The blacksmith is snoring in his bed one morning when I wake early. I press an ear to the door of his room, listening for his deep cadence of his breaths. He does not stir, and I pad silently into the forge.

He keeps his earnings from the shop in a small chest under a table. In it is a large coin purse, filled to bursting with gold. It’ll do for my purpose.

The ball was two days ago. I’d managed to get back to the forge a few hours after Barnard’s attack, in the middle of the night. I hid out in my makeshift room down in the cellar below, slowly washing as best I could with my sore body. A bruise bloomed purple over my ribs on one side. I’d cut a strip of fabric from the bottom hem of my slave’s dress and wrapped my scraped hands in it, cleaned the grit from the cuts in my cheek. I’d bled from a tear between my legs. I hardly slept in the two days that passed.

Kneeling before the table in the shop, I slip the coin purse into the blacksmith’s satchel, slinging the thing over my shoulder as I close the door behind me. I try to hide my limp, but my teeth grind together against the pain.

The buildings cast almost no shadows over the streets as the sun sits high in the sky. I follow the maze of streets until I find a shop with a sign above the door carved with a mortar and pestle.

Inside, the apothecary smells spicy and floral. The wizened woman at the counter has the same sliced right tip of her ear and shabby slave’s dress as I do. I wonder how long she has been here, what she could have done to have been given this fate. I approach, digging out Barnard’s coin purse.

“I’m looking for a healing salve,” I say. I know my hair only partially obscures the scrape on my cheek. “Willow bark and calendula, preferably.” The woman nods.

“Of course,” she says. She hobbles out from behind the counter, selecting a small jar from a shelf. It contains a rust-colored paste, the ingredients ground and mixed together to create the salve. Once applied, it will relieve my pain and heal the broken skin on my hands and face.

The woman sets the jar on the counter. “Anything else?”

“My master has a pest problem,” I say. The lie comes out smoothly. “You wouldn’t happen to sell hemlock, would you? He says it’s the favorite of the rats.”

“I do,” the woman says. She goes and gets it from a shelf locked behind glass. The jar is spherical, with a flattened bottom and a small opening at the top sealed with wax. The clumpy flakes inside are bright white.

The woman tells me the price, and I hand her the amount from the coin purse with a smile.

I grasp the strap of the satchel over my shoulder; the jars clink together inside. When I return to the forge, Barnard still has not stirred. I hear his snores through the walls of the shop. I set the satchel down, pulling the jar of hemlock out. I pop off the wax seal with a nail.

I move silently into Barnard’s bedroom, like a mountain cat stalking through the alpine trees in the mountains. My gaze stays pinned to the sleeping blacksmith, spread out on his mattress.

I ease onto his mattress, pinning his arms to its surface as I straddle his midsection. My silver hair cascades over my shoulders. I tip the jar of white flakes into his mouth. It falls into his throat, and I clamp my hands over his mouth. He startles awake, and sputters a cough. He struggles under my weight, tries to kick me off, but I have the advantage here.

I look him in the eye—he can’t help but swallow the powder, with my hands covering his mouth. I feel it move down his throat under my hands.

I wait a short while, biding my time as he wriggles under me. Finally, he goes still, twitching slightly. The hemlock paralyzes him completely, but his eyes stare up at me, so wide that I can see the whites all the way around the dark irises. I release him, and swing my leg over him to step off the bed. His eyes flick to and fro, attempting to follow my movements, but he is immobile.

His mind, however, is aware. He knows exactly what I’ve done to him.

“You’re the savage,” I hiss, baring teeth.

Within minutes, the whites of his eyes are red with burst blood vessels, and bubbling foam leaks from his mouth. Barnard and I watch each other as he dies, and I replace the stopper on the jar of hemlock, leaving the blacksmith for the rats.