Whoever designed this understood apothecary science at a level that should not exist outside royal laboratories.
She looks down at her stained hand again.
Rust.
Force.
Control.
Maireth may be supplying it, but she knows only one person can be forcing it down the throats of the Dravari people: Thalmyr.
Thalmyr fucking Lurian.
It makes sense now—the alliance between Dravara and Caeloria. It wasn’t new. It was established. Eldric was always walking into a trap, and Kael sent him there to negotiate an alliance that wasn’t even an option.
Fuck.
Panic flares sharp in Rubi’s chest, a cold sweat dripping down her spine. Because somewhere, far beyond the safety of the walls and wards of Nymeris, Kael and Elyssara are walking willingly toward the heart of it.
Rubi does not reach for her flask. Not now. Now she gathers the samples. Labels them with steady hands that no longer tremble.
A sharp knock strikes at the door.
Rubi snaps her eyes up from her work, only just realizing the sting rimming them, and Teddy’s head and shoulder peek through.
“Are you busy?” he asks.
But Rubi wastes no time. She strides across the room, and grips his arm, pulling him through the door.
She pokes her head around the door frame, darting her eyes down the hallways.
“What?” Teddy pushes, his voice hushed and urgent.
Rubi closes the door softly behind herself, and paces across the room, chest rising and falling too fast.
“I’ve made a discovery, Teddy,” she breathes softly, but there’s no denying the intensity in her demeanor.
Teddy’s eyes fall on the workbench, the shelves—the chaos. He takes it all in, calculating, assessing.
“The threvenar isn’t just cut with a binder, Teddy. It’s laced with a powerful resin that can transport the threvenar into the cell,” she begins, worrying her bottom lip with her teeth.
“Dumb it down for me, Rubes. I speak war, not plants,” he snaps impatiently.
“The threvenar has been engineered with a powerful resin that encapsulates the threvenar and carries it beyond the bloodstream and into the cells themselves—it embeds itself permanently there, Teddy. Threvenar can be purged from the bloodstream. Not the cells. There are no binders powerful enough to draw the threvenar and resin out,” she pants. And then she says the one thing she’s been dreading. “I can’t get it out, Teddy. I can’t fix this.”
The admission tears something loose inside her.
Rubi Ashborne can distill poison from blood. Slow fever from a dying child. Separate nightmares from sleep. Purge water from drowning lungs. She has coaxed bodies back from the edge of death with plants, powder, heat, and stubbornness.
But this?
This is not illness.
It is design.
And she does not know how to dismantle it.
She drags her hands through her hair, squeezing her eyes tightly.
