A Drop of Corruption Recap: How Ana and Din Solve the Yarrowdale Case

In Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Drop of Corruption, a Treasury officer disappears from a locked room high above Yarrowdale. The door was guarded, the windows were latched, and the bed was covered in blood. The detail worth remembering is the little piece of metal Dinios Kol notices by the window. It tells Ana Dolabra how someone got out. To solve the case, she still has to work out who was in the room in the first place.

Spoiler warning. This recap reveals the killer, the solution to the locked-room mystery, and the ending of A Drop of Corruption.

The short version. Sunus Pyktis kills Treasury officer Mineti Sujedo and uses his blood to get past the Treasury’s security. He later murders his own twin, Prince Camak, and takes his place. His plan is to destroy a shipment of leviathan marrow and make the Empire keep paying Yarrow for access to the Shroud.

If you need a refresher on Ana and Din’s first case, start with our recap of The Tainted Cup.

How did Sujedo disappear from the locked room?

The real Mineti Sujedo never made it to Yarrowdale. Pyktis took his place before he arrived, so the guards were watching a man who had already assumed the Treasury officer’s identity. The small piece of metal Din spotted helps Ana explain the escape. A magnet could move the window latches from outside, leaving the room apparently locked from within.

The remains recovered from the water answer a different question. Din and local warden Tira Malo find an odd mark on Sujedo’s torso. Ana eventually recognizes it as evidence of a blotley worm. Pyktis used the worms to transfer Sujedo’s blood into himself. That gave him access to Treasury locks keyed to the officer’s living blood.

These two clues explain why the opening crime is so easy to misread. The magnet tells Ana how Pyktis got out of the room. The welt tells her why he needed Sujedo alive long enough to steal his blood.

Why does the investigation lead to the Shroud?

Din and Malo trace the apparent Sujedo to a smuggling operation outside the city. They find a camp devastated by titan’s blood, hear about a figure called the Pale King, and recover an oathcoin that ties the operation to the Yarrow court. Now Ana has to account for a suspect with access to both court money and dangerous imperial research.

The Shroud is a living facility in the Bay of Yarrow where imperial researchers work with fallen leviathans. Commander Thelenai admits that she used an unauthorized augmentation called augury to give some of her researchers extraordinary pattern recognition. Pyktis was one of those augurs. He was presumed dead after a disaster at the facility, which gave him room to operate while the investigators looked for a living suspect.

Din goes into the Shroud and speaks to the surviving augurs. Their memories of Pyktis, including the objects he kept in a private shrine, help establish his connection to Yarrow’s royal family. Ana has already heard that multiple births run in the royal line. The pieces give her a way to explain both the killer’s access to court and the body that turns up next.

How does Ana expose Pyktis at court?

The king of Yarrow is poisoned. Ana identifies Treasury officer Gorthaus as the source of information Pyktis used in his scheme, but Gorthaus dies before she can name her contact at court. When Din and Malo pursue the fleeing courtier Darhi, they find a corpse that appears to be Pyktis. Some of the stolen titan’s blood is still missing.

The corpse is Prince Camak. Pyktis killed his twin, used grafts to alter Camak’s appearance, and left the body where it could pass for his own. The man presenting himself as Camak at court is Pyktis, who used his position to poison their father. Even Pavitar’s dead dogs make sense once Ana has the swap figured out. The dogs could have detected a difference that the prince’s human companions missed.

Ana tests the impersonation in front of the court. She plays a piece on her lyre whose sounds defy the pattern an augur’s mind keeps trying to find. The supposed prince reacts in agony. When Pavitar asks him to show his arm and settle the question of the blotley welts, he refuses and drops the disguise. Pyktis’s allies attack, Din and Malo help put down the ambush, and Pavitar kills Pyktis for murdering his own kin.

What was Pyktis trying to do to the marrow shipment?

The Empire has worked out how to move leviathan marrow and plans to withdraw from Yarrow. That would let it stop relying on the Shroud. It would also leave the enslaved naukari without the freedom they had been promised through annexation.

Pyktis wants the Empire to remain dependent on Yarrow, with himself on the throne collecting the payments. The attack on the smuggler camp frightens Thelenai into moving the marrow by ship, where Pyktis has a chance to destroy it. Ana realizes the docks are part of the plan and sends Thelenai to intercept the hidden weapon. Thelenai disarms it and later turns herself in for her role in the illegal augury experiments.

Where do Ana and Din stand before A Trade of Blood?

Yarrow’s court fractures, and many naukari escape. Din suspects that Malo helped them get away. Ana also helps bring the predatory lender pursuing Din under investigation, and Din decides to stay with the Iudex instead of transferring to the Legion. After watching both the court and the Empire conceal wrongdoing, he sees a reason to keep doing investigative work.

Ana leaves Din a clue about herself in an old book by the emperor. A passage about remaking the Khanum line gives him reason to suspect she belongs to that line. The case gives him a stronger reason to trust Ana and a bigger question about what the Empire has done to her.

Ana and Din return in A Trade of Blood, the third book in the series.

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See the Del Rey hardcover edition of A Drop of Corruption.