Chapter 54: Iris and the White Vein

The infirmary smelled of yarrow and rust. Nora pressed a damp cloth to Iris's forearm, watching the white vein pulse under the skin like a worm trying to burrow out. The poison had climbed past Iris's elbow in the three hours since the guards dragged her from the southern gate. Her breathing came in shallow rasps, and her fingers had begun to curl inward. Maeve stood at the foot of the cot with a bowl of crushed feverbark and a look that said she had already counted the hours left. Darius leaned against the door frame, arms crossed, watching the vein move. "She won't last the night," he said. Nora didn't look up. "She'll last until I decide she doesn't need to." Iris laughed, thin as paper. "Still trying to save people who want to burn you. That's why she picked you. That's why she'll never stop." Nora set the cloth aside. "The patron. Tell me where she keeps the nursery." Iris turned her head toward the frost-veiled window. "I'm already dead. The poison just hasn't finished walking through me yet." "Then walk faster," Nora said, "or I'll let the healer drain your blood and bottle it for study." Darius made a low sound--approval or surprise. She didn't turn to read which. Iris's eyes slid back. "You're harder than you were." "I had a child. It changed my priorities." The white vein pulsed, and Iris gasped, back arching off the cot. Maeve stepped forward with the feverbark, but Nora raised a hand. "Wait." "She's seizing," Maeve said. "She's mapping." Nora pointed. The white vein had branched, splitting into tributaries that crawled across Iris's skin like ink through wet paper. The poison was writing something. Iris's voice came out scraped clean. "She built the first nursery under Thornveil. Not the manor. The hill behind it. A door in the rock that only opens when the moon touches the crack at midnight." "Cells," Nora said. "Kept the children in cells cut into the stone. No windows. No heat. Fed them once a day through a slot in the iron. The ones who cried too loud she moved to the deeper chambers, where roots grow through the walls and the air tastes of copper." Nora's stomach turned. She thought of Hope's tiny hand curled against the wool sling. Someone had built this machine while she was still standing in the snow at Blackridge. "How many children does she keep there now?" Iris's eyes were losing focus. "I don't know. Never allowed past the first door. But I heard them. Every night. Singing. She made them sing to her while she worked." "Worked on what?" "The next crown-moon." Iris's lips pulled back. "She's not looking for an heir. She's looking for a replacement. Someone young enough to carry the mark for another hundred years while she finds a way to burn her own body and crawl into a new one." Maeve crossed herself. Darius pushed off the frame and came to stand behind Nora, close enough that she felt his heat but not his touch. Waiting. Nora looked down at Iris's arm. The white vein had stopped. It had traced a shape across the inside of Iris's wrist--three branching lines that curved like roots, meeting at a point below the base of her thumb. A map. "Maeve, bring me the cleanest parchment we have and a pot of black ink." Maeve moved. Darius leaned down, his voice low. "You're going to copy it." "I'm going to memorize it. Then I'm going to burn it. If the poison can write, the patron can read. I won't leave a trail she can follow back to Hope." Darius paused. "You're learning to think like a queen." "I'm learning to think like a mother. It's sharper." Iris's hand twitched. The white vein pulsed one last time, and the skin over her wrist split. Not deep, not bleeding--but the white ink rose to the surface, beading into droplets that traced the map's shape in three dimensions across her flesh. The poison had drawn the path. And now it was written in bone.