The emperor’s poison-tester was tall, gaunt, and feared. She swept like a vulture through the emperor’s court, shoulders hunched, smelling faintly of burned oil. Twice each day she tasted the emperor’s food, and the court watched to see that she did not fall dead before them.

Officially she was his Glory’s poison tester. But those who spoke ill of the emperor were wont to fall ill themselves, to sickness that made their bodies twist and writhe. The emperor called it the wrath of the gods, cast upon the disloyal. The entire court agreed.

Still, few spoke to her.

Except for Amra, a diplomat from Sunamey, who was jovial to everyone, cordial to her. He sat in the poisoner’s laboratory one evening, watching the sun set above the domed spires of the city and the sand dunes beyond.

He nodded to a copper pot which the emperor’s poisoner set to boil. “Who’s the lucky fellow?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.”

Amra was a stout man of middling years. Sunamey was in the east, but he dressed in the Imperial fashions: a trim beard in a crescent moon around his face, and robes as bright as poppies.

“Perhaps you will give me three guesses,” he said.

“Amra. The walls have ears.”

The poisoner had lank dark hair and a sallow face, as though all the sunlight she saw was through the laboratory window. The laboratory was high in the northmost tower, close to the emperor’s quarters, so that the poisoner could be called upon all times of day or night, whenever the emperor was hungry.

Amra said, “Come, Serash, the walls do not care for idle gossip.”

“Nor do I.”

Serash set a lid upon the pot, to let the Madonna berry boil and distill. She didn’t know who it was for. Maybe the emperor would tell her tonight.

“You, though, do not mind the walls.” She plucked at Amra’s sleeve, Imperial fashion. “Better than Sunamey, eh?” He had been at court for years. This harvest season he’d gone back early, to pay his respects to the winner of a bloody revolt, but he was at court again before the grain was stored.

Amra laughed and looked aside. “They say you do not mind. That you can slip through stone when the sun is down and visit unsuspecting men in their sleep.”

“To breathe death into their faces.”

“Most likely.”

“Better that than crawl into their beds.”

Serash stepped away and stirred the Madonna berry. Her tongue flitted out, tasted the spoon. Amra raised his eyebrows.

“Tell me that is pretense, Serash, and you will swallow charcoal and throw it up when I’m gone.”

Serash shook her head. “It’s not. But don’t you try it.”

“Why would you do that?”

“They say that if you take a little poison, your body learns how to fight it. Then you take a little more, and then a bit more yet. Eventually, you can swallow a vial full of death without flinching.”

He stroked his beard, watching her. “And can you?”

“Me?” She put the spoon down slowly. “I have so much time to waste, alone. What do you think?”

“So there are some poisons,” said Amra, “Which would spell the death of any man, even the emperor, but would not harm you at all?”

Her lips thinned to a line. She did not say no.

“Which you would not even feel?”

“That’s a very strange question, my friend,” the poisoner said.

“My apologies.”

“Perhaps you can tell me the gossip instead.”

And so he did, while she ground fine powders and crushed dried leaves, and always washed her hands between. In spite of this, filth crept beneath her nails. There was a purple stain across her palm that no amount of scrubbing could erase.

Eventually Amra took his leave, and Serash went to her bedchamber. She lit a silver oil lamp and undressed before a tall gilt mirror, commissioned for her by a late lord whose name she didn’t remember. Beneath her black robe, her skin was spiderwebbed with ink. Geometric patterns spiraled up her spinal cord. They curled around her ankles. The ink was said to burn like branding irons if ever she left the palace without the emperor’s permission.

It didn’t. But then, the times she left, the emperor had not noticed.

Upon her pillow was a small white scroll. The poisoner spread it over one bony knee and groped for her lamp.

There was a single name written in cipher. The strokes were harried and dark; the young scribe’s hand, since the elder scribe drank tea spiked with arsenic last moon. The emperor had suspected the man of treason.

Serash worked through the cipher, speaking each sound aloud.

“Amra Turin Werrei.”