The Witch at Low Water

How long does it take for poisoned blood to reach the brain?

I hauled the Fuar-Chuan squad leader by the collar of his wet leather coat, dragging his heels through the black mud of the low-tide flats. His boots left two deep furrows in the silt. Every four paces, he coughed up a string of grey, silver-flecked foam that hissed when it hit the cold salt puddles.

"Lift his legs, Lorcuin," I said over my shoulder. "Unless you want his spine catching on every sunken piling between here and the gutter."

Lorcuin did not argue. He stepped into the muck beside me, grabbed the captive by the ankles, and hoisted the dead weight with an effortless flex of broad shoulders.

Our knuckles brushed as he adjusted his grip on the raider's belt.

A hot jolt snapped through my skin.

My wolf jerked awake beneath my ribs, claws scrabbling against bone. Mate.

I shoved the beast down into the dark. Five years in the salt gutters had taught me how to bury pain until it went numb. I adjusted my stride, keeping six inches of cold air between our shoulders.

The mist hung thick over the flats. It smelled of rotting kelp, diesel fumes, and the sour chemical rot leaking from the captive's pores. My digital watch read 3:28 AM. We had roughly two hours before the clockwork timer on Vat Three tripped the purge valves. Two hours before twenty thousand gallons of silver distillate flooded the harbor conduits and turned every pack on the coast rabid.

Above us, Mhaeva's shack perched on four sagging oak stilts over the tidal gut. It looked like an overturned skiff covered in tar paper and dried fish skins. A single yellow light flickered behind the oilcloth window.

"Is your dock witch going to slit his throat or ours?" Lorcuin asked. His voice was low, clipped against the night wind.

"Depends on what you smell like to her," I said. "Try not to act like an alpha heir for five minutes. She charges triple for pedigree."

We climbed the slick wooden ladder bolted to the middle piling. I kicked the base of the plank door twice with my boot heel, then threw the iron latch.

The heat hit us first.

Inside, a cast-iron kerosene heater glowed dull orange in the corner, fighting off the damp Atlantic chill. Bundles of dried kelp, salt-cured dogfish, and bitter marsh-parsley hung from the low cedar rafters. A cheap battery lantern sat on the scarred worktable, casting harsh shadows across jars of grey brine and glass vials filled with murky sediment.

Mhaeva stood by the table, slicing the liver out of a dead flounder with a ceramic paring knife. She wore a stained wool sweater with frayed cuffs and an oilskin apron. Her grey hair was braided with thin nylon fishing line, and her pale, milky eyes tracked us without blinking.

"You brought mud on my planks, Fiadhuin," she said, not looking up from the fish. "And you brought a Tonnaragh prince. Did the council run out of marble halls to bleed in?"

"We need twenty minutes of clear speech from him," I said, nodding toward the operative.

Lorcuin dropped the raider onto the zinc-topped operating table in the center of the room. The zinc groaned under the impact.

Mhaeva set her knife down on the cutting board. She wiped her bloodied hands on a rag, stepped to the table, and pulled back the captive's left eyelid with a calloused thumb.

The pupil was milky white, ringed with an iridescent silver halo.

"Airgiod-Rot," she muttered, tapping the swollen vein along the raider's throat. The skin there was hard, like dried leather stretched over iron wire. "Third stage. His vascular lining is calcifying. Another half hour, and his cerebellum turns to wet porridge."

"Can you clear his head?" Lorcuin stepped forward, his tall frame forcing him to duck beneath a string of dried dogfish. "The council can pay whatever you ask."

Mhaeva looked at him for the first time. Her mouth twisted into a dry sneer that showed three missing molars.

"Keep your council coin in your pocket, boy," she said. "The Alpha Council hasn't held jurisdiction on these stilts since before your grandfather grew his first tooth. I don't work for promises from a house that rejects its own blood."

Lorcuin's jaw tightened. The muscle leaped in his cheek, but he held his tongue.

Score one for the old witch.

"Mhaeva," I said, stepping between them. I reached into my coat and pulled out the brass deployment cylinder we had taken off the raider, along with the dried ear token from my morning bounty. "Twenty minutes. The timer at the cannery is set for five-thirty. If that distillery purges, the whole harbor goes under. You won't have a mudflat left to dry your fish on."

Mhaeva eyed the brass cylinder, then looked at the dried wolf ear.

"Keep the ear for the Harbor Warden," she said. "I'll take three sovereign tokens from your belt and leave you the brass case."

I tossed three silver coins onto the zinc table. They clinked sharply against the metal, and I slipped the brass cylinder back into my coat.

"Done," she said.

She turned to a shelf of dark glass jars, pulling down an earthenware crock sealed with red wax. She uncorked it with her teeth and poured a thick, steaming decoction into an enamel bowl. The stench was eye-watering—sulfur, vinegar, and boiled sea-onion.

"Hold his shoulders," she ordered.

Lorcuin pinned the raider's upper body against the zinc. I moved to the head of the table, grabbing the operative's chin.

The captive woke with a violent convulsion. His back arched off the zinc, straining violently against the thick hemp cords binding his wrists behind him. A wet, rattling gasp tore from his chest as his neck snapped back.

"Easy," Lorcuin growled, pressing his forearm across the man's breastbone with crushing force. "Talk, and you get the counter-draught."

The captive's eyes rolled back. His jaw locked shut with a sharp crack of grinding enamel. Foam bubbled through his lips, thick and grey.

"Get off his ribs, Lorcuin!" I shouted. "You're collapsing his trachea!"

Lorcuin pulled back half an inch, but the raider was already choking. His neck muscles stood out in rigid cords. His airway had clamped shut—a classic silver-spasm triggered by aggressive physical pressure on calcified tissue.

If his throat stayed locked, his brain would starve in two minutes.

I didn't wait for Mhaeva's decoction.