The chilling clarity of Kaelan’s ultimatum settled over Verena like northern frost. He offered power, but also a noose. Her previous goal—survival—felt too small now, too passive. Simply treating symptoms would never expose the conspiracy. It was time to show the realm a different truth.
“Your offer is generous, Duke Kaelan,” Verena began, her voice steady despite the adrenaline firing through her veins. “Full access, a workspace, staff. But what if the plague isn’t merely a contamination of food, or even an ordinary malady? What if it is an engineered poison?”
Kaelan’s dark brows furrowed. “An engineered poison? It is real enough for my infantry to rot from the inside out.”
“Indeed,” Verena conceded, stepping closer to the steaming pot. “Yet its mechanism remains hidden. Your chirurgeons treat the surface, soothing pain without halting progression. To find a countermeasure, we must look beneath the skin.”
She met his gaze directly. “I require a body, Duke. A recent casualty of the Gravefrost pestilence. And permission to dissect it.”
Silence hung between them, broken only by the crackle of a distant brazier. Kaelan’s features turned to iron. “You speak of violating the honored dead, Rostova. Such an act is anathema in the North. The spirit must pass unblemished to the Veil.”
“And if the Veil is already tainted by this scourge, Duke?” Verena pressed. “If this affliction is an alchemical strike aimed at destroying the realm, would you not seek every means to unmask your enemy? Even if it requires challenging ancient dogma?”
He watched her, a predator assessing its prey, but with an unexpected curiosity in his eyes. “You speak with great certainty for a woman who has only witnessed a few days of this plague.”
“And your court healers have watched for years, yet they still smear salves that accelerate putrefaction,” Verena retorted, recalling her discovery in the sickroom. “The old ways fail, Duke. Let new eyes examine old problems. I can prove this is no natural rot, nor any divine curse.”
Kaelan pressed his lips thin. The chance of stopping the pestilence warring against deep-seated tradition. “Very well,” he said, the words drawn like nails from oak. “Secrecy is paramount. No one outside this chamber may know. A conscript, recently fallen, without kin to object. Jorian can arrange it. And if this sacrilege yields nothing, Rostova, your head belongs to the executioner.”
“Agreed, Duke,” she replied. She had won her terms, but set her own scaffold.
Hours later, a vaulted cellar deep beneath the Citadel’s lower wards became her impromptu dissection room. The air reeked of copper and distilled spirits. A single oil lamp threw harsh amber light across a slab of slate. Stretched upon it beneath rough linen lay the corpse. Illya waited in the far corner, lips pressed pale, while two armored sentries kept silent vigil at the iron door.
Verena drew the cold cellar air into her lungs, laying out her few instruments—a silver-edged scalpel, a bone saw scoured clean, and iron kitchen tongs. “Illya, bring the lamp closer,” she instructed, her tone brisk. “Set the basin of boiled water beside me.”
She pulled back the shroud. The dead man’s face looked waxen, but his chest and arms were mottled with petrified gray patches resembling split bark, oozing thin, milky fluid.
“They assume this is simple putrefaction,” Verena murmured, resting the blade against the sternum. She sliced downward in a single stroke. The dermal layer split with a dry scrape. Illya sucked in air through his teeth, while the door sentries leaned away, boots scraping stone.
She worked quickly, efficiently, her movements honed by years of intricate culinary preparation. Ribs were carefully separated, organs exposed. The stench was almost unbearable, but Verena pushed past it, her mind alight with a dreadful fascination. She observed the lungs, darkened and brittle, the liver, mottled with unnatural patterns. Then, she saw it. Not the expected liquefied decay, but something far more insidious.
“Illya, the tongs. And a clean plate, quickly,” Verena commanded, her voice sharp with discovery. She carefully extracted a sample of tissue from the man’s heart. It wasn’t a soft, decaying mass. It was rigid, unnaturally so.
With the tongs, she levered off a grain of the hardened arterial wall. It snapped like glass, revealing faceted fractures beneath. The core caught the lamp's amber flame, reflecting an unnatural emerald sheen.
“Look,” Verena said, holding the shard toward the light. “No necrosis. No bacterial liquefaction. The venom precipitates in the bloodstream, seeding mineral growth through the vascular tree. It turns tissue to brittle quartz. An alchemical catalyst.”
Kaelan stepped out from the shadows near the entrance, his boots silent on the flagstones. He stared down at the glistening green fragment, the lines of his mouth pulled taut. “Crystalline blood…” he murmured.
Far from the hidden chamber, whispers were already spreading like wildfire through the Volkov Citadel. Grand Duchess Anya, a venomous smile playing on her lips, had ensured it. “The Oltaran witch, Rostova, desecrates the dead!” she hissed to a circle of shocked courtiers, her voice dripping with outrage. “She carves up our fallen soldiers like cattle, mocking our sacred traditions, spitting upon the Ancestral Veil!”
The tale reached Emperor Radomir in his drafty throne room, where illness fed his ceaseless paranoia. Anya had supplied sworn accounts from bribed watchmen detailing the southerner’s sacrilege.
“The southern hostage… mutilating our dead?” Radomir rasped, striking the arm of his gilded chair. “An insult to the throne. She mocks our bloodlines with foreign witchcraft. She must be chained!”
Later that night, the iron-banded doors crashed against the stone frame. Six imperial legionaries blocked the corridor, halberds lowered and breastplates gleaming under torchlight. Their captain, a broad-shouldered officer named Vorlag, unrolled a vellum warrant.
“By decree of Emperor Radomir,” Vorlag boomed across the vaulted ceiling, “Verena Rostova stands accused of desecration against the dead and defiance of imperial law. Surrender to imperial custody.”
Verena straightened, scalpel balanced between her fingers, blood pounding behind her temples. Illya stepped in front of the slate table, fingers locked around his southern talisman. Duke Kaelan's two sentries raised their pikes to bar the threshold.
As Vorlag lunged forward, steel scraped scabbard. Kaelan cleared the shadows, sliding his black-hilted blade between the captain and the table. The steel caught the torchlight in a pale flash, holding the legionaries at bay.
“She is under my protection.”