Chapter 12 – A Taste of Poison #4
“Remin?” she called softly.
It was not a long search. The moment she stepped into the hallway, she heard a muffled noise that made her heart contract with terror.
“Remin!” she exclaimed, racing over to the privy and yanking on the door. “Remin, are you all right? Open the door!”
Again, the unmistakable sound of vomiting.
“Stay out,” he said hoarsely. “Go back to bed.”
“No! Are you sick? It can’t be the food, I checked!” Her hands went to her mouth in horror as he threw up again. “Remin, let me in!”
“It’s not poison,” he rasped when he was done. “I’m…I’m just not feeling well, wife. It’s fine. Go back to sleep, I’ll be back soon.”
“Stop telling me it’s fine!” Tears filled her eyes. “Tell me the truth, oh, I’ll go get Miche—”
“No.” He sounded so miserable. “Don’t bother him. It’ll pass.”
Ophele hesitated, torn.
“Then tell me what’s wrong,” she said. “You’re not fine. This is not fine.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” he finally admitted, low. “I had to…I know you were careful. I know it’s not…poison.”
But he didn’t, really. He couldn’t. She sank to the floor against the door, wrapping her arms around her knees as her tears silently overflowed.
“It really isn’t,” she said, scrubbing them away with the back of her hand. “I watched. We tasted every bit of it, and I’m not sick, and Davi tried it all hours and hours ago, he would…”
“I know,” Remin said, and fell silent.
“Why did you eat it, then?”
“I didn’t want to worry you.” He paused, and she could hear him trying not to gag. “Go back to bed, wife. I don’t want company for this.”
If he didn’t want to worry her, then he should stop trying to endure it all by himself.
Ophele retreated to the door of the bedchamber and then hovered anxiously.
From the sound of it, he was heaving up his toenails.
She wouldn’t want him to see her in such a state, either, but she couldn’t just go back to bed.
Could she be sure it wasn’t poison? Could someone have gotten to him after all?
Ophele had imagined this, but in her daydreams it had always been distant and dramatic, a thing that could not really happen.
She couldn’t stop thinking of Davi offering to switch plates at supper, and remembering that moment when one of the kitchen boys had shouted and she had looked away from Azelma’s busy hands.
At long last, the privy door creaked open.
Ophele fled back to bed on silent feet and slipped between the covers, pulling them up to her ears.
But it was a long time before she heard his heavy tread approaching and the loud clunk as he locked the door.
On the other side of the bed drapes, she could hear him building up the fire, and then a chair creaked under his weight. A rustling of paper.
He did not come back to bed.
* * *
Someone had searched Mionet’s cottage.
She had not been trained to notice such things, but there could be no other explanation. Shoe boxes slightly out of order. Ink bottles just a few inches from their usual position on her desk. The ribbon in her address book marking the wrong page. It was more alarming than an outright robbery.
It meant she was suspected.
By who?
Of what?
Had everyone been searched? It wouldn’t have surprised her, if that were the case; the attack on the cook had shattered the peace of the manor, and Mionet could not blame Duke Andelin for almost any precaution.
But though she watched the servants carefully, and listened to their gossip, there was no sign that they had endured the same indignity.
Ought she report it? Was it suspicious that she had not?
Standing in her violated cottage, Mionet’s hands clenched at her sides and she lifted her chin, drawing three slow breaths. It was suspicious either way. Duke Andelin’s threat rang in her memory, enough to send a prickling chill down her spine, but she knew there was nothing to be found.
It would be easy enough to claim ignorance, if anyone confronted her over her disarranged things.
There was nothing like a crisis to clarify one’s position, and to Mionet’s dismay, it was neither so high nor so intimate as she hoped. If she could have gotten her hands on the real culprit, she would have happily strangled him. In a single stroke, he had undone the patient work of months.
It wasn’t just the rapport she had been building with the Duchess of Andelin.
Ever since she arrived, Mionet had been molding the whole household in the appropriate direction.
Just bringing its highest-ranking members—and Davi—to the table to share meals was a triumph.
Eating together was not a trivial thing.
Over time, even the most banal conversations built up into real intimacy, like flakes of snow in a blizzard.
She had been working assiduously to make sure those conversations were not banal.
The Duchess of Andelin was her most important relationship, yes, but Mionet had been cultivating a rather intellectual understanding with Justenin, and fostering camaraderie with Leonin, a gentleman of the capital in every way.
She had pushed the dangerous Miche of Harnost aside and—she thought—even made a little progress with Duke Andelin himself.
He was not a friendly man, but he respected courage, and Mionet had chosen moments to distinguish herself carefully.
And then that botched assassination had blown everything to flinders.
“Why can’t you just work here?” Duchess Andelin was entreating her husband as Mionet entered the solar one morning, a week after the attempt on Wen. This was an area where things were going askew.
“I can’t hide away, wife.” He darted a sharp glance at Mionet and moved them both away, but even from the other end of the room, Mionet’s keen ears still caught the words. “I’ll be fine. I’m guarded.”
“Then at least come home for supper,” she said, catching his sleeve. “Please.”
“Ophele. You don’t need to worry about this.” His tone sharpened. “You don’t need to do anything.”
“I said I was sorry,” she whispered. “Won’t you just—”
“I said no.”
The words were so harsh, Mionet stiffened. From the corner of her eye, she could see him looming over his wife, nudging her chin up with a finger to make her look at him.
“This is not a puzzle for you to solve,” he told her, glowering. “Don’t you ever do such a thing again. Promise me.”
“Promise.” It was not a request.
She must have said something satisfactory, but Mionet had to look away at that point, feeling the outrage rise clear from her toes to her ears. She couldn’t imagine what the lady could have done that would merit the snarling correction of Remin Grimjaw.
“…stay here,” he finished, his eyes flicking the command to Leonin and Davi, who were just coming in for breakfast. “Anyone who wants to see you can come here.”
The duchess bit her lip and nodded, and Mionet couldn’t tell whether it was because she feared to speak, or feared to speak in present company.
In either case, her husband was not inclined to listen.
He gave her one last black look and then ducked out the door, lumbering off to find some other tiny, harmless creature to brutalize.
It was not Mionet’s place to comment. That was abundantly clear from all the looking that had just occurred: Duchess Andelin’s appealing glance at Justenin, who had been standing just outside the door.
His Grace’s silent order to Leonin and Davi.
The duchess’s unhappy glance at those two men as she went to sit down to breakfast. It mattered, who sought whose eyes, and who participated in those silent communications.
And who did not.
Mionet was not being excluded. She was just not being included.
She had no place in the present crisis. And with no clear direction as to why, or whether she was accounted among the potential enemies, she could not even capitalize on His Grace’s unpleasant behavior as a lever to move herself nearer the duchess.
But whatever their trouble was, it hung in the air like a stench, and through most of the morning’s lessons, Mionet had the distinct impression she was talking to the air.
“…the horse races, in June,” she went on, a recital of the highlights of the social season. “They are very popular, all the finest beasts in the Emp—”
“Mionet.” Duchess Andelin lifted her head, which had been propped pensively on her hand. “Is there any way we could just not go to the capital? Surely if everyone knew that someone was trying to kill His Grace again, they would understand, wouldn’t they?”
“I—I’m afraid it’s not that simple, my lady,” Mionet replied, concealing her surprise and alarm at this request. Well, she supposed it wasn’t surprising. “The sacred Divinity has commanded it. He has the right to order his lords to come to court.”
“So he can murder them more conveniently?”
That question was so shocking, even Leonin’s mouth fell open. Mionet drew a sharp breath.
“That—that is…my lady, it is unwise…” she began, plunged abruptly into a sea of treason and searching desperately for land. “I…understand that you may feel so. But those words might be considered treason for everyone that hears them.”
“But it’s true. Doesn’t everyone already know it’s true?” The duchess asked in confusion, looking from one face to the next. “Even in Aldeburke we heard about the assassins, and the only person who would—”
“Well, yes, yes, that is…something,” Mionet intervened, before she could complete the dangerous sentence.
“It has been very…unfortunate, for His Grace. But there are other considerations one must consider: the matter of his parents, his antagonism with the Divinity. You have not even heard of that first audience, everyone knows it went so poorly. And then the war, and the way he harrowed Valleth from the Andelin, and…other tales.”