Who Poisoned the Tea?

For a long moment, nobody moved.

The tea steamed. The fire popped. Pell lay on his side on the stone floor with his white hair spread across the flagstones and his small, gentle hand still curled around nothing. His eyes were open. He looked mildly surprised.

Then the room erupted.

Kael was on his feet so fast that his chair crashed backward. He seized my wrist and hauled me up and away from the table, and before I could speak he had one hand pressed flat to my cheek, tilting my face toward the light, his dark gaze scanning my eyes, my lips, my throat.

"Did you drink it?"

"No."

"Not even a sip?"

"Kael, I never touched it. I—"

"Look at me." He turned my face to the other side. "Your pupils are even. Your skin is warm. You are breathing normally." He said it in the quick, flat voice of a man reciting a checklist, but his hand was trembling against my jaw. I do not think he knew. "Tell me if you feel anything. Dizzy, numb, cold. Anything."

"I am fine. I promise."

"Dorian! Seal the room. Nobody leaves."

"Already done, Majesty." Dorian had a hand on his sword hilt and a gaunt look on his face. The two footmen stood against the wall with their hands raised, white as paper. "Rhys is on his way. Mara is coming."

"Good." Kael did not let go of me. "Nobody touches the cup. Nobody touches the tray."

I stood still in his grip and let him look at me for a moment longer than he needed to. It was a strange sensation, being checked over like something precious. No one had done it in sixteen years.

I did not like how much I wanted him to keep doing it.

Mara Quill arrived in under five minutes, a small, brisk woman in a green healer's apron with her dark hair pinned back in a knot. She knelt beside Pell without a word and laid two fingers against his throat. Then she bent and smelled his lips, and her mouth pressed into a thin line.

"Nightshade," she said. "And silver-salt. The same as the girl."

"It was in the tea?"

She lifted my cup carefully with a pair of tongs, sniffed, and sat back on her heels. "Yes. A strong dose. Enough to kill three men." Her gaze slid to me. It lingered. Something moved behind her tired green eyes, relief, fear, and something deeper that I could not name. "You are very lucky, my lady."

"I am not lucky," I said. "He is dead."

"Yes." She closed Pell's eyes with a gentle hand. "He was a good man. He taught me how to pick mushrooms when I was fifteen. He used to bring me honey cake on my birthday." Her voice cracked a little. She pressed her lips together and did not let it break. "He did not deserve this."

I looked down at the old taster's face, and I saw his thread.

I had not meant to look. But the shock had loosened something in me. The edges of my sight had opened up, and there it was, running out of Pell's chest like a ribbon of dull silver. It was not the soft, living glow of a true bond. It had the flat, bright, even shine I now knew too well.

Forged.

Pell had been leashed.

My heart began to hammer. The thread did not drift lazily, as a thread did when its owner died. It was still taut, stretched in a straight line toward the ceiling, as if something far above us were holding the other end. It rose through the plaster and the rafters and out of sight, and it was trembling.

"What do you see?" Kael said quietly in my ear.

I almost jumped. He had come up behind me, silent as shadow. "Nothing," I said. "I was only thinking."

"You were staring at him."

"He looked at me before he died. As if he knew." That much was true. "I keep thinking about his face."

Kael was silent for a long moment. Then his hand touched the small of my back, light and warm. "Do not blame yourself. The poison was meant for you, not him. That is the cruelty of it."

"It is not the cruelty of it," I said hoarsely. "The cruelty is that it worked."

The kitchens of Silvercrest Citadel lay deep beneath the east wing, a long, low, vaulted warren of stone arches and copper pots and roaring fires. At that hour of the morning it ought to have been a riot of noise. Instead, when Kael led me down the stair with Dorian a step behind, every cook, scullion and potboy had frozen in place. A hundred pairs of eyes followed us.

"Master Brannock," said Kael.

The head cook, a vast, red-faced man in a stained apron, dropped his ladle. "Majesty! I swear, on my mother's grave, nothing leaves this kitchen that is not tasted, and tasted again—"

"I do not doubt it." Kael's voice was gentle. "I am not here to accuse you. I want to know who prepared the queen's tea."

"The queen's—" Brannock's face fell. "Oh, Goddess. Is she—"

"She is well. The taster is not."

A murmur went round the room. Someone whispered Pell. A scullery maid began to cry.

"The tea was made by young Fenn," Brannock said, wringing his apron. "A good lad. Eighteen. He brews the morning pots. But I swear, Majesty, he would never—"

"Bring him."

Fenn was a lanky boy with sandy hair and a smear of flour on his nose, and he was shaking so hard that his teeth rattled. He dropped to his knees before the king. "Majesty, I did not put anything in it. I swear. I only boiled the water, and measured the leaves, and—"

"Where did the leaves come from?"

"A tin. A new one, from the stores. It came this morning."

"From whom?"

"I do not know. The delivery man left it with Master Brannock's mate." He glanced up, and his freckled face crumpled. "It was sealed. It had the merchant's mark on the lid. Green wax. I thought it was the ordinary order."

"Show me the tin."

Someone found it, a small round canister of tin, stamped on the lid with a crude green seal. A curled leaf above two crossed keys. Beneath it, in tiny, cramped letters: HARLOW & SON. TEAS & SPICES. HOLLOW STREET.

"Hollow district," said Dorian grimly. "Lower town."

"The same district where Tam Garrow's mother lives," Kael said.

It was not a coincidence. It was a trail.

"I will send a squad," Dorian said.

"No."

Kael stared down at the little green seal as though it had insulted him. "If we send soldiers in uniform, whoever is behind this will vanish before we reach the door. I want eyes on the street. I want to see who comes and goes." He looked at me. "I will go myself."

"Majesty, that is madness," said Dorian. "Let me—"

"I go. Quietly. With two men."

"And me," I said.

Both of them looked at me.

"No," said Kael.

"The poison was meant for me. The boy's note was addressed to me. The girl whispered to me. Whoever is behind this is playing a game with me, Kael. I want to see what they are hiding." I met his stare. "And you will take me with you, because if you leave me here, you will spend the whole day wondering what I am doing."

"That is manipulative."

"It is also true."

He looked furious. He looked like he wanted to lock me in a tower. But I saw the moment he understood that I was right, and I saw how much he hated it.

"Tomorrow," he said at last. "At first light. You will wear plain clothes. You will stay at my side. And if I tell you to run, you run."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then I will carry you."

"You would not dare."

He raised an eyebrow. "Try me."

Dorian coughed discreetly into his fist. I realised that every servant in the kitchen was pretending very hard not to listen, and I felt my face heat.

I went back to the breakfast room alone that afternoon.

Pell's body had been removed hours ago, taken to Mara's infirmary to be washed and prepared. The tea had been poured into the sink. The tray was gone. Someone had scrubbed the stone floor so clean that it shone.

But I could not leave it alone.

I stood in the empty round chamber, in the pale gold light of the afternoon, and looked at the place where he had fallen. Nothing was left of him. Only a faint, lingering smell of cloves.

Then I saw it.

Hanging in the air near the ceiling, thin and bright and trembling, was a single silver thread.

It had not vanished with the body. It floated where the taster's chest had been, anchored to nothing, and it quivered like a plucked string. As I watched, it tightened. Pulled. Dragged upward, straight through the plaster, as though someone very far above us were drawing in a long fishing line.

Then it slackened.

A long moment passed. The thread hung still.

And then, as if satisfied, it slowly began to coil itself back into the ceiling and out of sight.

My skin crawled. Somebody had just checked on their work. Somebody had felt the old man die, and reached down through the stone to be sure.

"Who are you?" I whispered into the empty room.

There was no answer. Only the afternoon light, and the quiet, steady hum beneath the floor.