Princeweaver

Chapter 26

TWENTY-SIX

Yet love remains a venom

far deadlier than hate.

The Red Book,

translated by Idwal gan Hywel

TWENTY-SIX

Osian coughed so violently it rocked the table. He spluttered, coughed again.

Horror erupted as the violence of it ricocheted through the hall. They had seen this scene before.

‘Osian!’ Meilyr, already on his feet, grasped him desperately, uselessly.

‘No!’ Aldreda cried as the space rumbled with toppled chairs. Shouts of fear.

‘Osian—’ Meilyr fell to his knees as Osian came out of his chair and retched across the stone. But sense lanced through the horror. With Meilyr’s hands on him, he could feel it, could taste it at the back of his mouth.

This was not sorcery. Osian’s blood cried out, but not from that.

‘This is not sorcery,’ he said – to himself, and Aldreda, Demelza, Pedr, Blythe, Wystan.

His food? No, too vast – his wine?

‘Hand me his goblet.’

Aldreda shoved it into his waiting hand, and he inhaled the acrid scent. Took a gulp, rattled it around his mouth. Spat.

‘Poison.’

‘Gods—Healer! Poison!’

‘He has ingested too much. Help me get him on his back.’

Terror splitting his skull, Meilyr knelt over the prone prince. Osian’s skin bleached grey, and he mouthed like a banked fish, withering visibly.

Damn it, there was nothing else for it. Meilyr reached with the senses of his blood and pressed into the feeling of Osian, into the woven threads that bound their blood, their flesh.

It was its own form of drowning: a complete engulfing, like jumping into the sea, salt and currents and heat.

Pain. Shared, mirrored pain. Meilyr winced with it, then laid his hands on Osian’s stomach.

To anyone else, it might only look like applying pressure.

There. That was where the foreign, malign gathering congealed thickest, beating eagerly through Osian’s body. Meilyr gathered those parts like sheafs of grasses, firmed his hands and pulled.

Osian convulsed. Cried out in breathless agony.

‘What are you doing!’

‘Aldreda, wait,’ Demelza said.

The Heir Apparent’s sword at Meilyr’s throat would not have stopped him. He pushed his hands higher, up to Osian’s chest. Pulling, across his ribs. Past his lungs. His heart. His throat—

‘On his side, now.’

Pedr and Aldreda rolled him as Osian retched tar-thick brown and blood across the stones.

Then he quietened. A little dark saliva bubbled at his mouth.

Meilyr wiped it away with his thumb and brushed the damp hair out of Osian’s face. ‘That is the worst of it removed,’ he said, emptied save the roar of his pulse. ‘He needs an antidote now. Rest. Hopefully…’

‘Get a stretcher.’ Aldreda pried herself from the shock and rose, commanding. ‘Get the royal physicians to Osian’s chambers. Now.’

Meilyr stumbled back from the scene as Osian, limp but alive, was lifted onto a pallet and moved off the dais.

‘Everyone stays right here,’ Aldreda ordered. ‘Not you, Highness Cadogan. With us, quickly.’

He raced after them through the cacophonous hall, through the blur of the corridors and up. His hands throbbed, the pain the only thing anchoring him to his listing body.

Time quivered into detached, swollen instances.

‘What was the poison? Do you know?’

It still seared his hand, his tongue. ‘Fox’s tears. I can make an antidote with the supplies in my rooms.’

‘Go. Order anything you need – you, do as he says.’

The slow unfurling of golden henbane, the most vital ingredient, which the prince would die without.

The spice of burdock root. The hum of nettle.

The tremor in his fingers, subdued by the work.

The monolithic climb up those tight stairs and the vastness of the parlour before he could reach the bedchamber.

‘He needs to drink this. It needs to be kept down.’

The royal physician got to work. Meilyr worried his hands through the reflexive desire to step in as they tended the prince with their assistant. Osian was still ashen, but more alive laid in his bed than he had been in the hall.

‘Good work.’ Aldreda wore a similar academic practicality. ‘If this works, I owe you a great debt.’

Meilyr pressed his nails into his palms. ‘You do not, Majesty. Not at all.’

Osian spluttered – Meilyr flinched forward, but the physician and their assistant managed to restrain and settle him enough to keep the antidote down.

‘Fox’s tears?’ The physician glanced at Meilyr, approving. ‘How in the name of the gods could you tell?’

‘I have come across it before. It… I have worked with it before.’

‘A good eye, or good nose, perhaps.’

‘Or good taste,’ Aldreda said.

The physician glanced between them but knew well enough to let it go. ‘Whoever did this must not have used enough, or His Majesty was very fortunate in the amount he ingested.’

Wrong. Osian would be dead if Meilyr had not expunged the poison manually.

‘He should keep that down,’ the physician said, ‘but I have not seen this do its work before. What would you suggest, Highness?’

They turned the title on Meilyr. Aldreda waited.

‘He will need to be monitored,’ he began, ‘and—’

‘Meilyr…’

Meilyr’s entire being keened at the sound of Osian’s rough, broken voice.

He stood transfixed for a wrenched heartbeat, then succumbed and went to the bedside, took Osian’s hand into both his own and perched on the sheets. ‘I am here, My Prince. Rest, please.’

Something tangible eased in Osian. Tightened in Meilyr’s chest.

‘Watch over him,’ Aldreda said.

He could only nod.

Osian’s forehead beaded with sweat as more supplies were brought, the

royal physician’s assistant careful with all of Meilyr’s equipment as

they laid it in the parlour.

Through the half-closed bedchamber door, he was aware of them, and Aldreda’s sharp commands to Pedr, Blythe, Macsen and Garrick – the four who had carried Osian from the hall.

Pedr and Blythe were to watch the door, the other two the landing below – and all would be questioned with the rest soon enough.

That settled, she returned.

‘Do you have any idea who could have done this?’

She stood back from the bed, shock working beneath her levelled facade. She could not look at her brother.

They were alone.

‘Someone with enough knowledge of such a rare plant to know what it is capable of,’ Meilyr said. ‘Someone with access to his goblet, as the wine itself would mean we would all be dead.’

‘That plant’s rare? I’ve heard of it.’

No use skirting around the noose. ‘Osian – His Majesty let me grow it in the gardens. But it is rare, yes.’

Something dark flashed through her. ‘You are the perfect suspect, once again. How convenient – how much better it would be if I could believe you’d done it.

Convenient for me, but not for him.’ She swallowed, lips tight.

‘But I do not think you would have gone to such lengths to save him. There’s no faking that fear in your eyes. ’

He looked away, gaze unfocused on the shape of Osian’s fingers, entangled with his.

‘I will check in when I can,’ Aldreda said. ‘Call for anything you need, immediately. I have vermin to hunt.’

She strode out and pulled the door closed behind her.

Meilyr waited. Listened for each person’s departure; the physicians were to remain two floors below, in the spare rooms there, the crownsblood outside Osian’s chambers, ready to fly down to fetch them at Meilyr’s word.

His blood still thrummed. He waited, thumb tracing Osian’s.

That should do.

He eased his hands free and slipped from the bed to the door, which he locked as quietly as he could. Osian remained catatonic, chest moving in slightly laboured breathing, skin damp with fever.

Meilyr rewashed his hands in one of the basins of clean water. He had done so before he made the antidote, but the cloy lingered, the remnant sting of wrongness like a residual burn.

His skin was his armour, but he would be feeling fox’s tears for days.

Fox’s tears…

He could not think about it yet. Just like Aldreda, he had work to do.

He drew aside the covers and clambered onto the bed, knees against Osian’s side. It was sickeningly easy to lean into the thump of his blood, to catch the final threads of the poison, wormed to the recesses he had not been able to reach in the Great Hall.

At least it was fox’s tears, the awful, brutal thing. He had ingested some of the little plant as soon as it had grown large enough, whereas he was out of touch with other poisons; his blood might have dulled beyond use.

He would do something about that later. For now, his hands worked from the base of Osian’s finely toned stomach towards the broad planes of his chest, slower and more thorough than before.

Heat stirred in his cheeks. Be academic, he schooled. Be academic.

He focused on allowing his senses to snare the last traces of vile otherness. Thank the gods the prince had foolishly given him his blood; affinity with the plant was not enough – if he had not woven with Osian, the prince would be dead.

A fraction of the poison proved hard to shift. He could come back to it when he was rested, but that consideration evaporated before it fully formed.

Dreigiau preserve him, he needed more life force than his hands could muster, but there was no way to get the angle right. He shifted closer, focused on the soft bow of Osian’s gently parted lips. Focused on the invisible threads beneath his hands and drew them up Osian’s chest, where they snagged.

Meilyr leaned in, burning with the academic and the anything-but.

Slowly, he breathed in through his mouth, barely apart from Osian’s: breathed in the warmth of the prince’s life, pulsing defiantly beneath his fingers. He coaxed the last of the fox’s tears with the pull of his own life, the pull of their bond, up Osian’s throat.

He drew back in time for the prince to jolt violently in a cough, and brought the empty bowl over from the bedside table for him to hack and splutter the last of the poison loose: black and yellow-brown bile.

‘Breathe,’ Meilyr told him, arm steadying his shoulders. ‘That is the last of it.’

Osian wheezed, bent forward, exhaustion dripping. At a silent signal, Meilyr removed the bowl and eased him down, his eyes slipping closed. He touched Meilyr’s arm, weakly.

Meilyr brushed the hair from his clammy forehead. Osian leaned blindly into the touch, relief untying small knots in his face.

‘Meilyr…’

Gods.

‘I am here.’

Osian’s breathing steadied, body angled towards him. Meilyr remained, run through, not wishing to stir even as weariness bunched his muscles. His fingers had come to rest near Osian’s damp temple, where the top of his braid was a little untidy.

The downpour began, loud against the tower’s windows: an instantaneous crash, rushing into saturation and susurration. Like the roaring of the blood through Meilyr’s heart.

‘Forgive me,’ Osian mumbled, stirring. ‘I should…’

Meilyr ended the foolhardy attempt with a hand on his shoulder. ‘You need rest, My Prince. You were poisoned, and are in absolutely no state to do anything.’

Hooded night-ocean eyes searched his.

‘Wait here,’ Meilyr said.

Osian caught his wrist, weakly. Let him go.

‘I will not go far,’ Meilyr told him. ‘Just to tell Pedr and Blythe you are alive. To ask for some things.’

The sight of the prince was unravelling the fabric of what Meilyr was. He needed to be gone from that room, just to make sure he could still leave.