My arm whipped forward, dislodging the cup from her hands. The earthen bowl fell to the ground, shattering into pieces.

“Tea?” Khalad rushed forward at the sound, and Kalen turned from his cooking. “What’s wrong?”

“Don’t drink that!” I staggered to my feet.

“What—”

I delved. The rune stood, bleeding red, in the air. Likh’s jaw dropped.

“All this time we’d wondered if the Blight rune affected silver heartsglass worse than it did others. We thought we were watching what we ate and drank. We were wrong.” Shaking, I upended the contents of my bowl on the ground, liquid sloshing everywhere. I felt sick to my stomach, my appetite gone. “Likh, how long have you been drinking this?”

The poor girl was shaking. Khalad pulled her closer, and she all but collapsed against his chest. “Ever since we left Kion. Althy told me to take it every day, that it would be good for long journeys, especially now that I’d been blighted…”

I remembered Kance, the headaches and pain plaguing him in the days before his engagement to Inessa had been announced. How his father’s death gave him the peace to chase them away; how he stopped drinking the herbs after that. Who had brewed his tea, during those long months?

Hadn’t I been drinking her concoctions as well? Strange dreams and visions had swirled my days together. Dreams that made me want to jump from high Isteran towers, that taught me how Kion should burn. Nightmares that drew my knife into my hands and stabbed my sister with my anger. Those nightmares had lessened after leaving Kion, but I had prepared my own herbs by hand since then.

Had Kance been blighted during those months as well? Was it a last resort, an unfulfilled threat?

I was wrong. I must be wrong. I would give up almost everything, not to be right.

“Tea.” Kalen’s face was strained. “Surely you don’t think…”

“I don’t know what to think. But you need to take the runic wards off me, Kalen. We need answers, and there’s only one person I know who can give us them now.”

The Compulsion dissolved around us, but the soldiers had learned their lessons and dared not approach.

“You didn’t believe me about Daisy,” the bone witch said, breathing hard. “You would not have believed me had I told you the truth about Altaecia. Why would you? I had no proof. Khalad knew then, but Altaecia only arrived back at Kion after he had left for Daanoris. She claimed to have visited Odalian villages, it seems—a deliberate ploy. It was my word against hers, and of the two of us, she was not the known kinslayer, not the renegade bone witch. Altaecia was clever, treating my mind with ills and humors until I questioned even myself.”