The Locked Journal

 

CHAPTER 9

ISOLDE’S POV

I did not drink the tea.

I carried the cup across the room and poured it into the washing basin, then watched the pale liquid swirl into the cooling water until it disappeared. The roasted chicken and boiled vegetables stayed untouched on the desk. My stomach twisted with hunger, but I would not let myself eat a single bite from that tray.

Then I walked to the door and knocked. One of the guards opened it a hand’s width, his spear still crossed in front of the frame.

“Someone slid a note under my door a moment ago,” I said. “Did you see who it was?”

“No one has passed this corridor since the maid left, my lady.”

“I heard footsteps.”

“You heard nothing,” the guard replied, and he closed the door. The other guard had not even turned his head.

I stood there for a long moment with my hand against the wood. Either they had not seen anyone, or they had seen someone and been told to keep quiet. I could not decide which possibility frightened me more.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and unfolded the note again. The paper was thin and yellowed, torn from the corner of a larger sheet, and the letters were small and neat, as if whoever wrote them had been taught to be careful with a pen. There was no name and no mark of any kind.

Anyone who wanted me dead would not have warned me. But someone might have wanted me frightened, so that I stopped eating, grew weak, and stopped paying attention. Either someone in this fortress wanted me alive, or someone wanted me to think I had a friend.

I thought about telling Orren. But if I showed him the note, I would have to explain why the tea frightened me, and every explanation I could give was either a lie or something I could not say aloud. Rhaelen had made it very clear what he did to people who lied to him.

I folded the paper into a small square and pushed it into the lining of my bag, next to the communication stone. Then I closed my eyes and tried once more to reach for the voice, and once more there was only silence.

I barely slept. When the guards unlocked my door at dawn, I was already sitting beside the cold fireplace, wrapped in the blanket, with my eyes burning.

Orren walked in first. His uniform was creased, and there were dark shadows under his eyes. Behind him came Maelora, wearing her gray hood and carrying the same leather satchel I had seen the night of the poisoning.

“The King has ordered the healer to examine you, Lady Isolde,” Orren said stiffly.

I stood up. “Am I ill?”

“His Majesty wishes to know whether you are harmless. Maelora will give him her answer.” He stepped back toward the door, and I noticed a smudge of ink along the side of his hand, probably from the morning’s reports. “I will be outside.”

The door closed behind him, and the key turned in the lock.

Maelora set her satchel on the desk and looked slowly around the room. Her gaze moved over the unmade bed, the basin, and the tray of cold food. When it reached the empty cup, she stopped.

She walked over, lifted it, and held it close to her face. “Chamomile and honey,” she said quietly. “Someone sent you tea.”

“Yes.”

“And you poured it away.”

My heart began to pound. “After what happened in the King’s study, I didn’t want to drink anything I hadn’t seen made.”

Maelora set the cup down, and for a moment she only looked at me. “That is the first sensible thing anyone in this fortress has done in days,” she said at last.

I could not tell whether it was approval or warning.

“Sit,” she said, pulling the chair away from the desk. “Hold out your hands.”

I obeyed. She turned them over and studied my palms and fingernails, then brought them close to her face and breathed in. She checked my eyes in the light from the window, then asked me to open my mouth, and when she was finished, she began taking notes in a thick leather journal with a worn clasp.

“Have you ever taken any herbs, tonics, or medicines?”

“Only when I was sick as a child.”

“Have you ever worked with silver, or kept anything made of it?”

“No.”

“Do you carry anything that does not belong to you?”

I thought of the communication stone hidden in my bag, and I kept my face still. “No.”

She wrote something down. “How did you know there was silver in the King’s medicine?”

I had practiced the answer all night, and it still felt like a lie in my mouth. “I noticed his hands shaking, and I smelled something strange. I only guessed.”

The scratching of her pen stopped. “Silver has no scent when it is hidden under bitterroot. I have studied it for most of my life, and I could not smell it myself.”

“Then I don’t know how I knew.”

Maelora lifted her eyes from the page. “That,” she said slowly, “I believe.”

It was not the answer I had expected, and it unsettled me more than an accusation would have. I decided to ask a question of my own before my courage ran out.

“Who prepares the King’s medicine?”

“I do. Every dose, every week, for eleven years.”

“Then whoever changed the recipe...”

“Be careful what you imply, Lady Isolde.” Her voice was quiet, but there was a sharp edge in it. “I have worked harder than anyone to keep that man alive.”

“I’m not accusing you,” I said. “I only want to understand who could have done it.”

“So do I.” She looked away, and the anger drained out of her face, leaving only a tired, frightened woman. “Give me your left wrist.”

I held it out, and she pressed two fingers against the inside to count my pulse.

At first, there was nothing unusual about it. Then I felt a faint warmth spreading beneath her fingertips, as if my skin had been left too close to a candle. Her fingers stopped moving.

I looked up, and the color was slowly leaving her face.

Maelora did not take her hand away. She turned my wrist toward the window and stared at it for a long time, and I saw her lips press together as though she were holding something back.

“What is it?” I asked. “Is something wrong with me?”

She released me so slowly that it almost seemed she had forgotten she was holding me at all. “Your pulse is strong,” she said, in a voice that sounded as if it belonged to someone else. “You carry no poison, and there are no herbs or powders hidden on your body. As far as I can tell, you are harmless.”

She stepped back to the desk and opened the leather journal again. I leaned forward to see what she was writing, and my eyes landed on the top of the page, where my own name was written in the same small, neat hand as the rest.

Maelora looked up and saw me watching.

She snapped the journal shut. From the chain around her neck, beneath her collar, she drew a small brass key that hung beside a much larger iron one, and she turned it in the clasp until it locked.

“What did you write about me?” I asked.

Maelora said nothing. She slid the journal into her satchel, fastened the strap, and walked to the door. When she knocked twice, the guards opened it at once, and she left without looking back.

The key turned in the lock behind her.

I stood in the middle of the room with my wrist still warm, staring at the closed door.