Chapter 12 – A Taste of Poison #3
“Wen?” she asked hesitantly, entering on tiptoe.
The huge cook was lying face down on a cot, his head angled to one side and his back swathed in bandages that only showed little bits of pink.
His big, rubbery mouth was partly open as he snored.
Glancing at Davi, Ophele crouched down in front of the cot and prodded the cook experimentally. “Wen?”
He gave a snort.
“Master Wen?” Ophele gripped her knees nervously and scooted forward on her toes. He had freckles on his cheeks. She had never noticed that before. “Master Wen, could you—”
Looking at all those bandages, she felt guilty. He might have died, and here she was bothering him about supper. But just as she was about to retreat, he snorted, blinked, and glared at her.
She almost fell over on her backside.
“Your…Grace?” he slurred, and twitched as if he meant to rise.
“No, don’t get up,” she said quickly, patting his shoulders. “It’s all right, Wen, I just—I just came to see you. Are you badly hurt?”
“Been stabbed a few times,” he grumbled, licking his lips and turning his head to squint at Leonin and Davi. “Come to…visit me?”
“Yes. Oh, I am so sorry,” she said, forgetting every word of the little speech she had planned.
“I’m so sorry you were hurt. They told me you were all right, but I wanted to see…
oh, and I brought you something,” she added, fishing it out of a pocket.
“I read that I ought to bring flowers to someone who’s sick, but there aren’t any, and Isilde showed me how to make sachets… ”
She extended the little bundle of silk, a sachet inexpertly embroidered with lavender, calendula, and roses on the outside.
“For me?” Wen dangled the object between his fingers, scowling. “It smells.”
“It’s meant to smell nice,” she explained. He didn’t seem to like it very much. “It has lavender and ginger and other things. I thought…it all just smells like medicine here. But you don’t have to keep it if you don’t like it.”
“It’s fine. It’s mine,” he grunted, closing his fingers over it as she moved to take it back.
“You look terrible,” she said sympathetically. “Does it hurt very much?”
“Bit.” Even with his eyes half-closed, one corner of his mouth twitched. “You come about…His Grace?”
“Yes.” Ophele was too worried to lie. “He keeps skipping breakfast and coming home after supper and he won’t touch any of the food I save for him.”
“Aye.” Wen gave a huge sigh and winced. “Got my keys?”
“What keys?”
“Storehouse.”
“Oh.” Ophele glanced back at Leonin, who nodded.
“Auber has them.”
“Good. Room inside the storehouse,” he began, and explained his methods for protecting Remin’s food in slow, slurred sentence fragments, sometimes falling silent for so long that Ophele wondered whether he had fallen asleep or just passed out.
It was dauntingly complicated. Wen was meticulous about every single stage of food preparation, from cleaning and sterilizing every surface and implement to cleaning and sterilizing the cook.
“Hair tied up. In a cap,” he said, with a snort that somehow indicated his own bald head. “Turn out all pockets, cuffs, sleeves. Make ’em wash their hands. And make ’em drink,” he said, glowering with his one visible eye. “Case they spit.”
“They…spit?” Ophele repeated, with dawning realization and then swift fury. “Spit…poison? Into Remin’s food?”
“Aye. Don’t take your eyes off ’em for one minute,” he said, and had to suck in a pained breath. “Not for…one second.”
“I won’t.” She had been angrier more often in the last few days than she had been the rest of her life, and she didn’t really know how to handle it, but it wasn’t Wen’s fault.
He had done everything he could, and more.
“I didn’t know how hard it was,” she said, reaching to squeeze his fingers firmly, though he had already sunk back into unconsciousness. “Thank you.”
Being angry didn’t help. And the slap of cold air as they went outside again cooled her a little, but she was still so furious she could hear a high-pitched singing in her ears, like the distant whistle of a teakettle.
Wen had done nothing to deserve this, and neither had Remin, and it was her rotten father who was doing this to them when all they wanted was to build Tresingale and take care of their people. How could she make him stop?
That problem was too big for her to tackle in an afternoon. Remin had been looking for silver linings for days, so she would try to make the best of this. If this had to happen, then at least it was a chance to get him to try Azelma’s cooking.
On reaching the kitchen, however, Azelma was dubious about the prospect.
“I don’t know, my lady,” she said, as she chopped rapidly through a pile of carrots. “I expect His Grace will be even pickier now.”
Azelma had neatly moved into Wen’s position, but if the long-suffering kitchen boys had hoped for an improvement in their lot, they were swiftly disappointed.
Azelma had been tyrannizing over kitchen staff for forty years.
A snap of her fingers instantly produced one boy, who disappeared with the carrots.
“Well, I spoke with Wen,” Ophele began, laying out Wen’s measures for securing Remin’s food. “Auber said he has kept Wen’s keys all this time, so no one can have gotten into the storeroom. If we test all the food, and clean everything like he said…”
“I suppose it can’t hurt to try,” Azelma said doubtfully.
“When we bring it up to the house, we can test it with silver in front of him, and then everyone will taste it, that’s what he said they do in Segoile.” Ophele had memorized every word of the precautions. “Then he can be sure it’s safe. He promised he would come home for supper tonight.”
“Then we’ll see there’s a supper on the table,” the old lady promised. “But it won’t hurt my feelings if he doesn’t touch it, child. I can hardly blame him.”
“We will all watch, so we can be sure it’s safe,” Ophele replied, filled with determination as she headed to the storehouse, where every single ingredient would be tested before it went to the kitchen.
It was more nerve-wracking than she expected.
Leonin and Davi insisted on doing the testing themselves, and even though she knew the room had been locked and they used the silver poison tester on the food, her stomach still gave an uncomfortable lurch as Davi dipped a finger into the flour, licked it, and made a face.
“Tastes like flour,” he shrugged.
But he didn’t drop dead over the course of the day, and three pairs of eyes watched Azelma through every moment of the preparations for a simple supper: mutton stew, parsnips, greens, and fresh white bread. Ophele even watched the sheep being slaughtered, which was just dreadful.
And even with all these precautions and assurances, it was still hard to face Remin that night.
“We watched Azelma make all of it,” she explained, feeling inexplicably nervous as she looked up into Remin’s opaque black eyes. “I thought, we could test it in front of you, and then taste it—”
“Not you,” he said, looking over at Azelma. “You eat it.”
“Of course, Your Grace,” she replied, firming up her mouth. Azelma was a chef trained in the Imperial kitchens; she was accustomed to tasting her cooking. With four separate silver forks, she tasted each course, presenting them for his inspection with Leonin and Davi watching every move.
There were only five of them at supper. Ophele had apologetically asked Mionet not to come, judging that Remin would not appreciate company. Her guess was confirmed as he sat to the table in ominous silence, refusing Davi’s offer to switch plates.
“I went to see Wen today,” Ophele began, buttering a slice of bread and lifting it to her lips. “He was talk—”
“Wait.” Remin spoke so sharply, it startled her, but his eyes were on the bread, not her. “We…haven’t said the blessing.”
It was an agonizing meal. No one else felt like talking, and Remin ate with a grim expression that was somehow different from his usual grim expression and responded to Ophele’s attempts at conversation with monosyllables.
His fork jabbed and lifted his food to his mouth as if every bite were a fresh-caught fish: raw, wriggling, and fighting to live.
Ophele couldn’t help watching him from the corner of her eyes, and everyone else looked anywhere but in His Grace’s direction.
“…and Master Forgess came at noon.” Ophele soldiered on. She was learning the value of Mionet’s lessons in making inoffensive and endless conversation. “He has been teaching me about taxonomy …”
She very nearly resorted to listing off various classes of reptile before the interminable dinner was over.
Everyone departed the instant they could and Ophele didn’t even bother trying to keep any food back for later; it was enough that Remin had eaten something, without hiding it in the bread or stuffing it into the mashed parsnips.
Surely it would get easier, once he got used to the idea of Azelma cooking his food.
“Do you want me to read to you?” she asked once the doors were shut and locked and the world shrank to the safe confines of the bedchamber, lit softly by candlelight. It was a relief to have him safe at home, where no one could hurt him.
He did. And a little while later, he took her to bed and moved in her with a different kind of hunger, taking her with hard, punishing strokes of his body.
He had hardly finished filling her before he was rousing again, and took her with such passionate violence that Ophele dropped into sleep like she was falling into a pit.
And woke to an empty bed.
Still a little dazed, she sat up and pushed the heavy bed drapes out of the way.
The fire had burned low, and the room was so cold, her breath puffed white as she slipped out of bed and fumbled about for slippers.
It took a moment to realize that the hall door was open.
It only led to their dressing rooms, privy, and bath chamber, but Remin never left any door open.