“Ah, good,” he said. “Welcome to my office, Lad—”

“Just Bri,” she cut in, hooking her thumb at Carys. “And Carys. We’re not interested in courtly titles.” Lady Catullus was her mother, someone she had no desire to be associated with, especially in these parts.

“Right,” Cole said with a nod. “I thought you’d be interested to see this.”

Carys sauntered into the room and leaned against the far rack of jars.

The brown witch’s office was a cluttered space, filled with shelves of baskets and opaque jars. Drying herbs hung above a dresser of numbered drawers. The workbench took up the bulk of the room. Mortars and pestles, jars of oils, and metal instruments covered the surface in haphazard piles.

Bri swallowed back the odd mixture of overpowering herbal scents on her tongue and ambled over to the far side of the workbench. She narrowed her eyes at the stack of fine silverware piled in the center of the table.

“Is that the silverware from the night of the Queen’s murder?” Carys’s eyebrows shot up. “How can someone poison metal?”

Cole adjusted his golden spectacles. “You see this fork?” He gestured to it with the long tweezers in his hand. “Do you notice it’s different from this one?”

Bri looked between the two forks lying side by side. She pointed to the one under the magnifying glass. “That one looks like it’s in need of a polish.”

The cutlery appeared dulled, as if a soapy film had dried on it.

“These were the ones set out the night of the Queen’s murder.” Cole pointed to the dulled ones. “According to the staff, they had just been shined. Watch this.”

Using his tweezers, he plucked a green leaf from a potted plant beside him. Carefully, he wiped the leaf along the handle of the fork and then held it up to the light. Bri’s eyes widened as the green leaf shriveled, disintegrating into blackened sand.

“Gods, is that what happened to the Queen?” Carys sucked in a tight breath.

“Internally, yes,” Cole said, his lips thinning. “I examined one of the bodies. Their veins had turned black.” His pale face drained of color as he looked at them and then back at his tweezers. “It wasn’t as quick as this either.”

“Gods,” Carys whispered. “How long did it take?”

“Half an hour.”

“Shit,” Bri growled. Her stomach churned at the thought of that poison burning through their victims’ veins for so long before it finally killed them.

“The attackers were flooding through the palace.” His voice trembled and he cleared his throat. “I couldn’t get to the Queen. I don’t think any of my antidotes would have worked, though. All the poisons I know of are ingested. This one seems to be absorbed through the skin.”

He swapped out his tweezers for calipers and picked up a scrap of fabric. He rubbed it down the handle of a dulled knife.

“It is the strangest thing. It doesn’t seem to transfer to other materials.” Cole wiped the cloth onto another leaf of the potted plant. They watched, but the leaf didn’t shrivel. “Something about how the metal mixes with the poison . . . seems to only work on living organisms.” He lifted the cloth and sniffed it. “It has an odd scent too. Kind of sweet.” He shook his head, setting the cloth back on the table. “But whatever it is, it’s magical. Can you feel it?”