When Kiva shook her head slowly, horror beginning to coil within her, Olisha frowned fully and said, “You should know better, dear. With this sickness going around, we need all the help we can get. Not everyone is allergic to goldenroot. You of all people should have been shoving these down the throats of your patients. Not the sick ones—we tried that, and it only made them worse. But the people who come here with wounds or colds or . . . or . . . the healthy ones. They’re the ones we’ve been giving the boosters to, trying to give them a fighting chance. As you should have been doing.” Olisha’s lips pressed together. “I’m disappointed in you, Kiva.”

But Kiva had stopped listening. Instead, she was hearing Cresta’s voice, her accusations from just yesterday: everyone who comes to see you for the smallest thing ends up getting sick—explain that, healer!

Everworld help them.

Kiva knew what was causing the sickness.

Olisha was right—there was goldenroot in the vial, a natural immunity booster.

But Olisha was also wrong, because there wasn’t only goldenroot in the vial.

The smell was still lingering in the back of Kiva’s nose, bitter almonds with a hint of rotting fruit. The spicy goldenroot almost masked it, enough that untrained healers like Olisha and Nergal wouldn’t realize, wouldn’t know.

High fever, dilated pupils, headache, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach rash—they were all symptoms of a stomach sickness. But they were also classic side effects of something else, something that smelled of bitter almonds and rotting fruit.

Wraithweed.

More commonly known as Death’s Embrace.

The immunity booster—it wasn’t medicine.

It was poison.

The prisoners weren’t catching an illness. They were being given one.

“Time to go.”

Kiva spun away from Olisha and toward the infirmary door, the shock of what she’d just realized causing trembles to overtake her body.

“Where’s Naari?” Kiva choked out at the sight of Warden Rooke striding toward her.

The man raised a dark brow. “You’ve become quite familiar with her, haven’t you? Be careful, healer.”

Kiva stared at him, still reeling from what she’d learned. She opened her mouth to tell Rooke, but then saw the guards with him, one who had walked in at his side, and others standing just beyond the doorway and within hearing range. Olisha’s words came to her again: he got them from someone else.