“I did wonder where Your Majesty’s… err… entourage was.”
“Doubtless drinking the excellent wine your servants have provided and wondering what on earth I am doing. Meanwhile, you have no ties to any of my advisors, no one has put your name forward, and you stand to gain nothing if my daughter dies.”
And neither of us will mention what I stand to lose.I wound my fingers in the folds of my skirt, feeling something duller than fear sink into my bones. It was not good to brag to a king, but it was much, much worse to fail one. “I… Your Majesty, you realize… I cannot promise anything.”
He met my eyes steadily. I thought again of how tired he looked, and part of me wanted to help him and part of me wanted to hide under the bed until the world went away and left me alone. “I’m not unreasonable, even if I am a king. If you cannot cure her, at least I will be no worse off for having you try.”
It was no use. My course had been set as soon as the stillroom door had opened to admit a king.
I tried one last time to change it. “I don’t want to give you false hope, Your Majesty.”
“And you are afraid of what may happen to your father and yourself, if you cannot cure my daughter,” the king said. “Aren’t you?”
I felt my lips twist. He knew, then.
Of course he knows, he’s the king, he’s been playing games with nobility all his life. And everyone remembers what his uncle was like.“The thought had crossed my mind.”
The king nodded. “I promise that no stain will attach to either of you,” he said. “I am grasping at straws. Don’t think I don’t know it.”
Yousaythat, but it will happen anyway. But what choice do I have?I blew out my breath in a long sigh. “Then, Your Majesty, I would be honored to grasp at them alongside you.”
CHAPTER 2
My interest in poisons began when I was eleven years old.
My sisters and I had been sent to the countryside to avoid the foul air that was said to permeate the city that summer, bringing typhus and glandular fever with it. My father had an estate there with orchards and olive trees and a small vineyard, all of it capably managed by our aunt. It was startlingly lush to my eyes—Four Saints is on the edge of the desert, and while you can grow plenty of things there, few of them come in such shocking shades of green.
On the first day, our cousin Anthony was given charge of his cousins and told to show us around the estate. Anthony was nearly thirteen and clearly resented being saddled with three younger children—my sister Catherine was only seven and inclined to be weepy—so he dedicated himself to showing just how ignorant the town-based cousins were.
“Bet you don’t know what this is,” he said, about the olive trees and the presses where the oil was made. “Bet you don’t know what this is,” about the killdeer pretending to have a broken wing and the great fields of ripening wheat and the ant lions hidden in their funnels of sand. “Bet you don’t know what this is,” he said, of the purple and yellow flowers of nightshade, which, he assured us, would kill us dead if we so much as touched a petal to our tongues.
And “Bet you don’t know what this is,” about a tall plant with a lacy mop of white flowers, which he pulled up from the ground, displaying a pale, knobbly root crusted with dirt.
“What is it?” asked Catherine, as she had asked for the last four hours.
“It’s a carrot, stupid,” said Anthony. “Don’t you know anything?”
“Really?” asked my sister Isobel, as she had also asked for the last four hours.
“It doesn’t look like a carrot,” I said. Carrots, in my experience, were purple or yellow, not cream-colored, although it was carrot-shaped and had the same little leggy roots.
“It’s awildcarrot,” said Anthony. “Bet you didn’t know they could grow wild. Bet you thought they only came from a market cart.”
I shrugged. I had never given much thought to the origin of carrots.
Anthony laughed at me, chopped the root off with his knife, wiped off the worst of the dirt, and popped it into his mouth.
Two hours later he was dead.
The next day, while the whole estate was plunged into mourning and Anthony’s mother had taken to her bed, I slipped away to the field where the poison hemlock that looked so much like wild carrots grew. I looked for the knot of lacy white flowers, pulled one up, then laid it out on the ground and crouched over the pale root, studying it.
I knew that death existed, of course. I had lost two grandparents and one baby sister in the crib. I had not particularly liked Anthony, though I felt very bad for his mother, so I could not say that I was mourning him. But it struck me as deeply bizarre that Anthony had been alive and then his path had intersected with this quiet little root and now he wasn’t alive any longer.
I sniffed cautiously at the carrot-like shape. It smelled like mouse nests. I wondered if Anthony had noticed that and simply kept chewing because he didn’t want to spit it out in front of his cousins after making such a big deal about it. Bravado and a little root no thicker than my own small thumb had killed him.
I could pick the root up now and bite into it, and I, too, would be dead. The thought gave me a strange queasy feeling, as if I was looking down from a very high place.
It had all happened sofast. Two hours! It seemed wrong that something so large and irrevocable as death could happen so fast. The sun hadn’t even gone down. Anthony had died in daylight, and no one had been able to say,Wait, stop, this shouldn’t happen,and change it.
