Chapter 4: Poisoned blood

Adrian did not have to wait long. Within the hour the shaman arrived with his two apprentices, and they crossed the threshold with slow, careful steps. They knew the mood their alpha was in, and none of them wished to be the first thing it fell upon.

Adrian said nothing, his silence was more intimidating than any command.

They went to Estella without a word to him, and rightly so. He had not summoned them for conversation. The shaman was an old man with long braids of silver hair, and upon his head sat the skull of a werewolf, its hollow brow resting there like a crown of bone. He drew the blanket back from her shoulder and studied her with an assessing gaze. Then he flicked two fingers toward his apprentices. They bowed their heads in answer and reached for their tools.

“When I brought her to you four days ago, did you examine her blood?” Adrian broke the silence, his expression lacking emotion.

The shaman's hands stilled. “My lord?”

“Gavard.” The temperature in the room dropped by several degrees. “Did you examine her blood or not?”

The old shaman broke out in a cold sweat. “N-No, my lord. Her injuries were too severe at the time... There was no room to spare for it.”

“Then examine her blood right away.” Adrian said almost impatiently.

Gavard wanted to object. But he also noticed an anomaly. This woman was a werewolf, and three to four days should have been more than enough for wounds like these to vanish without a trace, but they did not.

The shaman turned to his apprentices and gave his instructions in a low, steady voice. A minute later he took a cup of pale moonstone from one apprentice's hands. Its rim was etched with old lunar runes, and it had been warmed over the brazier until the carvings glowed a faint silver. He set it mouth-down over the place on Estella's shoulder where his obsidian lancet had already opened her skin. As the stone cooled, it drew a slow vacuum, and her blood rose in a thin, dark thread that crept along the inside of the cup. Estella did not stir. Her breath stayed shallow and even, her fingers slack against the linen. Adrian's eyes never left her face, searching for the smallest twitch.

Gavard saw where Adrian's intense stare had settled, on the unconscious woman, and he could not help but marvel.

Ninety-six years he had served this house. He had known Adrian since the hour of his birth, had watched the wailing infant grow into the majestic man who now sat across the room. In all those years, there was one thing Gavard hadn't witnessed for a long time.

Adrian sparing a woman more than a cursory glance.

Not since that incident, the old wound that had shut his heart. He had looked on most of them as spoiled, gilded creatures ever since, and he had treated them as such.

But never like this. Not once had Gavard seen him give a woman his full attention for so long.

Gavard's gray eyes sharpened, bright with quiet interest. Had the young lord finally let someone in his heart? Or was he reading too much into a single look? Whatever the answer, one thing was plain enough: this woman meant something to Adrian.

Soon the moonstone cup held enough blood to examine. The shaman lifted it from her shoulder and left his apprentices to dress and disinfect her wounds properly. He tilted the cup toward the firelight, and the blood inside swirled slowly against the pale stone. It was dark red, far darker than it should have been. Almost black. The old man's brow furrowed. He was certain of it now: something was wrong with Estella.

Gavard uncorked a small vial of fairy tears, and a pale, luminous glow rose from its neck like moonlight caught in water. He tipped a few drops into the blood. They sank through the red like falling stars in a crimson sky. He lifted the cup to swirl it, and then something strange happened.

A thick tide of blackish-green liquid began to separate from the blood. It uncurled through it like ink dropped into still water refusing to dissolve into anything clean. Everyone in the room went still.

“B-by the gods.” Gavard's face went ashen. Even Adrian's expression shifted as he rose abruptly from his chair.

“Sire! S-she's been poisoned severely!” One of the apprentices tending to Estella exclaimed. “How is she still alive? It's no small amount of poison either... And that's... That's definitely Wolfsbane.”

A tide of rage rose sharply within Adrian's chest, though not a trace of it reached his face. “She was poisoned, and none of you noticed when you first treated her?” His voice was calm, almost pleasant, but one could sense the anger in his tone. He called Gavard because he was the only healer and shaman he could trust not because he was the best... But even so, his performance was disappointing at best.

“P-Pardon my impertinence, my lord.” Gavard bowed low, and the wolf skull on his brow dipped with him, its hollow eyes turning toward the floor.

“A poison like this would be nearly impossible to detect through ordinary examination. I believe it was masked with Rainflower, which hides a venom as a quiet morning hides a storm. Had I not thought to use fairy tears, I doubt we would have found it at all.”

“Rainflower?”

“Yea, my lord. A rare herb native to the western forests of Kam'hala. On its own it is harmless... sweet, even. But paired with a poison, Wolfsbane above all, it turns lethal. It tricks a werewolf's immune system into think the poison is one of its own. The great Emperor Arukhas met his end because of this very herb.”

Adrian's fists clenched unconsciously. “How long would it take to cure her?”

“A week, my lord. With the correct dosage administered daily without fail.”

Gavard fell quiet again, turning the vial slowly between his fingers, watching the blackish-green thread with something close to fearful fascination. “How strange.” he murmured, mostly to himself. “The concentration is significant. Had she been given this much all at once, she would be in a far worse state than this. Most likely dead. Whoever did this was patient, and fed it to her drop by drop, over a long, long time. It could even be disguised as sickness.”

Adrian said nothing to that, only lowered himself back into his chair. Then something else caught his attention. A subtle change in the rhythm of someone's pulse across the room.

He didn't react outwardly, though his gaze on the woman lying still beneath the blankets intensified.

Gavard began to turn toward the bed. He was about to open his mouth when Adrian's eyes flicked to him. The latter brought a finger to his lips, signalling the shaman to keep silent. Gavard hesitated but did as he was told.

“It has symptoms, does it not?” Adrian asked and Gavard nodded. A slow smile touched his lips, and his eyes held a cold, calculating glint. Yet his voice stayed light and almost idle, as though the thought had only just crossed his mind. “List her symptoms... All of them.”

Something in Gavard's expression shifted. He had already caught on to what his cunning Alpha was trying to do. He obliged with relish, his voice rising a tad louder than before, rolling out across the chamber for every ear in it to hear.

Clearing his throat, he started.

“Short bursts of dizziness, coming at random. An irregular heartbeat, especially at rest and with no clear cause. Hypersomnia, unexplained thirst, muscle spasms, on occasion. And over time, it dulls the body's regeneration, which would explain why her wounds haven't healed yet.”

Adrian nodded slowly, his attention never leaving the bed. Something in the quality of the silence from that corner of the room had changed. It would have slipped past any other ear like a moth through the dark, but Adrian had been listening for it all along.

His mouth curved, just barely.

It seemed his little she-wolf wasn't quite as skilled at feigning sleep as she thought.

Whatever she had just heard, it had cost her something to hear it. He didn't need to look at her to know that. Not that it mattered to him, one way or another.

The Shaman and his apprentices finished not long after, rewrapping her wounds properly this time, careful and thorough where the first pass had been rushed. Gavard packed away his tools last, straightening without any stiffness for a man of his age. “Make sure she takes the treatment daily, my lord. Without fail, for a full week, or the Wolfsbane will simply resettle into her blood. I'll have the first dose brought up within an hour.”

Adrian inclined his head in a single, short nod, though he already knew how the evening would unfold. Estella would not trade her defiance for a vial of medicine. This was the woman who, not too long ago, made it painfully clear that she sought death more than anything at the moment. If she was to be cured, he would see to it himself. He would be the one to force the drug past her lips.

He let his gaze linger on her a moment longer. Her breathing was not quite even, and her pulse was not quite steady enough to belong to someone truly asleep, unless... She was having a nightmare? Surely not. Then he got up from the chair and walked up to the corner of the bed. “What a shocking revelation... No?” He said while looking down on her.

“Your lovely fiancé and your beloved father... Both meant to cast you aside long ago. Isn't that right, Estella?” He waited, his gaze steady on her face, but she still feigned sleep. Silence stretched across the room for a long time.

His nose flared as he drew breath to speak again when a knock sounded at the door and interrupted him.

“My lord, it's urgent.” the voice on the other side said, full of respect and reverence.

Adrian remained staring at her a moment longer than necessary before turning towards the door. Then he halted his movements with his hand on the frame.

“Make sure you take the medicine when it arrives, Estella.”

Then he was gone.

A/N: The technique Gavard used is a real practice for drawing blood. It's called Wet Cupping (Hijama) feel free to look it up.

[Fairy tears. A substance used to detect poison in food, water or blood, no matter how small or concealed it may be. ]