Page 23 of Down Comes the Night

They stopped at the only inn, the Guiding Light. Beneath its happily piping chimney hung a sign engraved with a comically beatific depiction of the Goddess. She cradled a misshapen little starburst that Wren assumed gave the inn its name. But the strangest thing was that it burned incandescently—not with gas lamps or firelight, but with a harsh glow like magic.

“How is it doing that?” Wren asked Basil as they walked the horses to the stable.

Basil squinted up at it. “It’s electricity.”

“Electricity,” she repeated. “How does it work?”

He seemed puzzled. “Tubes and wires and generators. I’m afraid the science of it is beyond me.”

Wren eyed the sign warily before he beckoned her onward. As Basil curried the horses, he said, “I just need some food and a wink of sleep, then we’ll be on the road again. I don’t want us to get caught in this weather. This time of year, a good snow won’t thaw out until spring.”

That was months from now. No one would be able to come after her anytime soon.

In her room, Wren entertained herself by flicking a switch on and off—light chasing darkness, over and over again. Then, when she’d quite perplexed herself with wondering how it worked, she warmed herself at the fireplace. Its blazing light bathed everything in a soft, hazy glow. After the brutal ride here, she longed to bask in the heat and relax.

Barely a minute passed before her stomach began twisting itself into anxious, guilty knots. She was restless by nature, as Heloise too often reminded her, and if she stayed still long enough, her grief would catch up to her. Since she had a few hours to kill, she might as well double-check her supplies. She retrieved her medical bag, a slim leather satchel, and knelt on the carpeted floor.

While most healers depended on their magic, Wren knew a truly great physician could not rely on magic alone. She liked toprepare for anything and everything, and took more of a scientific route, studying toxic plants and developing medications that could aid in the healing process. Faithful healers, meanwhile, believed themselves to be practitioners of a divine art. Psalms and scripture told of the first queen who had bound herself to the Goddess; moved by her devotion, the Goddess had blessed her with a piece of her divinity: the gift of regeneration.

The prayers of the good and righteous are powerful things,the Book of Morgane proclaimed.Worship the Goddess, and she will take from you your sickness, your suffering.

But magic, at its core, was nothing but a recessive trait that allowed for the manipulation of the energy that flowed through thefola—an energy that bound to receptors in the body’s cells. Some theories posited that healing magic was the oldest kind, affording its practitioners the abilities to induce cellular regeneration and autolysis. Over time, it had evolved into more diverse, specialized branches of magic that varied from family to family. Magic like Byers’s, which thickened his bones. And magic like Hal Cavendish’s.

Vesrians’ magic worked the same as Danubians’, even though centuries of superstition had painted them as something otherworldly and wicked. Their magical bloodlines were old and powerful; in honor of their god, they arranged marriages to preserve them—as well as they could, anyway. The Cavendishes had nearly died out, and Hal was the first to manifest their magic in two generations. No one knew exactly how his abilities worked; autopsies of his victims showed little but ravaged brain chemistry, as if his gaze alone was neurotoxic. Wren shuddered at the memory of him, his eyes mirror black, thefolain his temples glowing silver like scars.

She put some vials back in her satchel and drank in the rest of the room. Her accommodations were plain but comfortable: solid wood floors, a downy mattress, a curtained window overlooking the jagged blue spine of the Dramlach Mountains. There was even a closet, stocked with a complete wardrobe for a young boy. Earlier, when her host had come by to bring her a pot of tea and a slice of spiced cake, Wren asked if he had a son.

At first, he’d looked utterly puzzled by the sound of Wren’s accent. Then, after she repeated herself, he looked startled. “No. It’s only me and my husband here.”

The inn was indeed entirely empty. The silence unnerved her, as if the storm had frozen over the entire world. Earlier, she had wandered the hallway and paused outside each door. Nobody stirred within any of the rooms. Nobody made a sound. Still, she feltwatched.

Even now.

When the crawling sensation became too much to bear, she rose from the armchair and descended into the lobby. Pulling her traveling cape tightly around herself, Wren slipped out the back door. White-barked maples and sturdy evergreens clung to the rock faces, and all around her were pale mountains as far as she could see.

A short walk through the grounds presented her with a fenced-in garden half buried in snow. The owners must have been ambitious gardeners, because it was stranger and more beautiful than any she had encountered, with colorful flowers growing in iron cages like captive finches. At the gate, a skull painted onto a wooden sign glared at her with peeling black sockets.

Its meaning was clear:keep out, danger.But Wren couldn’t resist going in. Snooping in a Cernosian poison garden was far too good an opportunity for any healer to pass up. What Cernos lacked in magic, it made up for in harsh landscape and even harsher flora.

Wren pushed open the gate, the cold, unforgiving metal stinging her palms. She paced the neat garden rows, each marked with a plaque. There was deadly nightshade and autumn crocus, celandine and chinaberry, goldenseal and honeysuckle, hemlock and yew. And there, at the center, was a tangle of goddessblood pushing through a thin layer of snow. Wren crouched beside it and admired the membranous blue-violet petals bowing reverently over their stalks.

Goddessblood figured prominently in Danubian myths. It was said that the Goddess loved a man once. One night, he cut one of her three heads from her neck while she slept. What he did notknow was that she could not die from a wound. Goddessblood sprouted from the pool of her blood, growing deadly in the succor of her bitterness and sorrow at the man’s betrayal. In Cernos, however, this plant meant something else entirely. A warning to the rest of the world.

A few months ago, Wren had read a write-up of the world exhibition of arts and sciences in the paper. Cernos had showcased a gas laced with essence of goddessblood. While Cernos had never seen war due to its impassable mountains and carefully maintained neutrality, Wren could understand taking precautions. Her heart twisted when she remembered the account of the lab rats they’d tested it on, dead within seconds. On humans, it would likely only take a minute or two more. Unless someone developed an antidote.

Goddessblood grew only in harsh mountain air, so uncommon and strange in Danu that the thrill of studying it shut out Wren’s scruples. Surely, no one would mind—or notice—if she took a specimen. She set her medical bag on the ground and pulled on gloves. She yanked the flower from the half-frozen dirt, and the tuber, like a fat vein, dripped clotted earth from its roots. Just as she stored the sample in her bag, a shadow fell over her.

Wren turned and squinted against the ruthlessly white sky. As her eyes adjusted to the light, the shape of the innkeeper came into focus. He was a round, kind-looking man, but the way he was looking at her now… He looked afraid.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked.

“Nothing! I was just…” Wren’s face burned with embarrassment. While she hadn’t expected to get caught, she should have asked first. She wasn’t representing her homeland well at the moment.So much for diplomacy.“I’m a healer. I study poisons.”

“You can’t study these,” he snapped. “This is my property, not a classroom.”

“I’m sorry. I—” Wren fumbled for words. “I can pay you for it.”

“No, no.” The man pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s alright. You didn’t know. Just go on inside before you catch your death out here.”