Synopsis

He had been banished, a prisoner of circumstance, yet his shadow lingered in the halls of power. A crimson stain, deliberately left in the Royal Infirmary, served as a silent plea – a desperate attempt to halt the flow of medicine meant for the King. The plan was to delay, to disrupt, and in that disruption, to unveil the true nature of the Crown Prince’s enemies. The poison, it emerged, was a relic of distant lands, smuggled from the Qing Dynasty, a venom for which no cure existed. The Cro