The poison was a masterpiece.
Morana admired the vial as she held it to the lamplight. Not a murky sludge, but a thing of eerie beauty—the color of a twilight sky over the Fen, shimmering with suspended specks like distant, malevolent stars. It was not meant to kill quickly. That was for brutes and butchers.
This was a work of art. A slow, cold fever. A delirium that would mimic a wasting sickness of the lungs, something the castle physicians would futilely treat with honeyed teas and steam tents. They would never think to look for Pale Creeper root, distilled in water drawn from a bog where only whispering willows grew.
She stoppered the vial and slipped it into the hidden seam of her gown. The stone walls of her chamber felt oppressive, so solid. In the Fen, walls breathed. They sweated moisture and shifted with the soft, living earth. Here, everything was unyielding, like the man who ruled it.
Tyrion was a good king. A just king. A fire king. And that was the problem. Fire was reckless. It consumed without thought for the slow, necessary rot that made new growth possible. It saw her homeland not as a vital, intricate ecosystem, but as a foul-smelling quagmire to be drained and conquered. He spoke of roads, of forts, of "bringing the light of civilization."
He would pave over the whispering bogs. He would silence the Fen's song.
Her hand went to her abdomen, still flat. The child within—Tyrion's heir—was her key, but also her vulnerability. A son born of Fire and Fen would be a bridge. Or a weapon. But only if she controlled the narrative.
The plan was already in motion. The two princes, her stepsons, were safely away, guests of her cousin in the Fen under the guise of a "cultural exchange." They would hear only her version of the coming tragedy. They would be the perfect, grieving pawns.
Kaelen was the obstacle. The Earth-Warden. The loyal brother. He did not trust her. She saw it in his eyes, the color of river clay, that measured her every move. He would be the obvious suspect. The ambitious younger brother. The story wrote itself.
But she needed more than suspicion. She needed a failsafe.
She moved to her dressing table, where a simple carafe of wine and two crystal goblets sat. A gift from Tyrion, from the sun-drenched vineyards of the south. So symbolically him. She poured, the liquid a deep ruby. From another hidden pocket, she produced a second, much smaller vial. This held not poison, but a truth-seer's bane—a colorless, odorless elixir that, for one hour, would make its drinker suggestible, their memories pliable as wet clay.
She let a single drop fall into the left-hand goblet. The wine swallowed it without a trace.
A servant would find the king dead in the morning. They would also find this carafe, and in the dregs of both goblets, the distinct, tell-tale sediment of the Pale Creeper. Evidence of a shared, fatal drink.
And Kaelen, who had stormed in here just this afternoon for another of his tense "diplomatic discussions," who had accepted a glass of wine to be polite before leaving it untouched… his fingerprints would be on the other goblet. The clean one.
He would have no alibi for the time of the poisoning. Only motive. And her own frantic, grief-stricken testimony.
She smiled, a thin, graceful curve of her lips. It was a good plan. Elegant. If it held, she would be Regent, the kingdom in chaos, ripe for the Fen's "assistance." If it frayed… well, she had prepared for that, too.
A whisper of sound, the softest scrape of a boot on stone, came from the corridor. Right on time.
Morana picked up both goblets, walked to the door, and opened it.
Kaelen stood there, his broad frame filling the doorway, his expression grim. "Morana. We need to talk about the borderlands. Your cousin's men are—"
"Please, Kaelen," she said, her voice a silken thread of sorrow. "Not tonight. My head aches with it all. But come, share a drink with your sister? For Tyrion's sake? To… easier days?"
She offered him the goblet in her right hand—the clean one.
His eyes, those hard, earth-reading eyes, flicked from her face to the wine. For a terrifying moment, she thought he could see the ghosts of her poisons dancing in the air. He could sense a crack in stone a mile away. Could he sense a crack in her performance?
He reached out. His fingers, stained with soil from the gardens he tended, brushed against hers as he took the offered glass.
"To easier days," he rumbled, his voice full of a weariness she intended to bury him under.
He did not drink.
"I still have work to do,"he said.
But he had taken the glass. His fingerprints, solid and real, were now etched upon her masterpiece.
Let the earth try to hold against the coming flood, she thought. She would see Tyrion soon, and share a different drink. The game was begun.