“My daughter Snow is sick.” He spread his hands. “It is slow, whatever it is, but it is killing her. None of the physicians I have consulted have the least idea what is wrong. Most of them say it is simply shock at losing her mother and her sister, but I know that it is more than that.” He put a hand over his heart. “Iknow. But I do not know what to do.”
Now I was on firmer ground. “Ah. What are her symptoms?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what is a symptom and what is simply being a grieving twelve-year-old girl. She eats little, she is very pale, her moods are erratic—but which of those is significant? And what am I overlooking?”
“I see.” He wasn’t wrong. Family members were forever trying to tell you what the symptoms were, in my experience, and half the time, they’d fixated on entirely the wrong thing. The other half of the time, they were convinced that they knew exactly what had poisoned the victim and were pointing fingers at each other over the sickbed.
How much worse would that be when the sickbed belongs to a king’s daughter?
“I have had what feels like every doctor in the kingdom attend my daughter,” the king said. “They have bled her and sweated herand accomplished nothing. They tell me that it is not consumption, nor ague, nor any one of a hundred ailments. But they cannot tell me what itis. And she gets no better.”
I doubt that I’d get better if I was being sweated and bled and having my feet blistered and the saints know what else,I thought, but I certainly wasn’t going to say that out loud. “So now you’re wondering if someone is poisoning her.”
It was a statement of fact, but he answered anyway. “I do. And I hoped that you would come to the palace and tell me what you find.”
I rubbed my temples. “Your Majesty,” I said wearily, knowing that I should just agree to whatever he wanted but fearing the consequences if I did. “I am at your disposal, but I must warn you that very few ailments are actually the result of poison.”
“No?” A half smile crossed his lined face. “To hear gossip tell it, no royalty has ever died of natural causes.”
I could not hide my exasperation. “Because it is a much better story to be poisoned than to have eaten a bad bit of fish, or contracted choleric fever, or drunk oneself into a stupor. People reach for poison as an excuse because they want something to blame. Most of the cases that I see have nothing to do with malice at all, and much more to do with drinking fouled water or eating the wrong thing by accident.”
My hammering heart palpitations gave the lie to what I was saying, but I reminded myself that the king couldn’t possibly know about them.
“You saymostcases,” the king said. “Not all, then?”
I bit my lip. “No,” I admitted. “Not all.”
It occurred to me belatedly that I was talking to a man who had inherited his throne because of poison. The old king had been convinced that his enemies were trying to murder him. He had been quite mad but not, as it turned out, incorrect.
The king nodded slowly. “I sent Snow away from the palace early on, away from courtiers,” he said. “When we still thought itwas grief. She improved for a time, but then it worsened again. My fear is that the poisoner has followed her.”
I picked at my skirt again. It was old and stained, the fabric long overdue for the rag bin, and I resented him a little more for seeing me in it.But it’s not as if I can wear a ball gown to process herbs, on the off chance a king stops by.
Probably there were noblewomen who did wear ornate gowns all the time, for just such an eventuality. But I presumed that they spent less time around open flame than I did.
“Do you have any idea who might want to poison your daughter?” I asked finally.
“That’s the maddening thing,” he said, rubbing his hands over his face. “I don’t. I have an heir already, and Snow is nowhere in the line of succession. At best, shemightmarry and have a child thatmightsomeday be in line for the throne, if my son Gunther’s line dies out.”
It seemed to me that this meant the most logical poisoner was the king’s heir, seeking to remove a possible future rival, but I didn’t want to say that. I’d never heard any ill of the prince, though, and in any case, he was currently several hundred miles away, courting the eligible ladies of the kingdom of Tohni.
“Will you come with me?” asked the king abruptly.
I lifted my head, startled. “Come with you?”
“To Witherleaf. To see Snow for yourself. To see what the others have missed.” Whatever my expression, he mistook it, because he gestured at the workroom, the sweep of his hand taking in the glass alembics and the jars and the chime-adder drowsing in her cage. “Bring your equipment. A workroom will be prepared for you. Anything you require. Witherleaf is only three days’ ride from here.”
Threedays?
I swallowed around my first instinctive protest. One did not say no to a king, and one certainly did not shoutno!in a king’s face.
“But… surely if you suspect poison, there are others betterequipped…” I tried, while part of me panicked about how I would continue my work so far from the city, and the other part panicked about what would happen if I failed to cure the king’s daughter of whatever mysterious ailment had taken hold of her, and a third, largely insignificant part noted that this batch of chime-adder distillate was the strongest one I’d cooked up yet, and I should probably back the dosage down if I didn’t want to give my patients heart failure. (This is why I test each batch on myself.)
“If itispoison, who can I trust?” the king asked. “My advisors have suggested a dozen physicians, for all the good it has done. So now I must askwhythey put those names forward and whom they might have served in doing so.” He shook his head. “But you… well, your father mentioned you to me a year ago, long before Snow became ill.”
“I’d saved his horse from snakebite,” I said wearily. “I think he told everyone in the city.”
“He told me, certainly.” Another faint smile from the king. “When I began to suspect poison, I remembered the story. And I have come to you alone to ask for help.”
