Shivers took one last look at the farm before he followed, shaking his head. There’s nothing worse’n too much plan, that’s true. But too little comes in close behind.

Morveer blinked. “But…” He took a slow step towards Day. His ankle wobbled and he slumped sideways against the table, knocking over a flask and making the fizzing contents spill across the wood. He clutched one hand to his throat, his skin flushing, burning. He knew already what she must have done, the realisation spreading out frigid through his veins. He knew already what the consequences would have to be. “The King…” he rasped, “of Poisons?”

“What else? Caution first, always.”

He grimaced, at the meagre pain of the tiny prick in his arm, and at the far deeper wound of bitter betrayal besides. He coughed, fell forwards onto his knees, one hand stretching, trembling upwards. “But—”

Day kicked his hand away with the toe of one shoe. “Doomed to be misunderstood?” Her face was twisted with contempt. With hatred, even. The pleasing mask of obedience, of admiration, of innocence too, finally dropped. “What do you think there is to understand about you, you swollen-headed parasite? You’re thin as tissue paper!” There was the deepest cut of all—ingratitude, after all he had given her! His knowledge, his money, his… fatherly affection! “The personality of a baby in the body of a murderer! Bully and coward in one. Castor Morveer, greatest poisoner in the world? Greatest bore in the world, maybe, you—”

He sprang forwards with consummate nimbleness, nicked her ankle with his scalpel as he passed, rolled under the table and came up on the other side, grinning at her through the complexity of apparatus, the flickering flames of the burners, the distorting shapes of twisted tubes, the glinting surfaces of glass and metal.

“Ha ha!” He shouted, entirely alert and not dying in the least. “You, poison me? The great Castor Morveer, undone by his assistant? I think not!” She stared down at her bleeding ankle, and then up at him, eyes wide. “There is no King of Poisons, fool!” he cackled. “The method I showed you, that produces a liquid that smells, tastes and looks like water? It makes water! Entirely harmless! Unlike the concoction with which I just now pricked you, which was enough to kill a dozen horses!”

He slipped his hand inside his shirt, deft fingertips unerringly selecting the correct vial and sliding it out into the light. Clear fluid gleamed inside. “The antidote.” She winced as she saw it, made to dive one way around the table then came the other, but her feet were clumsy and he evaded her with negligible effort. “Most undignified, my dear! Chasing each other around our apparatus, in a barn, in the middle of rural Styria! Most terribly undignified!”

“Please,” she hissed at him. “Please, I’ll… I’ll—”

“Don’t embarrass us both! You have displayed your true nature now, you… you ingrate harpy! You are unmasked, you treacherous cuckoo!”

“I didn’t want to take the blame is all! Murcatto said sooner or later you’d go over to Orso! That you’d want to use me as the scapegoat! Murcatto said—”