Chapter 12 – A Taste of Poison
“I’m fine…I’m fine, didn’t I tell ye I’m fine,” mumbled Wen, one beefy arm flapping. “Just a…fucking scratch…”
It was not just a scratch.
Grimly, Remin watched as one of Genon’s journeymen caught the waving arms and pinned them down, arms that were fishbelly white, hands that were still blue with cold. Wen had been lying in the snow for some time before they got him to the infirmary.
“If it’s just a scratch, you can hold still while Gen closes it up.
” Remin stepped into the small room at the back of the infirmary, shutting the door behind him.
Lying facedown on a narrow cot, Wen’s tunic had been cut away over the massive expanse of his fat back, where blood pumped from multiple stab wounds.
It was anyone’s guess how they had missed his heart, but Remin knew what Wen would say, with a mixture of pride and defiance: he was too fucking fat to stab.
“Hold him down, if you want to be useful,” said Genon tersely, threading a fresh needle.
Obligingly, Remin nudged the journeyman aside and crouched down, whistling lightly through his teeth.
“Wen. Wen. Look at me,” he said, and the cook’s muddy eyes swam up to his. “You can sleep in a bit. Can you tell me what happened?”
“Dunno. Went for a piss,” Wen said, the words emerging in staccato bursts. “After the bread…someone behind me. Hit me.”
“Did you see them?” Remin squeezed his big, beefy hands. Wen had hands like a brawler.
“No. Fucker.” His shoulders twitched, blood welling from the wounds on his back and streaming down his sides. “Didn’t see…nothing.”
“They didn’t say anything?”
“No.” He snarled through bloodless lips. “Tried to dr…dra—agh, fuck, stars and blazes, fuck! Fuck you, Gen!”
“Keep talking,” Genon replied, tugging with thread and needle. “Finish your story and I’ll give you some nice medicine.”
“Tried to…drag me,” Wen repeated, panting shallowly. His eyes rolled up. “Stupid…bastard…”
He wasn’t going to make it to the nice medicine. Remin gripped those big hands as they went limp, and looked up to see that Genon had finally stopped the blood from pouring down his back. His breathing was shallow, but steady.
“He’ll live,” Genon said, answering the unspoken question. “So long as he doesn’t suffocate himself, lying on his belly like this. One of the kitchen lads found him. Lucky it wasn’t long before he went looking.”
“That the boy with Auber?”
“Aye.”
“Tell me if you need anything.” Remin’s voice was cold, but he was gentle as he arranged Wen’s arms on the cot. He had known this would happen, sooner or later. It had happened before. It would happen again. And Wen was an obvious target.
Knowing that didn’t make it any easier to control his own reaction.
A spiral of useless thoughts and emotions, grief and fury and blackest hate for the fucking Emperor, who would not leave him alone.
It made Remin want to push everyone away, send his guards off, make himself the bait and hope that the assassin would show himself.
When he was younger, he had done exactly that, more than once.
It did no good. Assassins only came in their own time.
There was an order to these things. The note Juste had found in the barracks and the open window in the solar circled in the back of Remin’s mind, but first he would eliminate the possibility that someone had tried to kill Wen for his own sake.
It wasn’t impossible; Wen was offensive all by himself.
But that theory was immediately obliterated by the boy who found the cook in the snow.
“Me and Jules got him, Your Grace,” said the lad, a stocky boy of fifteen or so. “He didn’t come back, so I went looking, and I saw the…the blood, and yelled for Jules…”
Perhaps that had saved the boy’s life, if the killer was still close by.
After that interview, Remin went to see the tracks in the snow himself, well-muddled with the high traffic between the kitchen and the storehouse.
The essentials were clear. Around the corner of the woodpile, he could see the place where Wen had been stabbed, the sudden burst of red in the snow, the place in the snowbank where Wen had fallen, and the trail where someone had tried to drag him out of sight.
This boy had interrupted them, and the murderer hadn’t been willing to risk witnesses.
“Unlucky,” said Juste, who had arrived quickly and begun investigating in his own way. “They should have cut his throat, if they wanted to be sure. Trying to drag a man Wen’s size?”
“Did they mean to search him?” Remin wondered, his brow knotting. It was the only reason he could think why they would have tried to drag the vast cook out of sight.
“If they did, they didn’t find what they wanted.” Auber dangled Wen’s heavy key ring from his fingers. “I checked.”
That was the only good news of the morning. Whether they wanted the keys or Wen himself, they succeeded in their goal: removing a barrier between Remin and poison.
Leaving Auber to oversee the kitchen, Remin went to search for other witnesses with Juste and Miche.
The odds of finding any weren’t good. The secretaries who slept in cottages behind the storehouse had seen nothing, and neither had the Benkki Desans, whose talimaru, a small compound of houses and gardens, was only a short distance away.
“No, noble lord,” said Master Balad. Though it was barely dawn, he was already up and on his way to the baths, with his head freshly shaved and his iron-shod staff in hand. “We heard something happened.”
“News travels fast,” Miche observed sourly.
“I think Imari heard it herself,” Master Balad offered, apologetic. “I will get her.”
Remin had almost forgotten Madam Sanai’s first name until she appeared a moment later, her face flushed as if from exercise.
“I heard shouting,” she said, her eyes widening. “I thought it was just Master Wen, we hear sometimes. Noble lord, please forgive, I never thought—”
“Nor should you,” Remin replied gruffly.
He didn’t want his people to hear shouts and immediately assume someone was being murdered.
But along with his guilt and fury was the familiar embarrassment, that he was the cause of this.
The Emperor’s loathing had been a plague on him all his life, striking down innocent people all around him.
“Please ask among the others,” Juste told them, looking from Madam Sanai to Master Balad. “It would be a great help if you could remind them to watch carefully for anything strange.”
“We will, noble knight,” Madam Sanai promised, and both Benkki Desans bowed them out of the compound.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll go poke around myself,” Miche said as they mounted their horses. “People might be nervous to speak with their lord asking them directly.”
“Are you thinking of anyone in particular?” Remin asked, glancing at him sidelong.
“No. I wish.” Miche gave him a crooked smile. “The stars made me charming, Rem, let me see what I can make of it. Juste—”
“We will collect Auber on the way to the barracks,” Juste promised. Remin’s men would take no chances of his safety today, and Juste’s shoulder was not healed enough to make him a fit bodyguard.
Remin didn’t want bodyguards. As they rode around the bend of Eugene Street, his eyes went to the manor on its hilltop, the windows of his bedchamber visible even from the road.
He had dragged Leonin and Davi out of bed and ordered them not to leave Ophele alone for even a moment, but he was sick at the thought that danger could come so close to her.
That note. The open window. And now the man that cooked her food.
He knew, he had known that with so many people coming into Tresingale, it was inevitable that the Emperor’s servants would be among them.
But it made him furious to think of the people he knew and wonder which of them might be a liar, a betrayer, a murderer.
Was it one of the craftsmen? One of the refugees from his villages?
One of the people he had allowed to come across the river, one of those people from the Empire who had come to the Andelin Valley against his wishes, who he had forgiven, and welcomed into his lands?
One person? More than one?
Someone Ophele had invited into his home?
“Your Grace,” Juste said gently. “Anger will not help.”
Both he and Auber were looking at Remin, their eyes filled with compassion. And he was right, but it was a long time before Remin could even bring himself to speak. There was nothing he could hit, no one he could shout at, no enemy he could fight.
“I am wondering if we ought to bother trying to stop the rumors,” he said, his voice crushed flat with the effort of controlling himself. “I expect it’s already too late to keep it quiet.”
“I think that ship has sailed,” Auber agreed. “Too many people heard the racket by the cookhouse.”
“I would discourage trying,” Juste advised. “Whoever attacked Wen knows they failed. It might even be best to spread the word, to have as many eyes watching as possible. It will make further attempts more difficult.”
“Do you think that’s what Miche is doing?” Remin said a moment later, in tones of revelation, and Juste gave a rare bark of laughter.
“It would not surprise me.”
That was one bright spot in a day that was otherwise infuriatingly like any other.
Remin could hardly go about interrogating people himself; it would be counterproductive and dangerous, and not only to him.
Too often, it was the people around him that suffered.
Every one of his knights had scars from some attempt on his life, where they had given their bodies in place of his own.
Instead, Remin left the matter to Juste and went to the practice yards, burning off his fury so he could at least try to work.
This was how it was, with assassins. The attempt on Wen’s life didn’t change anything.
Perhaps they would get lucky and find witnesses, clues, but every single day of his life, Remin knew someone might come for him.
And someone else might be hurt because of him.