Mia grabbed it off her, seized a kitchen knife and pried the mirror’s frame away. Taking the blade to the back of the glass, she began furiously shaving away the reflective layer of silver nitrate, gleaming flakes of metal spilling onto the kitchen bench. Maggot coughed again, head lolling on her shoulders as if her neck were broken.
“Crow, she’s stopped breathing!” Magistrae cried.
“Maggot, don’t you die on me!” Mia shouted over her shoulder.
She gathered the flakes of nitrate, crushed them to powder with a mortar and pestle. Shoving Finger aside again, she added the powder to the boiling concoction on the stove, the scent of burning metal in the air. She looked over her shoulder, saw Maggot convulsing in Leona’s arms. Prayers to the Black Mother, the Four Daughters, whoever was listening spilling over her lips.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please please please…”
It was ready, the concoction set. Mia scooped a healthy dose into a clay-cup, turned to the girl behind her. Maggot was pale as death, still as a millpond. The dona’s eyes were wide, her nightshift and hands spattered in the girl’s blood.
“Take a cupful to everyone affected,” she told Finger. “The unconscious ones first. Make them drink at least three mouthfuls, take a funnel if you have to, go go!”
Mia wrangled Maggot from Leona’s arms, breathing quick. Laying the girl on her back, Mia wiped the bloody foam from Maggot’s lips, forced her mouth open. Holding the cup in steady hands, she poured a goodly dose into the girl’s mouth.
“Swallow it, baby,” she whispered, massaging her throat. “Swallow.”
Maggot wasn’t listening. She surely wasn’t swallowing. Mia pulled her up to sitting position, the antidote spilling from the little girl’s lips. Leona and Magistrae helped prop up Maggot between them, and tilting her head back, Mia poured more of the draft into her open mouth.
“Swallow, Maggot,” she begged. “Please.”
Mia massaged the girl’s throat, shook her gently. Maggot wasn’t responding, wasn’t moving, wasn’t breathing. Hanging limp in their arms like some broken doll. The Blade in her had seen all this before. But the girl in her, the girl who looked at Maggot and saw a pale reflection of herself, she refused to believe it. Praying for some miracle, like in the books she used to read as a child. Some prince to ride in on a silver charger to wake Maggot with a kiss. Some fae godmother with her pockets full of magik and wishes to spare.
Mia felt hot tears in her eyes, a crushing weight on her shoulders. A scream was building in her belly, but her voice was only a whisper.
“Please, baby.”
“It’s funny, but when you take a person out of the world, you don’t just take them, do you?”
Leona looked at Mia, eyes wide with shock, tears spilling down her cheeks.
“… Crow?”
“You take everything they were, too.”
“Please,” Mia begged.
“Do you ever think about that?”
The cup slipped from Mia’s fingers, shattered on the floor.
Do you ever think about that?
CHAPTER 27
SEVERING
Mia couldn’t remember the last time she really cried.
She’d spilled a tear or two here and there along the road, but it was never the primal kind of grief. The kind where the sobs are being torn out of you, shaking you to your bones and leaving you hollowed out inside. She hadn’t cried when she failed her initiation. Hadn’t cried when Ashlinn murdered Tric. Hadn’t cried when the Ministry said a quiet mass and sealed the boy in an empty tomb in the Hall of Eulogies.
She wasn’t very good with grief, you see.
Mia preferred rage instead.
She stood in the infirmary over Maggot’s lifeless body, belly knotted with fury. The girl’s hair had been combed, the blood wiped from her face. She looked almost as if she were asleep. Otho lay beside her, just as peaceful. The big Itreyan’s eyes were closed, the lines of care that had creased his features as he fought upon the sands now smoothed away.
It was a miracle only two of them had died—as if “only” had a place anywhere in that thought. Maggot was simply too small, and had imbibed too much toxin. Otho was a grown man, strong as an ox. But he’d wolfed his entire meal down and been on the way for seconds before the effects kicked in, and by then, it was too late. More of the Falcons would have succumbed—all, in fact—if Mia hadn’t been there. She supposed whoever poisoned their meal wasn’t expecting a trained assassin to be on hand to boil up the antidote. As it was, most of the gladiatii suffered varying degrees of internal hemorrhaging, but the remedy she’d mixed had saved them all from death.
Almost all, anyway …
Fang lay on a bloodstained blanket, the dog’s eyes forever closed. Executus had almost wept when he found the mastiff curled up in a pool of blood on the infirmary floor. He sat beside Fang now, running one callused hand over the dog’s flanks. His fingers were shaking. From anger or grief, Mia couldn’t tell.
“How in the Everseeing’s name did this happen?” Leona demanded, looking over the bodies with her hands on her hips.
“Simply enough,” Mia murmured, eyes never leaving Maggot’s body. “Somebody dosed the onions in the pantry with Elegy, and Finger used them in the stew. Onion is porous, acts like a sponge. And the smell and flavor does a fine job of masking the toxin’s. Good delivery method. The killer knew what they were doing.”
Leona turned to Finger. The cook stood trembling between two houseguards, steel grips on both his arms. His lank hair hung over his eyes, his body shaking.
“What do you know of this?” the dona asked.
“N-nothing, Domina,” the cook replied. “I serve you faithfully!”
“Any snake would hiss the same,” Leona snarled.
Finger shook his head, his voice shaking.
“Domina, I … Ever you’ve treated me well and fair. I’ve no cause to harm your flock. Nor would I ever hurt the lass. She was like kin to me. I served the meal to her with my own hands.” Tears filled his eyes, snot at his lips as he looked to Maggot’s lifeless corpse. “You think me cold enough to look in her eyes and smile as I p-passed the blade that would end her?”
The man’s chest heaved, face twisting as tears spilled down his cheeks.
“Never. By the Everseeing and all his Daughters, never.”
Leona’s eyes narrowed, but she could see it in his face, plain as Mia. His thin frame trembling. Eyes swimming with grief. Either Finger was an actor worthy of the greatest theater in all the Republic, or the man was genuinely gutted at Maggot’s death.
“Who had means to get into the larder?” Leona asked.
Finger pawed his eyes, sniffled hard. “Anyone with access to the keep could get to the provisions, Domina. They’re not locked of a nevernight … I-I’d have kept them with more care, but I had n-no inkling a serpent lived among us.”
“Nor I,” Leona said. “But I’ve suckled one at my breast, sure and true.”
“Elegy isn’t easy to make,” Mia said. “Dangerous. Messy. But in a city as big as Crow’s Rest, there’s bound to be a way to buy it, if you’ve the coin.”
“And how do you know this, exactly?” Arkades growled.