“This is not a simple thing,” Hannah said sternly. “It seems simple to you because you’ve been doing this your whole life. But this is complicated. We just haven’t landed on the right solution yet.”

“Maybe.” Wren dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I don’t know what else to try.”

“You have a thousand of those little bottles in your bag. You’re only using half of it to make these medications.”

She did have a point. If no one or nothing could give her the answers she sought, maybe she could find it using what she had on hand. It would be wasteful of time and resources to combine things randomly, but what other choice did she have?

Wren opened her medical bag and emptied it onto the bed. Out tumbled the leather case that housed her surgical tools, a bag full of syringes, and a menagerie of glass bottles filled with tinctures and medications and herbs. One vial, filled to the brim with purple flowers, rolled toward her.

The goddessblood she’d taken from the Guiding Light Inn.

Wren stared at it for a long time. Symptoms of goddessblood poisoning included attacks on the heart, the kidneys, the lungs—symptoms that matched Hal’s. The chances of matching the poison were laughably slim, but it was all she had. “Hannah?”

“Yes?”

“Can you do me a favor when you’re finished with that?” She dug gloves out of the pile and snapped them on. “Can you bring me some boiling water?”

“Of course.” Hannah worked as meticulously as ever, corking the tincture and pouring hot wax over it to seal it shut. After she placed it alongside the rest of the bottles she’d finished this evening, she slipped out of the room to fetch the water. A few minutes later, she returned with a kettle, still roiling.

Wren emptied the goddessblood and some water into a mortar, then ground the petals until they reduced to a liquid as dark as blood. Brewing a poison was as foreign as it was satisfying. It was all passion and imprecision, mixed with equal parts intention and rage. Her apprenticeship, meanwhile, had instilled in her a slavishness, a fastidiousness. She could close her eyes and feel Heloise there at her elbow, rapping a switch against the table while she measured out herbs by the gram.

Do you want to cure your patient or kill them? Heloise once hissed after Wren used far too much St. John’s wort in a medicinal blend. You must always consider the contraindications.

But this excessiveness—it felt good. Almost natural.

Wren strained the poison into a vial. It swirled behind the glass, strikingly beautiful. The color of a winter night set ablaze with stars. Hannah leaned closer. “It’s … pretty.”

“Don’t get too close.” Wren held up a hand. “It’s dangerous.”

Her eyes grew round. “What is it?”

“It’s, uh … a very experimental tincture. Unstable.”