint mark and refused to declare where the liquid came from.”
Thorne set the bottles onto Iven’s table with a loud thud.
“It’s the same mixture we’re looking for. Smells of resin and prohibited chemicals. I propose we transfer him to the east tower cells immediately for formal interrogation before his accomplices clear out the rest of the workshop.”
I walked over to the kneeling boy.
I crouched beside him, resting a hand on his trembling shoulder. Through the rough wool of his doublet, I felt the frantic hammer of his pulse, the smell of stale sweat, oatmeal, and raw panic.
There was no Alpha scent signature in his blood, none of the territorial arrogance of a Gray Tide conspirator. He was an ordinary Beta, worn thin by labor at the loom and terrified by the shadow of uniforms.
“Look at me, Joram,” I said quietly.
The boy raised his face slowly. His eyes were red and swollen from weeping, a bleeding scrape across his left cheek where Thorne’s gauntlet had caught him.
“My lord… By the river spirits, I swear on my mother’s memory… I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“What’s in those bottles?”
“It’s marshmallow root syrup and apple brandy, sir,” the boy sobbed, swallowing hard.
“My little sister has had the winter cough for a month now. She spits blood in the mornings, and the village apothecary charged me three coins for the brew. I hid it under the floorboards because the soldiers were smashing jars in my neighbor’s house, and I was afraid they’d take the girl’s medicine. ”
I looked at Iven.
The royal physician had already unstopped one of the bottles. He dipped the tip of a glass rod into the dark liquid, sniffed it carefully, and touched the sample with a drop of potash reagent on a porcelain plate.
The mixture didn’t change color.
“Common expectorant syrup,” Iven pronounced, glancing at Thorne with barely concealed disdain. “Beet sugar, marshmallow root, and cider alcohol. No lead, no juniper alkaloids, and no peat-bog resin.”
I straightened slowly, fixing my gaze on the captain of the guard.
“Cut the rope, Thorne.”
The officer didn’t move at once. A flicker of defiance tightened his jaw.
“My lord, the security protocol approved by the Council authorizes the preventive detention of anyone concealing uninventoried substances during an emergency search.”
“The health protocol is mine to dictate, Captain,” I replied, lowering my voice until every syllable rang like drawn steel.
“And it does not authorize you to beat innocent weavers or confiscate medicine from a sick child. Cut the rope and write this boy a transit pass before I decide to relieve you of vanguard command.”
Thorne pressed his lips thin in muted fury, drew his service dagger, and sliced through the hemp at Joram’s wrists with a single clean cut.
“You can go, lad,” I told the weaver, taking his arm to help him to his feet. “Take your bottles and go home. No soldier will cross your threshold again as long as this camp stands.”
The boy gathered his medicines with shaking hands, offered an awkward bow that nearly sent him tumbling into the stove, and bolted from the tent as though he had just slipped the jaws of a predator.
When the door flap fell shut again, the silence inside the tent hung thick and heavy.
Thorne remained by the exit, hand resting on the pommel of his sword, eyes pinned to the ground.
“The Council of Elders will not look kindly on the sovereign releasing suspects without an endorsement from the royal clerk, Darian. Lord Odran sent a messenger this morning demanding concrete results. Houses Karr and Sarr are threatening to pull their supply wagons if the guard doesn’t produce culprits before the end of the week. ”
“Odran can lodge his grievances before the full Council when we return to Asteria,” I replied, turning my back on him to study the district map.
“My duty isn’t to hand him peasants’ heads to justify his marriage schemes.
My duty is to find the source of the poison that nearly killed a woman before four hundred witnesses in the citadel. ”
Iven stepped up to the field table, bringing a small walnut box where he kept the samples tested over the past three days in the river hamlets.
“Darian,” the physician said under his breath, drawing me away from Thorne. “You need to see this.”
I walked over to the side table.
Iven opened the box and took out a white ceramic jar, sealed with an old cork stopper bound in rusted wire.
“This sample was seized yesterday afternoon in an abandoned charcoal-burners’ hut, two leagues north of the birch tree line,” he explained, pouring a drop of brown residue onto a paper strip soaked in litmus tincture.
“The base is a cheap household suppressant, concocted from oak ash and bitter willow bark.”
“Like the others,” I said.
“Not like the others,” Iven corrected, bringing an oil lamp near the paper strip. “The proportion of lead acetate and copper salts in this jar is identical, down to the last fraction of a grain, to the residue we extracted from the collar’s broken plate in the east tower laboratory.”
A cold jolt struck my chest, followed by a rush of heat that pulled the muscles along my spine rigid.
“The same batch?” I asked.
“The same batch and the same maker,” Iven stated firmly. “Whoever compounded the doses that woman took for years on the plateau wasn’t buying them on the docks of Asteria. She was buying them in this district. Less than three leagues from where this tent is pitched.”
I looked down at the map spread across the table.
The birch tree line, the charcoal-burners’ hut, the winding course of the Siel River, and farther east, atop the rolling farmland overlooking the valley, the red-ink outline of the Valen estate.
Liora was there.
Every nerve in my body, every instinct of my primal wolf that had stayed wakeful and vigilant since Solstice night, told me the quarry wasn’t running for the northern peaks or hiding in the holds of coastal smugglers.
She was in her own home, trapped between whoever had forced that poison on her for years and the cordon of my own soldiers.
I reached into the inner pocket of my tunic, brushing through the wool against the cool, rounded shape of the quartz vial where I kept her pure scent.
“Rain on warm stone. River flower. Sea salt.”
I remembered Iven’s clinical warning in the tower: lead poisoning was cumulative and lethal, and the blocker’s collapse called for urgent chelation before her glands suffered irreversible atrophy.