Barnaby Holt slammed his wooden ladle onto the cedar table so hard the salt dish jumped.
“We can’t feed her standard stock,” the old man growled, his lone arm trembling as he pointed at the pallet. “Any ordinary pill with five to twenty-five percent Pill-Poison will coat the heart-wall.”
“You dump standard medicinal slag into a loose ice spasm, and the frost freezes right over the sediment,” Barnaby rasped. “It’ll turn her main heart vein to glass before dawn.”
Mina lay curled beneath two thick wool quilts on the low daybed, her lips pale blue.
Small crystals of frost clung to the tips of her dark eyelashes. The warm herbal steam from the adjoining bathhouse still hung in the air, but her small frame shook with violent, rhythmic tremors. Each breath whistled through her teeth like sleet scraping against a frosted windowpane.
Sera Thorne did not wait for the old keeper to finish his lecture.
Her heavy leather coin pouch hit the table with a dull clink, followed immediately by three silver hairpins and a folded promissory note from the Iron-Willow Merchant Guild. Her jaw was set like river granite.
“The Black-Crow midnight block is running right now,” Sera said, her voice flat and tight. “Deacon Vane opened the bidding for Master Ash’s ten Tier 2 Supreme Pills half an hour ago. Every clan elder from the north docks is there with open coffers.”
