The inn was indeed entirely empty. The silence unnerved her, as if the storm had frozen over the entire world. Earlier, she had wandered the hallway and paused outside each door. Nobody stirred within any of the rooms. Nobody made a sound. Still, she felt watched.

Even now.

When the crawling sensation became too much to bear, she rose from the armchair and descended into the lobby. Pulling her traveling cape tightly around herself, Wren slipped out the back door. White-barked maples and sturdy evergreens clung to the rock faces, and all around her were pale mountains as far as she could see.

A short walk through the grounds presented her with a fenced-in garden half buried in snow. The owners must have been ambitious gardeners, because it was stranger and more beautiful than any she had encountered, with colorful flowers growing in iron cages like captive finches. At the gate, a skull painted onto a wooden sign glared at her with peeling black sockets.

Its meaning was clear: keep out, danger. But Wren couldn’t resist going in. Snooping in a Cernosian poison garden was far too good an opportunity for any healer to pass up. What Cernos lacked in magic, it made up for in harsh landscape and even harsher flora.

Wren pushed open the gate, the cold, unforgiving metal stinging her palms. She paced the neat garden rows, each marked with a plaque. There was deadly nightshade and autumn crocus, celandine and chinaberry, goldenseal and honeysuckle, hemlock and yew. And there, at the center, was a tangle of goddessblood pushing through a thin layer of snow. Wren crouched beside it and admired the membranous blue-violet petals bowing reverently over their stalks.

Goddessblood figured prominently in Danubian myths. It was said that the Goddess loved a man once. One night, he cut one of her three heads from her neck while she slept. What he did not know was that she could not die from a wound. Goddessblood sprouted from the pool of her blood, growing deadly in the succor of her bitterness and sorrow at the man’s betrayal. In Cernos, however, this plant meant something else entirely. A warning to the rest of the world.

A few months ago, Wren had read a write-up of the world exhibition of arts and sciences in the paper. Cernos had showcased a gas laced with essence of goddessblood. While Cernos had never seen war due to its impassable mountains and carefully maintained neutrality, Wren could understand taking precautions. Her heart twisted when she remembered the account of the lab rats they’d tested it on, dead within seconds. On humans, it would likely only take a minute or two more. Unless someone developed an antidote.