Chapter 20 The Taster
The Taster
Morning arrives pale and cold. By the time I am brought to breakfast, the light over the inner court has turned the snow to silver.
Thin sunlight lies across the long table in the smaller dining chamber Aunt Petunis prefers, touching the rims of the dishes and the polished necks of the pitchers set out between them.
Nothing in the room looks dangerous. Honey glows in a shallow bowl.
Steam rises from tea. Slices of dark bread rest beside winter fruit cut open to show jeweled flesh.
It is almost enough to make the whole palace feel civilized.
Almost.
Aunt Petunis is already seated when I enter.
Nyara sits to her right, wrapped in pale green this morning, her dark hair braided with small golden rings that catch the light whenever she turns her head.
Two attendants stand back against the wall.
Another waits by the door with the stillness of someone trained not to be seen unless needed.
Petunis lifts her eyes when I approach. Her gaze moves over me once, taking stock. Not warm. Not cold. Simply thorough.
“You look better,” she says.
“I feel marginally less dead.”
“That is improvement.”
I sit across from her. My body is still tired in the deep and stubborn way that sleep does not cure, but the scouring and Hyverin’s work have taken enough of the sharpness from the pain that I no longer feel as though I am being held together by thread alone.
That in itself is dangerous. It is easy to mistake less pain for strength.
An attendant moves toward me with a cup. I reach for it.
“Not yet,” Petunis says.
The woman stops at once.
I look at my aunt. “You brought me here to watch other people eat?”
“I brought you here to learn not to behave like an idiot simply because you are hungry.”
Annoyance rises at once, quick and familiar. “I am beginning to suspect that is your preferred way of speaking to me.”
“It produces the clearest results.”
She does not look away as she says it. One hand rests lightly beside her untouched plate. The other holds a folded cloth, which she sets down with almost absent precision before nodding toward the table. “You will not eat until the taster comes.”
I only stare at her. “Surely that is excessive.”
“No.”
“It is breakfast.”
“It is food placed before the queen heir in a palace that spent the better part of yesterday deciding whether to kneel to her, manipulate her, bind her, or fear her.” Petunis lifts a brow. “So yes. We will begin with breakfast.”
The title strikes harder than the rest of it, but she gives me no time to follow the thought. Nyara glances between us, saying nothing. There is sympathy in her face, though it is carefully hidden. She has already learned what can and cannot be shown in rooms like this.
I fold my hands in my lap and force myself not to reach for the cup simply to prove I can.
“My husband--”
“Is probably dead if he has attempted to find you. And worthless if he has not.”
“That is not my question.”
“No,” Petunis says. “I imagine it was not. Your question was probably some childish query for us to open our wards so that he may enter or so that you may find him." She looks up at me. "And the answer to that is no, and do not ask me again."
The door opens behind me before I can answer.
A man enters with one of the palace servants at his side.
He is narrow-faced and middle-aged, dressed plainly enough that he might have passed unnoticed in any corridor if not for the measured reluctance of everyone else in the room to look directly at him.
His eyes remain lowered as he approaches the table.
“The taster,” Petunis says.
The servant places a fresh setting before him. Small portions are drawn from each dish already laid out. A bit of fruit. A slice of bread. A spoonful of preserves. A cup poured from the same pot intended for me.
I sit back in my chair and tell myself I am only irritated.
The man begins with the tea. He lifts the cup, drinks, swallows, and waits.
Nothing happens. He reaches for the bread, then the fruit.
He is moving toward the last dish when his hand falters.
It is slight at first. So slight that I almost think I imagined it.
A brief hesitation in the fingers. A pause in the throat.
Then the cup slips from his other hand and shatters across the stone.
Nyara startles upright.
The man makes a sound I will hear again later whether I wish to or not, something wet and strangled that seems to tear its way out of him rather than pass through his mouth. He staggers once, reaching for the edge of the table, and dark blood spills suddenly over his lips.
He does not fall gracefully. He strikes the floor hard enough that the whole room seems to jolt with him.
For an instant no one moves. Then everything does.
The attendants rush backward. One screams. The servant near the wall drops to his knees as though that might somehow remove him from whatever has just happened.
Nyara has gone pale, one hand pressed to the table so firmly that her rings bite into the wood. Petunis does not flinch.
I am already on my feet.
The taster convulses once. Again. His eyes are open but wrong, fixed on nothing, the whites veined red. More blood runs from his mouth, too much, far too quickly. By the time the guard at the door reaches him, he is still.
Dead.
The chamber goes silent in the wake of it, not calm silence but the sharp and splintered kind left behind by a scream.
Petunis rises at last. “Do not touch anything on this table,” she says.
As though I still have an appetite after watching a man die next to my breakfast. One of the attendants breaks and runs for the door.
Petunis does not stop her. She turns instead to the guard now crouched beside the body.
“Seal the chamber. No one enters, no one leaves, and no dish from this room is discarded until I say otherwise.”
The guard bows his head. “Yes, my lady.”
Petunis looks at me then. For the first time since I entered the room, I do not mistake control for coldness. There is fury in her face, banked deep and dangerous.
“You may be annoyed with me now,” she says. “Later, you may thank me.”
My stomach twists, sudden and violent at the thought of how close the cup had been to my hand. I hate that she is right.
Nyara stands slowly, still pale. “Was it meant for her?”
“For whom else?” Petunis asks.
No one answers that.
I lower myself back into my chair because my knees have begun to feel uncertain in a way that has nothing to do with weakness. The dishes in front of me look unchanged. Beautiful, even. I cannot stop staring at the fruit. At the gloss on the skin. At the cut edges glistening in the light.
Someone wanted me dead enough to poison my breakfast on my first morning in this palace. The thought should feel surprising, yet it does not. It feels like the natural continuation of everything else.
A healer is sent for. Another taster. Two guards.
A woman from the lower kitchens who swears with shaking hands that the food never left her sight.
A man from the upper service halls who says the trays passed through three hands and no more.
Petunis questions them all with a calmness that grows more unnerving the longer it lasts.
I remain where I am. Nyara does too. At some point, fresh tea is brought in from another kitchen and poured under the watch of six different people. No one offers it to me until it has been tasted twice.
By then the body has been removed, though the dark stain remains between the stones where he fell. Nyara is the first to speak once the chamber empties again. “I think,” she says carefully, “that I should perhaps stop complaining that the capital seems severe.”
Petunis gives her a cool glance. “That would be a beginning.”
Nyara huffs a breath that might have become a laugh in any other room.
“I had planned to spend the morning looking for a place in the city.” She smooths her fingers over the edge of her cup, not drinking.
“Lord Eskarin offered to show me what parts of the capital are worth seeing and which parts are not.”
I look at her. “Did he?" For some reason I already dislike this Lord Eskarin and I do not know why. Perhaps it is because he seems to want to steal away my best and only friend.
“He did.” She lifts one shoulder. “He seems to have taken it upon himself to ensure I do not get myself robbed, insulted, or married by accident.”
“Ambitious of him,” I say.
That earns me the faintest shadow of a smile.
“He also invited me to perform at the theater tonight,” Nyara says. “Apparently the court prefers music when it is pretending not to be at war with itself.”
Petunis reaches for her cup at last. “Then you will perform at the theater tonight.”
Nyara blinks. “You say that as though it is an order.”
“It is.”
Nyara smiles despite herself. “Then I shall do my best to seem honored rather than conscripted.”
I glance at her, taking in the dress again, the soft fabric, the gold at her hair. “I am not used to seeing you like this,” I say. “You spent so long in trousers and tunics I almost forgot you owned anything else.”
Nyara lets out a quiet breath. “Now that we are in Alarna, I have not felt the need to hide,” she says. “Although pants and tunics are far more comfortable, so do not get used to it.”
Petunis clears her throat. “The Queen Heir and I will both attend,” she says.
I turn to her. “Must I?”
“Yes.”
“Someone just tried to poison me.”
“And tonight they will fail to kill you at the theater instead.” She sips her tea. “You cannot vanish into your chambers every time this palace bares its teeth. If you do, it learns too quickly that it can move you where it pleases.”
The answer irritates me precisely because it is sensible.
Nyara studies me. “If it helps, I suspect I will be more frightened than you.”
“I doubt that.”
“Oh?"