My spine stiffens. “Cress came here?”
“The Kaiserin,” she corrects me, not quite gently. “And yes. The official story was that she was taking on her father’s duty of inspecting the mines until a new Theyn could be chosen.”
“And the unofficial story?” I ask.
“She was asking a lot of questions,” Artemisia says. “About the mine, and specifically about the springs within it.”
The words don’t surprise me, exactly—I already suspected as much—but the thought still drips down my spine like cold water.
“So she knew about the springs,” I say. “This must have been after she’d tortured someone into telling her what Encatrio was.”
“Yes, but that’s the thing,” Art says. “None of the slaves, none of the guards, no one who has worked at the mine since the siege, knew anything about any springs. No one’s seen them.”
I cross to the other side of the tent, leaning against one of the poles and folding my arms over my chest. “That doesn’t make sense,” I say. “I heard the springs as soon as I stepped into the mine, even before I lost my memories. And I think I might have seen one once, though I’m not sure. And you…Whoever you got the Encatrio from must have gotten it from a mine.”
“The source of the poison I got didn’t bottle it himself, and I doubt he could have told me who did, or how long ago it was. It might have been sometime before the siege,” Artemisia says, shaking her head. “And I don’t know what you heard or saw, but every former slave I talked to said the same thing—they never saw a spring, no matter how deep they went. At first I thought maybe they didn’t tell the Kaiserin in order to keep the springs hidden, but they told me the same thing just now, and I get the feeling they were telling the truth.”
“But you brought someone with you,” I say, glancing at the shadow of the person on the other side of the tent. “What do they know?”
“Apparently the Kaiserin wasn’t keen to leave empty-handed after all of that trouble,” Artemisia says. “So she started asking around about other ways to create a fire poison, something that would have the same effects as Encatrio.”
“And this woman helped her?” I ask.
Art shakes her head. “But she knows someone who did, and more important—she knows what that someone said.”
* * *
—
At first glance, the woman Artemisia brings into my tent looks to be in her late thirties, with weathered skin, a frail frame, and black hair threaded with gray. Her eyes are heavy and guarded—after she worked more than a decade in the mines, so I’m sure she’s seen horrors that I can only guess at. When I offer her a seat, she takes it but sits at the very edge of the chair, hands clasped tightly in her lap. It’s then, when I really look at her, that I realize she can’t be as old as I originally thought—I would be surprised if she were older than twenty-five.
“Thank you for speaking with me,” I tell her. “What’s your name?”
“Straya,” the woman says, looking up at me with large dark green eyes that skitter away as soon as they meet mine.
“Straya,” I repeat, glancing uncertainly at where Artemisia stands behind her, blocking the entrance to the tent to ensure we’re not interrupted. “I understand the Kaiserin paid a visit to the mine to gather information.”
“No one wanted to tell her anything, Your Majesty,” Straya says, her voice shaking. “When she first arrived at the camp, she wore her hair bound up under a silk scarf that wrapped around her neck. Even though the weather was warm, she wore a cloak that covered her from the throat down. All we could see of her was her face. Her mouth was painted red, but I could see that underneath the paint something wasn’t right—her lips were flaking and black.”
I remember Cress as I saw her last, black lips, charred throat, white hair—she made no attempt to hide the effects of the Encatrio; she wore the disfigurements with pride. But that wasn’t always the case, it seems.
“Did you realize what had happened to her?” I ask.
Straya’s eyes find mine, and this time she holds my gaze. She swallows, then bites her lip. “There were whispers,” she says slowly. “Some of us overheard the guards saying that you’d poisoned her. The night she arrived, I returned to the barracks, and the girl who slept above me—Nadia—said that it must have been Encatrio. She said that when a person survives that kind of poison, it leaves them changed, outside and in.”
I sit up a little straighter. “How would Nadia have known so much about it?” I ask.
“Her father was a fire priest before the siege,” she says. “She knew all manner of things about the mines that the rest of us didn’t. She said she could have escaped, if she’d had any idea about where to go after she did, but she thought that even if she made it out of the camp, she would have wandered about until she starved to death, never mind the execution she would have faced if caught. There were many people I knew who would have taken death over chains, but Nadia wasn’t one of them. She planned to live long enough to see the Kalovaxians destroyed.”
A sick feeling settles over me. It is not lost on me that Straya is using the past tense to talk about Nadia, and I don’t have to guess that she didn’t live long enough to see her chains broken.
“The guards knew about Nadia; they knew she understood the mines better than anyone else. So they brought her before the Kaiserin and asked her questions. I never saw her again after that.”
“Then how do you know what she told the Kaiserin?” I ask.
“Because she told me what she knew, as soon as the Kaiserin arrived and we’d seen what the poison had done to her. Nadia said that the springs in the mine were elusive, that they moved and sometimes disappeared altogether, but that the springs themselves didn’t matter because as long as the Kaiserin lived, the poison was in her blood.”
The poison was in her blood.
The room lurches around me and I have to struggle to stay upright. A new piece of the puzzle slides into place with a sickening click that I feel all the way in my bones.
“And you’re sure she told the Kaiserin this?” I ask her, barely trusting myself to speak.
Straya hesitates. “I can’t say for sure. I’d imagine that the only people who could were the Kaiserin and Nadia herself. But the Kaiserin left as soon as she was done with Nadia. The guards had gathered others who might have information, but she didn’t want to speak with anyone else. She just left.”
I glance over Straya’s shoulder and meet Artemisia’s gaze. She’s trying to make sense of this, trying to process what it means, but it has taken her by surprise, and in a rare occurrence, she looks truly horrified.