Page 32 of Tethered In Blood

Quinn tilted her head back to look at him, meeting his glare with her composed expression. Then she smiled. It wasn’t soft or innocent. No. It was a knife-edge smile that didn’t soothe a soul but unsettled it.

“I understand your concerns and requests,” she stated. “However, the courts found me the most suitable due to my methods for discovering and creating new cures.” She let her words linger, her tone friendly. “I don’t want to be here any more than you want me to be. I suggest you cooperate, so you won’t have to see my face for more than a few days.”

A few knights behind them coughed, stifling their laughs.

The arrogant knight’s lips pressed into a thin line. A muscle in his jaw twitched, and his gaze darted to the hand on my sword, my stony expression, and then to Quinn. He huffed and stepped back. “Fine.”

Coward.

Quinn gave a curt nod. She was adept at hiding her fear and stress. She stepped back, scanning the room and noting every detail, before retrieving her journal and charcoal. “Who got sick first?” she asked, skipping the pleasantries.

The knights judged her, several bristling at her presence. But she remained patient. The longer the silence stretched, the more it became clear she wouldn’t yield.

One of the older men, pale and drawn, gestured toward the rear of the room, where the hearth burned. “Them,” he muttered. “They were the first to fall ill.”

Quinn’s attention turned to the knights closest to the fire. I followed her gaze to the men slumped against their cots. They appeared worse than the others. Their skin glistened with sweat, and their breaths were shallow.

She pressed on. “And their symptoms?”

One of the younger knights shifted his weight and glanced at the others before replying. “It started with fatigue. Then came fevers and coughing. They… they say their limbs feel heavy, like lead.”

Another person spoke up. “Sometimes, they talk in their sleep, saying things that make little sense.”

Quinn nodded and scribbled notes in her journal. “So, you have all been sharing space, using the same water source, and eating the same food?”

A chorus of agreement.

She tapped the end of the charcoal against the page. Her eyes flicked back to the sick men huddled by the hearth. “And they’ve been sleeping by the fire this whole time?”

Another knight chuckled. “Those were the cots they claimed when we arrived.”

Quinn hummed, clearly piecing things together and following a trail visible only to her. I couldn’t detect any magic in the room, yet they were the first villagers to fall ill. If magic were at play, I would sense it around these men. Her brow furrowed, and her lips pressed together as she flipped back a few pages in her journal—something wasn’t adding up. The way she squeezed the journal’s spine indicated she felt it, too.

The healer led us from house to house, each door revealing the same grim scene, the same symptoms, the same slow decay. The stench of sickness hung heavily in the air—herbs and stale sweat, fever-warmed sheets, and the faint, sour tang of something rotting beneath it all.

Outside, the village should have felt alive. Stray dogs should have lounged near doorsteps, waiting for scraps to fall. Barn cats—thick-furred and sharp-eyed—should have prowled through alleyways, hunting whatever the night disturbed. There should have been moss sparrows, small, gray-feathered birds that nested in the eaves of homes, their songs light and scratchy.

But there was nothing.

Even the animals sensed the creeping fear that had settled over the village with the fog. The villagers wore it on their faces, in furtive glances, hunched shoulders, and the way their hands twitched toward the door latches as we passed.

By the fourth house, Quinn’s posture had shifted. Her shoulders bore a new tension that settled deep and felt brittle at the edges. She gripped her journal too tightly; her knuckles paled under the pressure.Had she noticed yet?A sense of unease permeated every interaction and whispered conversation as the village watched her.

As we stepped out of the last house, dusky shadows stretched long across the dirt roads, swallowing the spaces between buildings and pooling in the alleyways, waiting for the sun to set. Quinn stood still for a long moment, her hands clenched at her sides, before rubbing her temples.She wasn’t just troubled; she was angry… But why?

“It’s not the water,” she whispered quietly.

I gazed down at her. “Then why instruct them to boil it?”

Her eyes locked with mine. “I don’t know what else to tell them yet. They need reassurance while I figure this out.”

As we stepped back into the village healer’s building, Quinn cast the healer a quick glance before speaking. “Do you have any notes or books on local ailments? Are there any stories about past outbreaks, superstitions, myths, or legends?” She paused. “And I mean anything, no matter how ridiculous it seems.”

12

Eden

THEHEALERFROWNEDandrubbed his beard while he pondered my question. “Superstitions?”

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