Now she understood. The soil had not healed her. It had marked her. A seed, planted in childhood, waiting fourteen years for rain. The contamination had not invaded her. It had returned to her, like a debt called due.
It always had.
None of them would be wrong.
Not poison. Not plague. Something older. The royal physician, a thin man named Alberic who smelled of camphor and failure, pricked her finger and watched the blood pool in the glass vial. It did not clot. Instead, it moved. Slow, deliberate, as if tasting the air. He dropped the vial. It shattered. The blood crawled across the marble floor toward a dead mouse in the corner.
Elara dismissed him. She was wrong to do so.
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