14
Chapter
One More Dose
Liora
The tolling of the bells from Saint Jude’s parish shifted rhythm on the morning of Day Fifty-Six.
They were no longer the slow, spaced peals of the blizzard days, but three sharp double strikes, metallic and urgent, echoing against the slate roofs of the plateau to announce that the royal guard column had crossed the bridge over the Siel River and was advancing toward the borders of our land.
Maevra didn’t wait for couriers from the district council to reach the main gate.
By eight in the morning, the entire house was steeped in the soot-tinged reek of three hearths blazing at once. My stepmother had ordered out the fine pewter tableware, the carded wool hangings for the guest wing, and the white linen tablecloths used only during Michaelmas harvests.
“I don’t want to see a single speck of dust on the entry stairs!
” she shouted from the landing, hair gathered into a black velvet coif and a silk apron tied over her finest wool gown.
“Celene, go down and see that the stable hands have laid clean straw in the courtyard mangers. If the Lord of the Crown chooses to quarter his senior staff at this estate, no officer from Asteria will say House Valen does not know how to receive a sovereign.”
I was kneeling on the floor of the herb store, down in the damp cellar behind the potato pantry.
The cold down there hung thick and clammy.
I leaned my back against the boards of a worm-eaten shelf, breathing slowly through my mouth.
My sense of smell, deadened for more than two weeks by the chemical sear of Soren’s resin, was beginning to wake with painful violence—not as clean, orderly perception, but as a barrage of disjointed sensations hammering my temples.
I could smell the rust on the wall nails, rancid grease from the mousetraps, the lime dust sifting down from the rafters, and above all, the stinging acidity seeping from my own neck.
I touched the base of my jaw with trembling fingers.
The lateral glands were hot, swollen like two hard beans beneath the taut skin.
Without the suppressants Maevra had locked away over three weeks ago, my human body was losing the battle against Omega blood. With every heartbeat, a sweet, salty note—like rainwater on warm stone and river flowers—fought to force its way through my pores.
If Darian Corven walks through that door tomorrow and I smell like this, he won’t need hounds or laboratory reagents, I thought, a jolt of panic turning my stomach cold. He’ll know the moment he sets foot in the hall.
I rummaged through the bottom of an old wicker chest, where my mother had stored discarded clay jars and bundles of chamomile from three summers ago.
My fingers struck a rusted pipe-tobacco tin, buried beneath a wad of moldering tow.
I pried it open with my thumbnail.
At the bottom of the tin lay three tablets of household suppressant, forgotten there for at least four years.
Moisture had degraded the compound: the grayish surface of the pills showed hairline cracks crusted in a whitish bloom of lead and sulfur salts, giving off a pungent stench of slaked lime and horse urine that turned my stomach with a dry heave.
They were pure poison.
A filthy, rancid, expired concoction that under any other circumstances would have ruined my liver in less than twelve hours.
I lifted one of the pills between two fingers.
The logic of fear—the cowardly voice six years of servitude had hammered into my skull—urged me to shove the whole pill into my mouth, wash it down with a gulp of ice water, and force my wolf into silence at any cost, even if it meant days of retching black bile in the attic.
I brought the pill to my lips.
Inside me, the wolf stirred with a low snarl, clawing against my sternum in desperate fury, refusing to be buried once more beneath a slab of rusted lead.
I froze in the dim cellar, my hand arrested in midair.
I remembered dragging myself through the drifts toward the charcoal-burners’ hut, the taste of blood and ash in my mouth, the searing agony of a fractured shift.
If I keep killing myself so they suspect nothing, there won’t be anything left of me by spring.
It was the first time in my life I refused to obey terror.
I picked up a sharp shard of slate from the floor, set the tablet on an oak beam, and shaved it down with care, carving away barely a quarter of the whole—a tiny crumb no larger than a hemp seed.
With the slate’s edge, I quartered the remaining tablets and wrapped each piece separately.
I would never swallow a full dose again.
If I had to blunt my scent during the hours of an inspection, I would take the smallest possible amount at daybreak and let the effect run out before touching another.
I set the scrap on my tongue.
The taste was foul: a blend of bitter chalk, ash, and rancid metal that instantly numbed the lining of my mouth, leaving a coppery taint down my throat.
I stepped out into the rear yard and walked over to the well curb.
The north wind whined through the leafless willows with a sharp whistle, kicking up fine flurries that clung to the mossy stones.
I turned the wooden crank, dropping the zinc bucket down into the dark water. The hemp rope, stiff with frost, scraped my palms as the pail rose dripping clear, dark water.
I drank two long swallows, letting the freezing cold wash the bitter powder into my gut.
I waited five minutes, forehead resting against the damp wood of the wellhead.
The effect was not the violent blackout of a full dose.
It was a muted dampening: the throb in my temples eased back, the swelling in my glands subsided enough to stem the outward leak of scent, and the wolf inside my chest was not suffocated in the dark. She remained there—still, watchful, and alive, curled into the shadow of my ribs.
And right then, the rush of heat that had struck my chest over past days—that bodily tug pulling me toward the highway—settled into a strange calm, a steady, measured pulse traveling down my arms like a sentinel’s vigil.
The bond didn’t answer to desperation or apothecaries’ drugs.
It answered to the physical truth of my own body.
In the middle of the afternoon on Day Fifty-Seven, I went out to the stables carrying a bale of dry hay for the dapple-gray horse.
Barek sat on a low stool, oiling the leather harness with a blend of tallow and beeswax. The old stable hand’s fingers were gnarled with chilblains, his watery eyes fixed on the paddock gate.
I dropped the hay into the manger and stepped over to him.
“Barek,” I said quietly.
The old man didn’t look up from the girth, but his fingers halted on the iron buckle.
“The sovereign’s guard is at the mill, girl. The post-riders say Lord Corven rides at the head of two companies and trusts none of the bailiffs’ reports.”
“I know,” I answered, kneeling beside him to take up a clean rag. “Maevra wants to offer them the east wing quarters.”
Barek gave a dry snort through his nose, a bitter huff smelling of leaf tobacco and aged leather.
“Your stepmother thinks she can buy off a primal wolf with a feather bed and three flagons of spiced wine. She doesn’t understand what a lord of Vhal is.
I saw Darian’s father when he came down to the plateau twenty years ago.
He looked neither at tapestries nor silver cups.
He looked at corners, at stables, and at men who lowered their eyes when he rode past.”
The old hand glanced at me sidelong, with a sharpness that tightened my chest.
“If things go sour tomorrow, Liora… If soldiers start forcing doors and rounding up the servants in the yard, don’t linger in the kitchen.
The back gate of the paddock has a latch broken by frost. Shove the wood, slip into the irrigation ditch, and in three hundred paces you’re inside the birch woods. ”
I tightened my fingers around the leather rag.
“I’m not running into the woods, Barek.”
“You barely came back alive last time,” the old man murmured, dropping his voice to a rough whisper. “I saw you crawl in on the night of the hard freeze. Oria thinks no one noticed, but I saw the blood in the snow by the woodshed.”
I met his eyes, holding his gaze with steady gratitude.
“If I run, Maevra will burn the will and sell the land before winter ends. This estate belongs to my mother. If I have to defend it before the sovereign of Eryndor, I’ll do it standing in this yard.”
Barek nodded slowly, went back to rubbing the leather of the girth, and didn’t speak another word.
Day Fifty-Eight broke under a low, leaden sky, a freezing drizzle turning the road into impassable mire.
In the great dining hall, Celene was trying on for the third time the dark blue wool gown trimmed in ermine that Maevra had ordered altered on urgent notice.
“The sleeves are too tight at the wrists, Mother,” she complained, studying herself in the three-paneled glass while Oria pinned the hem with pearl-headed needles. “If I have to pour the sovereign’s welcome cup with stiff arms, I’ll look like a valley peasant.”
Maevra sat at the long table, reviewing for the fifth time the provisions list and the estate’s property deeds.
“Lord Corven will not be looking at your wrists, Celene. He will look at your bloodline, the composure of your bearing, and the loyalty this house can offer the Crown. Land Steward Barel confirmed that the command post advances to the Three Eyes Mill today. Tomorrow before noon, we will have the guard in this yard.”
The woman looked up and saw me enter carrying a basket of holm-oak firewood for the parlor hearth.
“Liora.”
I stopped in my tracks, holding the basket with both hands.
“My lady?”
Maevra rose slowly, walked toward me, and stopped two paces away.
Her chest expanded in a measured inhale, testing the air for any trace of the acidity that had alarmed her days before.
My shoulders didn’t move. I met her gaze with the practiced docility of someone who has nothing to hide.