The Prison Healer (The Prison Healer #1)(97)
When Kiva shook her head slowly, horror beginning to coil within her, Olisha frowned fully and said, “You should know better, dear. With this sickness going around, we need all the help we can get. Not everyone is allergic to goldenroot. You of all people should have been shoving these down the throats of your patients. Not the sick ones—we tried that, and it only made them worse. But the people who come here with wounds or colds or . . . or . . . the healthy ones. They’re the ones we’ve been giving the boosters to, trying to give them a fighting chance. As you should have been doing.” Olisha’s lips pressed together. “I’m disappointed in you, Kiva.”
But Kiva had stopped listening. Instead, she was hearing Cresta’s voice, her accusations from just yesterday: everyone who comes to see you for the smallest thing ends up getting sick—explain that, healer!
Everworld help them.
Kiva knew what was causing the sickness.
Olisha was right—there was goldenroot in the vial, a natural immunity booster.
But Olisha was also wrong, because there wasn’t only goldenroot in the vial.
The smell was still lingering in the back of Kiva’s nose, bitter almonds with a hint of rotting fruit. The spicy goldenroot almost masked it, enough that untrained healers like Olisha and Nergal wouldn’t realize, wouldn’t know.
High fever, dilated pupils, headache, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach rash—they were all symptoms of a stomach sickness. But they were also classic side effects of something else, something that smelled of bitter almonds and rotting fruit.
Wraithweed.
More commonly known as Death’s Embrace.
The immunity booster—it wasn’t medicine.
It was poison.
The prisoners weren’t catching an illness. They were being given one.
“Time to go.”
Kiva spun away from Olisha and toward the infirmary door, the shock of what she’d just realized causing trembles to overtake her body.
“Where’s Naari?” Kiva choked out at the sight of Warden Rooke striding toward her.
The man raised a dark brow. “You’ve become quite familiar with her, haven’t you? Be careful, healer.”
Kiva stared at him, still reeling from what she’d learned. She opened her mouth to tell Rooke, but then saw the guards with him, one who had walked in at his side, and others standing just beyond the doorway and within hearing range. Olisha’s words came to her again: he got them from someone else.
Kiva couldn’t risk giving away what she’d discovered, not until she was certain the person responsible would be caught. Olisha and Nergal had been nothing more than pawns. Idiotic pawns, but pawns nonetheless. Until their supplier was revealed, Kiva had to be careful who she told. She couldn’t just blurt out the truth to Warden Rooke, not while others were listening. The prisoners weren’t the only gossips at Zalindov. The rumor mill ran rampant among the guards, too, and word always traveled back to the inmates.
This needed to be taken care of—but quietly. Zalindov was already a powder keg waiting to explode. If people discovered that the illness wasn’t an illness . . . that someone was deliberately poisoning them . . .
“What’s that you’ve got there?” Rooke said, peering at the liquid in Kiva’s white-knuckled grip.
Kiva sought a calmness she didn’t feel, lying through her teeth as she handed the vial back to Olisha and said, “Nothing important.”
Rooke’s eyes narrowed and Kiva felt a spark of hope, knowing how good he was at reading people. Surely he would recognize the panic on her features enough to see that something was wrong, and demand a private audience with her. Then she could tell him the truth without listening ears.
But he said nothing, oblivious to all she was thinking and feeling. All he did was turn away and gesture for her to follow. “Come. We’ve a walk ahead of us.”
“Wait!” she cried, unable to stop herself. “Can I have a quick word? Alone?”
Rooke’s strides didn’t even slow as he called over his shoulder, “We’re running late. Whatever it is, it can wait until after your Trial.”
“If you’re still alive,” snickered the guard who had walked in with him, stepping closer and giving Kiva a hearty shove forward. “Move, healer.”
“But—”
“Walk, or I’ll carry you.” The guard shoved her again. “Your choice.”
Kiva ground her teeth together but stomped obediently toward the door, silently cursing Rooke for not seeing how desperate she was to speak with him.
Her thoughts spiraled as she stepped outside, the still-snickering guard speeding up to flank the Warden alongside two others. A further three joined them on the path, but none were Naari. Kiva was desperate to see her and share what she’d learned, certain that Naari, unlike the Warden, would listen, and confident that the guard would know what action to take. People were dying because of a poison. Someone needed to know, needed to figure out who was behind it and bring them to justice.
Kiva’s first thought was Cresta. If inmates were able to get their hands on smuggled angeldust, then other items could be obtained, too. Especially by the leader of the prison rebels. But . . . Cresta had seemed so enraged when she’d confronted Kiva yesterday, claiming that her friends were getting sick and dying. If she was the one supplying the poison, then surely she’d have kept it from harming those she cared about.