Page 24

T he villagers prod me into the luminarium, and a familiar fear claws at my chest. It’s the fear I thought I’d left behind after the first outbreak—only now, it’s worse. Stronger. It slams into me like a wave, cold and suffocating.

The stench of sweat hits first, followed by the low moans of patients rolling on straw mats.

Steam from boiling herbs hangs thick in the air, failing to mask the decay.

My eyes sweep over a dozen bodies, each one a stark reminder of Kastoria’s horrors.

Last time, I barely made it through—with magic. Now I’m here again, without it.

Silver-beard barks and Olyn rises from needling a patient. Her tired gaze hits mine over the sea of sick and relief bleeds out in her long sigh.

She crosses the luminarium and speaks calmly with the men who captured me, who also hand over sacks of herbs. Once the sacks are sorted, she grabs me by the wrist with a trembling hand and hauls me outside. “Cael... I begged the heavens for help, and now you’re here. This has to mean hope.”

Hope... I glance back at the luminarium, my chest tightening. We thought this was over, but now... “It’s the same, isn’t it? But worse.”

Her nails dig into my sleeve as she nods. “These families—they’re from remote mountain villages.”

“Why not go to the capital? There are vitalians there.”

“They think we have a cure,” she says, her voice breaking. “They’re desperate. And when the scriptions don’t work—” She swallows hard. “They think we’re lying. That we’re hoarding cures—or worse, spreading it ourselves.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“They’re sick and terrified, Cael. People don’t think clearly when they’re scared. And...”

She hesitates, her voice dropping. “They’re not entirely wrong to be suspicious.”

My breath catches. “What do you mean?”

She points at herself, her expression taut with worry. “I’ve been in that luminarium for days, right beside them. Breathing the same air, touching the same patients. And I’m not getting sick.”

Her words send a chill down my spine. My grandfather’s journals flash through my mind. “Those who aren’t getting sick... are they the ones who survived the first time?”

Olyn’s brow furrows. Slowly, she nods. “Yes. Most of them. Now some are being held hostage...” She trails off, her face pale in the moonlight .

“Where are the vespertines when you need them?”

I expect her to say they’re busy, spread thin across Kastoria helping the weak—but instead, she grimaces. “Half of them are hostages. It was an ambush. Poison.”

“Bastion?”

She shakes her head. “He left the day before to get more information in the capital.”

I grimace, but she’s not finished yet.

“For every death they suffer,” she continues, “they’ve killed one of ours.”

I slam a fist against the tree trunk. Fear might be the most frightening effect of all.

I glance at the luminarium, where those dying patients are waiting and will take healthy ones with them.

There is no time to get angry. This sickness is only going to keep spreading. “How many fall sick each day?”

Olyn shudders. “A dozen today. But it’s doubling every day.”

Doubling.

I grip the trunk so hard splinters sink into my palm, but I don’t care.

I can’t look past the horror of that number.

Horror—and nauseating guilt. To win against the Wyrd army, we faked a plague.

We toyed with fear like it was a game. We tricked people into believing the poxies would spread. We used terror to win a war.

And now? This sinister sickness is real. It’s spreading faster than we ever imagined.

Is this the price of our deceit? The consequence of our deception? Our punishment ?

My impersonation of one with Lindrhalda’s touch, my idea to mimic plague—had it all tempted the gods?

My stomach clenches so violently I double over, bile burning the back of my throat. I brace a hand against the luminarium wall, swallowing hard to keep from heaving.

Olyn whips out her needles and presses them into three acupoints, relieving the sickness in my stomach but not the one in my heart.

“This is bad, isn’t it?” she murmurs.

“If there’s sickness here,” I say on a thick swallow, “It’ll be elsewhere. This will spiral exponentially out of hand.” I shove myself towards the luminarium, rolling up my sleeves. “Let’s take a look; ease symptoms where we can. At dawn, we leave.”

“Leave? We can’t leave.”

I meet her eye firmly. “If we don’t, we may not save anyone.”

The night stretches on in fevered whispers and dying breaths. When dawn breaks, frost glazes the luminarium’s dome, and in the distance three towers of smoke plume towards the heavens. A sharpened scythe halts an inch from my throat.

The farmer gripping it has skin shining like turquoise shells and yellowed eyes burning with fever. Behind him, more block the way, their cracked nails scraping against wood, against their own arms, against each other.

The metal at my throat is cold. I don’t move.

“Where do you think you’re going?” the farmer demands, voice raw.

Olyn grips my sleeve. I don’t dare let my hands tremble.

“We won’t find a solution sitting here,” I say, measured but firm. “We need to see the villages where you came from.”

“One of us will escort you.”

“No.”

The tension sharpens and glints like their curved blades. I raise my hands before they think to use the rusting weapons. “You’re sick,” I say quickly. “You’ll infect the healthy. You must remain here at the luminarium.”

They don’t like that. A cough rattles in the air, followed by whispers, then arguments, then nails digging into skin.

In the end, they strip us of everything—our money, our packs, even my dromveske, everything except my healing bag—before stepping aside.

“If you don’t come back by sundown,” the man with the scythe growls, “we’ll kill two more of your lot.”

I bow stiffly, biting back a curse. My fingers twitch toward my belt, where my dromveske should be. Mine. Quin’s . The loss sinks deep, but now isn’t the time to fight for it.

I’ll get the dromveske back. It won’t be long. It can’t be.

The sick and the not-yet-sick are counting on us .

We follow the canals into the river that cleaves through the forest, then race through the woods, the dappled light blueish from a cold dawn. A very cold dawn; I’ve been shivering since I left the boat. I curl my cloak deeper around me.

“This isn’t the most direct route,” Olyn says, pointing to the distant hills and more smoke rising from them.

I don’t slow. “I need something first.”

The ruined fortress looms ahead, blackened stone swallowed by vines. My breath comes quick. He has to be here.

I step carefully over the rubble, my voice cutting through the ruins. “Nicostratus.”

The silence tightens. A cold certainty coils in my chest.

He wouldn’t have left. Not yet.

Not until he knew what had happened to me—

A flash of red. A rush of wind. He lands before me.

For the first time since leaving the luminarium, my chest loosens. Just slightly. Just enough to breathe again.

His expression is unreadable but his gaze drinks me in—whole, unhurt. The tension in his shoulders unwinds, and a slow, quiet sigh escapes him. “You’re unharmed.”

I shiver, not from his concern, but from how very cold it feels. “You’re shielding yourself. Good.”

“I spent a long night meditating,” he says, and there’s more behind the simple statement. More than simply absorbing spiritual power. He’s reflected on how he last used his. Our eyes hold, his dark and wistful and pained. He looks away first. “You fear that sickness. Is it— ”

“Yes.” I snap towards the horse showing its head around a wall. “You have my things. My books. I need them.”

He grabs my shoulder, pulling me back around, his gaze deepening with fright. “A real plague?”

I look over his shoulder at Olyn, patiently waiting for us with a grim smile.

Last night I asked her how many succumb to it.

Her answer had me shuddering. I look at Nicostratus and grimace.

“Have you seen how thick the smoke is coming off the mountains?” He steers his gaze to the distance where four streams funnel into the sky. “There are more and more each day.”

“Burning the dead?”

“The sky will soon turn black.”

“So many?”

“Half might survive.”

Nicostratus rocks back as if struck, his breath catching. His hands flex and curl at his sides, like he’s resisting the urge to grab onto something—anything—to ground himself. “That’ll destroy the kingdom.”

I move past him and search through the saddlebags until I find Grandfather’s journals. There, I also find my other belongings. My soldad. My clasp. I tuck both into my belt with trembling fingers. They pulse in my hand like a heartbeat. Like Quin’s.

I quickly turn when Nicostratus shifts behind me.

He says, “Surely vitalians can—”

“The scriptions we have aren’t working. Vitalians won’t have an answer to this either. ”

I find a broken wall and spread the books out along it, flipping through pages, shivering.

“Surely there’s a cure.” Nicostratus’s shadow lands over my grandfather’s scrawl. “Can’t you find one?”

“You could have all the vitalians in the kingdom work on it, and you may have one in half a year.”

“Half a year! But by then—”

I look up at him. “Exactly. There’s no time for a cure.”

Nicostratus goes very quiet.

I search for the relevant pages, tapping urgently against the paper when I find them.

His broken voice reads a snippet of Grandfather’s words. “Halt the progression.” He looks at me. “How?”

I snap the book shut. “We need to check the villages, now.”

We speak to the sick. We speak to the frightened. We speak to the crying.

A woman clutches a fevered child to her chest, her fingers white from gripping too tightly. “Please, healer—there must be something. Anything.”

A man clings to a doorframe, coughing, red-eyed. “My brother is dead. What do I do now?”

And at the village’s edge, we pay our respects to the burning dead .

We try to get the villagers to wear cloth over the nose and mouth, and we encourage them to remove themselves from their family if they start to feel unwell.

I’m the only one to look after my children and my grandmother. I can’t be sick. I can’t remove myself.

With a heavy heart we ask for directions to the alpine farms and leave them to decide for themselves.

“Why farms?” Olyn asks.

“Because I need to test—” I stop.

A farmer trudges past, boots kicking up dust, eyes wary. “What’dya want?” he growls, stepping away from me. With Nicostratus shielded and Olyn immune, only I have my mouth and nose covered. I can see it makes him uneasy.

“Your animals. Have they caught it too? Which ones are dying? Which ones aren’t?”

“How d’you know some aren’t?”

My heart skips a hopeful beat. “Which is it? Goats? Sheep?”

“All get infected.” He hesitates, scratches the back of his neck, and grudgingly adds, “‘Cept my horses got better fast. The pigs drop like flies. I’ll lose half my yearly taking if this keeps up.”

On a pent breath I step urgently forward. “Let me try and save the healthy ones?”

“Whatcha mean?”

“I’m a healer. I’m looking for a way to help people, but I need to test a theory first. If I’m right, it’ll save your pigs.”

The farmer’s lips thin. “You say you could save the healthy ones?” He hesitates .

“I’ll do my best.”

His face hardens. “Best. So you might harm ‘em?”

My shoulders sag and I grimace. “If so, you’ll be no worse off than you fear now.”

I tell him what I want to do, drawing gasps from Olyn and Nicostratus and a decided shake of the farmer’s head. “Infect the good ‘uns? Get outta here.”

“Listen, please—”

“Off with you! Or I’ll git the constable!”

“This might be the only way. There’s so little time—”

A shadow falls over me.

“Let me try.” Nicostratus’s voice is soft, but the authority in it makes the farmer flinch.

He grips his pitchfork tighter.

“You’d rather lose all your livestock?” Nicostratus murmurs. “Because that’s what will happen.”

I press a hand to his forearm before he can push further. “Go.”

“If you’d just let me—”

“He needs to agree of his own free will. Stay back.”

Nicostratus tries again, pulling at something beneath his cloak, and I push him back this time. No need for swords here.

He grimaces, scowls, and reluctantly returns to Olyn’s side while I try once more to placate the farmer. “You’re a good man. All you want is to protect your animals. I agree with you.”

“Then why’d ya say you’d infect ‘em! Maybe this thing passes. Spares the rest. Won’t have you fir certain killin’ em.”

“What if it saves them? What if this is the only way to spare the rest?”

The farmer hesitates, but his lips are stubbornly firm, like nothing will change his mind. But I try one last time. “Have you heard that Kastoria has very few sick?”

“They’re hoarding the cure!”

“No. Last year, they suffered a variation of this plague. All those who survived have become resistant to this one.”

“Whatcha saying?”

Before I can respond, I’m cut off.

“Pegus!” the cry comes from a middle-aged woman who stops her cart and crosses the dirt road, clutching the loosening fabric binding her hair, her pounding feet stirring up a dust cloud.

The farmer turns and rushes towards her.

The woman clutches the farmers soil-stained shirt. Tears stream down her face and she sobs. “They didn’t make it. The luminists were burned this morning.”

The farmer—Pegus—stiffens, and lets out a guttural cry.

“Them poor little ones, they aren’t sick. They haven’t got it.” She gestures to the cart where two small heads pop up from amongst the hay.

“Let me get rid of this lot, and I’ll help them inside.”

The woman finally notices me and my companions and she swipes at her leaking eyes. “W-who— ”

I step forward, bow my head, and lie. “I’m a royal vitalian. The king has ordered me to stop this plague.”

Pegus hisses. “He wants to test his strange theories on our animals!”

The woman looks from me to her husband and back to me. “A royal vitalian?” Her gaze glimmers with hope. “Prove it.”

I open and shut my mouth. In a flutter of cool air, Nicostratus is once more by my side, showing his royal beads. They immediately gasp and drop into a deep bow for the prince.

“How easy this could have been,” Nicostratus chides softly, and I rub my throbbing head. Indeed. I should have thought. The fear has simply been all-consuming.

The woman scrambles nearer, pleading. “Take all the animals. Just please, find a way to keep us and these children safe.”

It’s from the sun passing behind a cloud. It’s her words, weighted with life and death.

I shiver again.