Evelyn looked over the array of unlabeled jars and boxes that she had accumulated over the years, organized according to a specific pattern held only in her mind. Goldenrod to slow bleeding, willow bark to dull the pain, ginger to push off infection. She was no doctor, but she was skilled enough to nurse a man back to health.
Or put a man in the ground. Poisons lined her shelves, white bryony and belladonna, oleander and aconite. Some a magistrate would recognize by name, but many were more esoteric, like the bottle of gelsemium tincture, its stopper crusted over in the decade since she’d used it last. She’d tended the plant, harvested the root, powdered it and infused it into clear grain alcohol obtained from a chemist ostensibly for the extension of an old bottle of perfume from her childhood. Mixed into a glass of spirits, the clear poison was all but tasteless and took hours to strike. Two, four, as many as eight hours after ingestion, breathing would become difficult, the lungs begin to slow and fail. The body would become cold, the heartbeat rapid and feeble. Eventually, inevitably, death would follow.
Gelsemium killed without pageantry. There was only a quiet death in the middle of the night, and in the morning, a body born out of the house to the tower mausoleums, built above ground so that the drowning floods could not reach the bodies inside.
Her father had been first. He had made plans to marry her off to Lord Susthin, knowing of his pox, knowing of his clenched fist, of the servants in his household that he had hurt, and of his first wife who had died of a miscarriage occasioned, it was whispered, by violence, and not ill-luck. Her father had been less quick to the strap than Susthin, but they had been of a kind, and Evelyn had always been only a nuisance, a daughter who could accomplish nothing. Even if her mother’s young death had not devastated her soul, Evelyn would never have been a beauty, and the grief that clung to her from age seven had drawn her thin and translucent. It made her reserved, unpredictable, and angry.
Evelyn had been so angry. And so she had decided she would not submit. She made a gelsemium tincture and slipped it into his brandy. He had been dead before dawn.
Nobody suspected her. Nobody questioned her obvious grief. If suspicion fell, it fell on her brothers alone, who stood to gain the whole of the fortune and the shipping company. And back then, before the coup, Perdanu Shipping had been wealthy beyond imagining. They did not possess much political influence, due to the relative youth of their title, but it would come in time, and silks and spices and gold went a long way to securing power. But if suspicion fell, she never heard about it at all.Her brothers shut her away, claiming that her grief was so acute she must rest. She had accepted it, until she tried the door from her chambers and found it guarded by servants who, apologetic and false-tongued, would not let her leave. The marriage was not called off. Lord Susthin visited her, and though he kept his hands to himself in deference to her black veil, she could feel his disdain, his repulsion. He didn’t want her. He wanted her money.
So did her brothers. She could hear them talking, sometimes, late at night as they prowled the halls, arguing and drunk, about how best to make money off of her, how best to forge alliances. Should they break the engagement her father had designed, and try someone another step up the rungs of power? No, better to get her away from them, worthless creature that she was. She had always been the weak one, the fragile one.
And so everybody mourned for her when her brothers died not a fortnight later. They mourned for the constant tragedy of her life, and they mourned for a girl left alone, so unsuited to isolation, so unsuited for the fortune that had been dumped into her lap as the bodies dropped around her.
None of them had ever suspected. They were all fools. Poison was not the only tool she had. Behind the bottles she kept certain papers, secrets and promises stored for when she had need. Violetta would surely prefer to see their soldier buried in the garden, no risk at all, and Evelyn couldn’t blame her; they could both feel the vultures circling. If the Judiciary learned of this, if Danforth and Sing and the others knew, they would come for her. They would strip her of her wealth, of her safety. She was one of the last full-bodied beasts left in their ever- tightening prison, and the jackals would tear her apart if they saw weakness, if only to buy themselves a few more years.
But as long as the soldier remained hers, she had power. He had become her secret the moment he had stepped across the border, set on whatever path would bring him so near to her doorstep. He couldn’t have chosen to escape to a dying city. He wouldn’t have chosen the winding road that led to her home at random.
In some way, he was here for her.
And so she would nurse him back to health. She would spool out his secrets from him and see what she could gain. It was a risky move, but she had not gotten to where she was by being meek, only paranoid. Only proud.
The vultures circled, regardless of what she did, how still she kept, how small she made herself. No; her secret soldier would give her the upper hand.
But she did not have to grant him power over her in exchange. She looked over the rows of medicines and poisons, considering. Datura, to make him delirious, to keep him from ever learning anything about her that he could twist to hurt her? No; she needed him coherent, able to answer questions. Incapacitation could come later, if he healed enough to attempt escape. For now, what she needed was a way to keep her identity hidden in case he did one day fall into the hands of the authorities. She took down several jars from the shelf and worked quickly, powdering a dried, gnarled root and mixing it with steeped liquids. She made just enough to fill a small vial, and tucked it into her case along with the medicines she had already gathered.
By the time she returned to the sickroom, Violetta had left. The soldier had been stripped to the waist, his torso bruised and bloody over the thick black tattoos that had been worked into his flesh from hip to shoulder, and halfway down his arms. An officer for sure. The tradition had started over a hundred years ago, a point of pride among the men the empire sent halfway around the world to fight for it. A young soldier had the head of a leviathan poked in ink into the flesh between his shoulder blades, and it grew from there in a language that spread from ship to ship. The higher a soldier rose, the more skin his tattoos covered. The generals and admirals had black ink curling along their hairline, though the reigning empire had called it a monstrous tradition. It should have been the first clue that a schism was coming.
Evelyn sat, gingerly, on the edge of the mattress. She set out the contents of her case. Poultices to cleanse the skin and speed healing. The clotting agent, the pain killer.
But first... She drew a pipette of tincture of belladonna, blended with powdered root of black hellebore, and leaned in close. The soldier moaned but did not stir as she eased apart his eyelids. His eye was unfocused, the sclera tinged red by burst blood vessels. She carefully applied three drops to his pupil, and watched as it grew in size, a deep blackness in the room’s dim light. Then she let his eyelids fall shut and moved to the other side of his face, repeating the procedure.
He only whimpered in his unconsciousness as the tincture burned out his eyes.
The soldier slept for the next two days, Evelyn’s medicines keeping him in a sedated fog. Violetta was left to clean his bedding when he evacuated himself, and the bedroom’s lack of windows trapped the stench, turning Evelyn’s stomach on her visits. But the swelling began to lower, the bruises turning sickly yellow instead of brilliant, deep maroon. In another day, she could ease him back to wakefulness, to blindness, to her questions.