“I’m only a horse leech,” Rinald demurred. “I wouldn’t presume to tell a city doctor their business.”
“Well, this city doctor is begging you to tell me,” I said, taking out my notebook.
He grinned again, but it faded quickly. “Truth is, Healer, I was just as glad to hand it off to someone else. It came up suddenly, and then again it didn’t. She was here for a bit with no more trouble than not being able to sleep at night—and who can blame her?—and then the vomiting started. But that nurse of hers said she’d always been a puker, so I didn’t think it was anything serious, and it went away the next day. Maybe ten days later, the same thing. Over and over. The gap between episodes got shorter and shorter. But you do get children who’ll cast up their stomachs if the wind blows wrong, and at first it was long enough between episodes that it didn’t seem like they were related. When I finally realized it was more than that and looked back, it was obvious that it had been going on for months and getting worse.”
He took off his hat and fanned himself. I could smell hay and horses from the stable. Ironwood was in there somewhere, getting a good rest after days of work lugging my bones around.
“Truth is,” Rinald added, after a moment, “I think it might’ve been going on before she even got here. I don’t know that anybody even thought to notice the early stages. Why would they?”
I stared down at my notes. His account squared with everything I’d learned, though I was glad to hear it from him and not someone too close to Snow to see the larger picture. “Any chance she’d be doing it deliberately?”
Rinald scratched under his hat. “My gut says no,” he said finally. “I watched it happen a few times—came up to the house every time she was feeling poorly—and she didn’tdoanything. Just had some tea and a bite of toast, and a minute later…” He spread his hands. “And she getsrealsick each time. I actually worried she was getting antimony somewhere and changed out all the cups and whatnot.”
“Damn,” I muttered. That was one of the things I’d been planning on trying. Wine in an antimony cup will make you purge everything but your toenails.Oh well. If it was easy, the king wouldn’t have called you in.
“Thank you,” I said, getting to my feet. “This really does help.”
Rinald smiled again, though not as widely. “Anything I can help with, you just ask, Healer. I hate the thought of that child wasting away.”
“Actually, there’s one thing,” I said. “Do you know where I can get a rooster?”
The square-jawed man who managed the estate’s poultry was in awe of me as the king’s physician—or possibly mistress, I didn’t want to know—and tried to give me the finest rooster in the pens, a tall black-and-white fellow with a comb as scarlet as a sunset. I would have balked at using such a large rooster anyway, and certainly at such a handsome specimen. (Judging by the number of young chickens with his same coloration, the hens thought highly of him as well.)
After several explanations involving the wordssmall, tiny,andminiatureand eventually hand gestures, the poultryman was talked down to a half-grown bantam cockerel. I would have preferred to use two test subjects, but I had so little material to work with that I was forced to settle on one.
“Sorry,” I told the small rooster, lugging him back to my laboratory in a wicker cage. “It’s really nothing personal. I’m trying to save a life.”
The rooster was not interested in apologies, but was reasonably interested in the violet pastilles. He pecked them a few times to make sure that they were not some kind of weird human trap, then happily devoured the lot. He stretched his neck through the bars of the cage afterward and pecked at the flagstone floor experimentally, in case it, too, was made of food.
I went back to unpacking my lab equipment, keeping a close eye on my test subject. (I use a cage with fitted iron bars on one side so that I can watch in case they do anything interesting, like convulse.)
The floor was not made of food. The rooster tried another section of flagstone.
“Anything?” I said.
This patch of stone was also unsatisfactory. The rooster retired to the back of the cage to sulk.
I carefully decanted the chime-adder into her permanent cage. This was a tricky business and required heavy leather gloves. She rang her tail bells at me in annoyance. She was probably hungry after travel. I hadn’t fed her on the road. I was going to have to secure a source of mice. Yet another thing on my list of things to accomplish.
That list was getting sufficiently long that I needed to start crossing things off it. I solved the mouse problem by cornering one of the pages and offering him a bounty on live mice. All the pages were young lads, and if he spread the word to his comrades, I might find myself with more mice than I could handle. I decided, in a fit of recklessness, to charge the king for it.
“For my next trick,” I muttered, “I shall inspect the kitchens.”
Neither the rooster nor the adder had any opinion of this. I left them to their respective devices and went to see where the food came from.
The kitchens were neat and orderly, with no signs of sloth to be found. The counters were clearly scrubbed nightly, and the staff probably were, too.
It didn’t take much time spent lurking in the kitchen doorway to realize that here, too, it would be rather difficult to poison one specific person. The sandwiches were all made up in a bunch, and how would you know that Snow would take a specific one? The soup, likewise, was dished out from a single enormous pot.
On the downside, though, the far wall of the kitchen had two doors that stood open, leading directly to another courtyard and an herb garden that would have made our cook back home weep with envy. Anybody could have strolled into the kitchen. Hell, they might not even have needed to enter the kitchen at all—cuisinein this part of the world involved a lot of sun-dried ingredients, which adorned drying racks scattered around the courtyard, and there were no guards posted to watch them.
Whether guards would beneededwas up for debate. The ruler of this kitchen had the soft, comfortable shape of a fresh-baked loaf of bread and the savage gaze of a bird of prey. Holding a conversation with her was tricky, because she would break off in midsentence to shout things like, “That’s about to boil over! Stir it, you lump!” and “Dip it in eggfirst! What do you expect the flour to stick with, hope and wishes?”
She was more than happy to help me, though, and to my great relief, she didn’t take offense at the idea that I was blaming her food for poisoning the king’s daughter. “It’s a saints-be-damned mystery,” she said. “When she started getting sick, I made her food with my own hands and carried the trays up myself—Bruno, you’re chopping vegetables, not wood!—and it didn’t seem to make a damned bit of difference.” She grinned at me abruptly. “And I realize that means I’m the most likely suspect, but I wouldn’t knowhowto poison someone. Except with food poisoning, and I’d die of shame if someone took ill out of my kitchen like that.” She shook her head. “But nobody else has had more than a bad tummy from overeating, and I can’t do anything aboutthat.”
“I’m not blaming you,” I said hurriedly. (Shewasa prime suspect, but I imagined the king had already thought about that.) “But if you ever looked away long enough, someone might slip something in.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” the cook said. “But it’s been three months, and I can’t believe—Mina, those are supposed to besymmetrical. That means the same on both sides. No. Count them again—I can’t believe that I wouldn’t have spotted someone sneaking something in sooner or later. And Iwatched.”
