Chapter 5: Shattered

“... Poisoned, and none of you noticed when you first treated her?”

These were the words Estella heard as she awoke. Adrian's voice pulled her out of the soft embrace of unconsciousness, and her eyes began to open. But she saw the shapes gathered around her, and she stopped herself before her lashes had lifted more than a sliver. She let them fall shut again and gentled her breath into the slow, even rhythm of someone still asleep.

'Poisoned?' Estella reached for the meaning of Adrian's words, but it slipped through her grasp. Even the sentence he had spoken moments ago drifted through her mind in scattered fragments.

But one word stood apart from the fog: Poisoned. Whatever they spoke of, it concerned her. So she lay still and listened.

“P-Pardon my impertinence, my lord.” She heard an old man's voice tremble in shame. “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.”

Estella's confusion only deepened, but she kept her face slack and her breath slow and even, letting not a flicker of it reach the surface.

“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.”

The old man spoke, and Estella finally had an idea of what they were saying.

If she had to guess, these fools were saying she had been poisoned.

'T-this is a joke. A charade, nothing more. It has to be... If I were poisoned, I would have noticed long ago.' So she thought, clinging to her denial. She knew the infamous Rainflower and she had studied this very herb, and not for a moment had she imagined it being used on her. The doctors at Silvervale had examined her and found nothing wrong, so why should she believe these strangers over them?

She tried to shut out their voices and let them blur into the crackle of the fire, until something made her ears prick.

“How strange.” she heard the old man named Gavard murmur 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.”

Something in Gavard's words made her heart skip a beat. Sickness. Then she remembered the illness that had plagued her for months, and then, slowly, the pieces slid into place. 'It can't be...' Estella thought in horror.

Silence followed. She felt every eye in the room turn toward her. Her heart had skipped, and in a room full of werewolves, a faltering pulse was as good as a confession that she was awake. But she did not care. She kept her lashes lowered and her breath even, and she went on feigning sleep.

Then Adrian spoke, and the silence broke. Something in his tone sent a chill down her spine, as if he were looking straight through her closed eyelids.

“It has symptoms, does it not?”

What followed was more silence, though if she had to guess, Gavard had probably nodded in response to Adrian's question.

“List her symptoms... All of them.”

Her heartbeat quickened the moment she heard it. He knew. He had to know she was listening, and he wanted her to hear every word.

What Gavard said next was the final nail in the coffin.

“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.”

Estella's blood ran cold. She no longer cared whether her breath or her pulse betrayed her. Everything Gavard had just listed was what she had lived with for seven months. Every. Single. Damn. Thing. The sudden dizziness, the stumbling heartbeat, the heavy sleepiness, the thirst no water could quench, the muscle spasms that struck her without warning. They had become part of her life these past few months, and every doctor she had seen dismissed them as ordinary fatigue. Resting had never helped. Even when she tried, her father would summon her for one errand or another, always for no apparent reason.

Everything clicked into place now. Everything.

Her fiancé and her father had not decided to be rid of her on a whim. They had planned it, patiently and for a long time. They had sent her to the front lines whenever Silvervale clashed with Frostveil, hoping she would fall by Adrian's hand. When she did not, they had handed her one dangerous task after another. It all made sense now.

They had wanted her dead for a long time.

Estella did everything in her power not to make a sound, everything in her damn power to lie still, to not sob on the spot. Because she was on the verge of breaking, and she only held herself together by a single thread.

Her teeth clenched as another memory surfaced. Darius had always brought her meals himself, especially at night. Ironically, it was one of the things she had once loved about him. He never joined her, and he never took a single bite. Still, she had trusted him without question. The thought that the food might be poisoned had never crossed her mind, not even once.

Truly, love was blind.

All that time, she had not known. He had been killing her by slow degrees, and she had thanked him for it, and kissed him in gratitude.

A tremor ran through her body, and her heart felt crushed beneath a great and terrible weight. She felt like a fool. No... Worse than a fool. Beneath the blanket, her fists closed around the sheets until her knuckles turned white. She could not put a name to what she felt. Estella felt like something in her was being torn... Shattered.

Not long after, she heard Gavard and his apprentices take their leave. The door opened, then swung shut, and the room fell silent around her and Adrian. A seat creaked as he rose, and his footsteps crossed the floor toward the bed. Then his voice reached her, soft with mockery.

“What a shocking revelation... Isn't it?” he rubbed salt in her wounds.

Estella did not answer. She kept her eyes shut and her breathing even, though her heart had grown unbearably heavy. Her own family had hidden the truth from her, and her enemy had been the one to lay it bare.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk... Poor Estella. It seems your lovely father and your beloved meant to cast you aside long ago. Isn't that right, mutt?”

The sound of her name in his mouth confirmed what she already suspected: he had known she was awake. Perhaps from the very beginning. Perhaps he had staged the entire exchange so that she would hear the truth with her own ears. And she did not know how to feel about that.

Adrian was about to speak again when a soft knock sounded from outside the door.

“My lord, it's urgent.”

He said nothing else to her, only turned and walked away. At the door, he paused. “Make sure you take the medicine when it arrives, Estella.”

The door swung shut behind him, though it didn't quite latch, left standing slightly ajar.

The moment he was gone, her lips began to tremble, and at last she let her eyes open. The sob she had held back for so long broke free. Tears rose until the canopy above her dissolved into soft, shifting shadow. She pressed both hands to her face and wept.

“Darius... Darius...” His name broke apart in her mouth and shook loose between sobs as her whole body trembled. “Why...? What did you do it?... Why?” The sobs came harder after that, ugly and uncontained, torn out of her with nothing left to hold them back.

“I loved you, I loved you more than I loved my own life... Why did you have to do this to me?... Oh God... Darius... Darius!” Estella cried more than she ever had in her entire life, until her head throbbed from it.

“Darius...” she whispered. She had lost count of how many times she said that name. “No... I can't... live... I can't live like this, I have to end this... I can't.”

Her claws slid from her fingertips, and she set their points against her throat, desperate to end the pain. A thin thread of blood trickled down. But when she pressed deeper, an unseen force repelled her hand. Her brows drew together. She tried again, and again that invisible force turned her back. It was not her imagination.

Then a memory surfaced: a silver beam leaping from Adrian's palm into her skull. Her hand fell away with cold realization.

“So that's what you did.”

Bitterness rose thick and scalding in her chest. “You bastard!” She broke into tears again.

Why had she not seen it coming? A man as cunning as Adrian was never going to leave her be, not after she had made her wish for death so painfully plain.

The nature of the spell felt familiar. She had heard of it once, from her own father: a binding that human mages laid on prisoners too valuable to be shackled like common captives, so that they could never take their own lives. Estella had never imagined it would be used on her.

Hatred, sorrow and despair. Those were the three things she felt now, twisting together in her chest. She bit her lip until she tasted blood, her eyes darting around the chamber in search of a way out.

Then her eyes sharpened. She knew of a sure way to break this binding Adrian had placed on her.