I was surprised to discover that the king’s entourage had been here already and erected dozens of tents. My guards showed me to one that was practically a pavilion, a two-room construction in a startling shade of red. There was a basin and a brazier and a chest, presumably in case I wanted to unpack one of my travel chests, then repack it in the morning. This seemed excessive, given that all I was going to do was sleep here for one night, but I didn’t complain. Javier and Aaron had cots in the front room. I started tocomplain about that, then remembered what Javier had said about things not becoming truly dangerous until we were traveling. The guards were sleeping there so that they were between me and anyone who wanted me dead.
I had succeeded in pushing off my fears until later. Nowlaterhad arrived, and I wasn’t somehow magically equipped to deal with it. Poor planning on my part, clearly.
I stared at the ceiling of the tent for about five minutes. There was dark purple trim layered over the red walls. It looked expensive.Someone might try to kill me. Maybe being royalty means you have fancy tents as a matter of course. Also, someone might try to kill me.
Stop that,I told myself.You’re not going to do any good if you stand there panicking. Do something useful.
Useful. Yes. Someone might try to kill me, but I could still be useful until they succeeded. I unwrapped the chime-adder’s cage and fetched a dish of water. This was actually quite centering, because you cannot be distracted while working with a venomous snake. I slid a thin piece of board in to wall off half the cage, set the dish in, pulled the board out, and snapped the lid down. It took about a minute, during which time I did not think about people trying to kill me. Unfortunately, after the minute passed, the thought came back again, and I still had no idea what to do with it.
I watched the chime-adder slowly uncurl, all blunt head and flickering tongue. A living saint, small enough to keep in a cage, the cold, dry melancholic humor made flesh. She wore the same colors that I did, browns and earth tones, with a pattern of pale chevrons along her back. Young chime-adders were an elegant little deadliness, all nerves and whiplash speed, but mine was old and thick-bodied and, insomuch as a venomous snake can be, even-tempered. She was in a bad mood today, though, probably because of all the jostling around on horseback. She’d struck at the board twice, her tail ringing a carillon, and now eyed the water dish as if it were personally responsible.
I felt a pang of sympathy. I, too, would have liked to bite something, and I didn’t know who was responsible. No one had ever wanted me dead before. How was I supposed to feel?
I still hadn’t figured that out when Aaron put his head through the flap and told me, almost apologetically, that I had been summoned to dine with the king.
CHAPTER 6
I was glad of the over-robes that Isobel’s seamstress had prepared for me. Pulling one on over my traveling clothes didn’t make me look like a courtier, but at least I looked like the better sort of eccentric scholar. I splashed water on my face and only thought, a moment too late, that if someone wanted to take me out of the picture, they could easily have changed the water out for something like lye or oil of vitriol. Well, my face didn’t melt off, so apparently they hadn’t. That was a relief.
I hastily re-braided my hair, wondering how exactly I’d be assassinated. A knife? Would I be walking along and suddenly feel a piece of cold metal actuallyinsideme, down among my organs? An arrow? That felt like being struck, I’d read, a sudden hard blow, and only later did you realize that there was a piece of wood sticking out of you.
Better than oil of vitriol, I suppose.
Arrows seemed unlikely. People would notice that you were carrying a bow, wouldn’t they? Compared to a knife, anyway. Or maybe the assassin would just shove me off a cliff. There weren’t really any cliffs around here, as long as I avoided climbing a mesa, but for all I knew, Witherleaf was made of cliffs stacked on top of each other.
“Are there any cliffs near Witherleaf?” I asked Aaron, emerging from my side of the tent.
He looked puzzled. “I don’t know. I’ve never been there.”
“It’s fairly flat,” said Javier. “Why?”
“Nothing.” I didn’t want to have to explain my catastrophizing to my guards. It would probably sound like I didn’t trust them to protect me. For all I knew, one had gone in and checked the water before I even arrived. “Let’s not keep His Majesty waiting.”
I hadn’t really expected an intimate dinner with the king, but it must be said that I hadn’t expected a pavilion full of courtiers either. The king ate at a table on a raised dais. It was quite an elegant table, made of polished rosewood. I wondered how they’d transported it here. I had plenty of time to observe it, because I was seated at the same table, along with about ten other people. I didn’t know any of them, of course. I wondered if any of them knew who I was. Then I wondered if one of them might want me dead. My palms began sweating, and I rubbed them on my knees.
I was sitting on the king’s left, a far more honorable position than I’d expected. I had a feeling that a great many people in the tent were looking at me and speculating on who or what I was.
The woman to my left was small and definitely older than she looked. Her skin was smooth, but the corners of her eyes and the very slight creases in her lips gave it away. I put her somewhere in her sixties and hiding it well. She introduced herself to me, but I forgot her name immediately. Fortunately she was busy conversing with the gentleman on her other side, so I didn’t have to pretend I remembered it.
The servants brought out plate after plate. There were chickens stuffed with almonds and dates, dishes of thin rattail radishes pickled in sweet vinegar, and a magnificent slab of beef. Beef is expensive stuff compared to goat or lamb.Perks of being king, I suppose.
The dishes themselves were glazed a beautiful green, with an almost glassy sheen. Lead glaze. I looked at the cup in front of me, also green, and stifled a sigh. It would probably be rude to ask for a cup in a different color.Oh well, one meal’s worth of lead won’t do much.I wiped my sweating palms again.
“You need not fear poison, Mistress Anja,” said the king, perhaps mistaking the cause of my nerves. “The food comes from the kitchen under guard.”
“That is certainly one method, Your Majesty,” I said, becauseIsobel had told me to be tactful.It’s cute that you think that will workwould not have been tactful.
I wasn’t particularly worried about poison in the food, truth be told. Everyone was served from the same dishes on the table, so anyone trying to poison those would have to be willing to kill all the other diners in hopes of getting me. And as for the guard… well, it would be even more difficult to poison a dish by sprinkling poison on top while it was being carried from the kitchen to the table. Even if you were sure that you’d gotten enough onto the food to have an effect, even if it didn’t have a distinctive taste or appearance, you’d still have no way of being sure that your target would eat enough of the substance to be fatal.
Poisoning food on the spot is tricky, too, honestly. One of the servants might palm something and slide it onto the meat, say, as they handed me my plateful, but I’d probably notice a lump of strange powder sitting in the middle of the food. It is a sorrow to poisoners everywhere that very few substances dissolve on contact with meat.
You could probably get away with poisoning a sauce or a gravy, but it was far more likely that one of the servants would slip something into my cup of watered wine. Hmm. I could swap cups with the woman on my left when she wasn’t paying attention, but then I’d possibly be dooming Lady… Lady… whatever her name was. Or if someone was trying to murder her, I’d doom myself. Hmm.
I was just wondering which was more likely when she turned to me with a smile. “Mistress Anja,” she said warmly. “I am so glad to have a chance to speak with you.”
“You are?” I said, then realized a moment too late that I should probably have said something less blunt.
She laughed, a practiced trilling sound that had undoubtedly taken years to perfect. The rest of her had probably also taken years to perfect. Every inch was carefully polished, and she had the absolute confidence that can only be achieved by people who never haveto glance in a mirror to see if they are immaculate. Just looking at her made me feel like there was something stuck in my teeth.
