Irina Jace's Arc

Chapter 4 of 9

Irina sat at Maren's workbench the next morning, her journal open to the page where she'd drawn both burns—the woman's and the man's. The patterns were almost identical, but the woman had found purple-stemmed plants near her home. The man had stolen compounds from the guild. She tapped her pencil against the page. She needed to see where those plants grew. If the woman had been near the same source as the man's stolen compounds, then the guild's facility was somewhere in Duskshade. Irina packed her journal and left before Maren woke, following the woman's directions to the north edge of the forest. She found the purple-stemmed plants growing thick along an old wooden fence, their leaves dark and waxy. Beyond the fence stood a weathered shed with a faded warning sign: ONE DACERERS NOW OLL DANGERS. The words were worn, but the meaning was clear enough. She walked the fence line and found more purple-stemmed growth clustered near the back corner. The shed's single window showed shelves inside, and on the bottom shelf sat a row of glass containers with residue dried along the rims. The colors matched the stains on the man's cloth exactly. She pulled a folded square of paper from her bag—something she'd taken from the apothecary's waste bin weeks ago because it changed color when wet. She pressed it against the fence where the purple plants grew thickest. The paper turned yellow, then orange, then deep purple at the edges. She touched it to a leaf stem. The paper crinkled and smoked. She held it near the shed's foundation. It burst into a corona of red and orange that spread like liquid fire across the surface before fading to ash. Her birch bark remedy worked because it sealed skin fast enough to keep the compound from spreading. But the guild's alchemical waste had soaked into everything here—the soil, the fence, the plants. Anyone who touched this area would burn, and she'd never stop treating victims unless someone sealed the source. She sketched the shed, the fence, the containers, and the reactive paper's color pattern in her journal. Then she sat on the ground and stared at her drawing. If she reported this to the guild, they'd know she'd been treating their stolen compounds. They'd ask questions she couldn't answer without exposing her work. But if she stayed quiet and opened her traveling shop, she'd spend years healing burns that never should have happened. She closed her journal and stood. The choice wasn't between safety and reputation anymore. It was between building her shop on other people's suffering or stopping the harm before it spread. She walked back to Maren's house knowing what she had to do. She'd document everything, give the guild one chance to fix their facility, and if they didn't, she'd make sure every trader and traveler knew exactly where the burns were coming from.