Nearly forty hours after Mina took the stabilizing pill, the gravel didn’t crunch beneath Kaelor’s felt boots as he reached the rim of the stone well.
He crouched low in the pre-dawn gloom, his dark green robes blending into the mist. In his right palm, the crystal vial felt like a chunk of river ice.
Kaelor smiled, his thin lips peeling back over crooked teeth.
“Idiots,” Kaelor whispered under his breath. “Sleeping like pigs while the Morvane family rules the mountain.”
He pulled the wax stopper with his teeth, tilting the vial over the open mouth of the well. A single drop of corpse-frost sap gathered at the lip of the glass, thick and oily.
The poison was brewed from nine-year-old cemetery moss and glacial corpse-bile. If an ordinary Jade Meridian disciple drank it, their marrow would turn to brittle chalk in three days.
For a frail twelve-year-old girl like Mina Vance, one sip of morning tea would extinguish her life-flame before lunch.
Kaelor shifted his weight onto his front heel to drop the poison.
