I remembered Mama’s stories of the bastard older brother, Baudouin, who had exiled himself deep in the northern territories after the old king had died. I remembered her snorting over rumors that the wrong brother had ascended the throne.
I remembered too the trampled roads I’d noticed on our journey here. The king had mentioned skirmishes. Had an army marched down those roads?
“With all due respect, Your Majesty, I’m more interested in hearing about you,” I said carefully.
He sighed. “I’d just left the council when I felt a twitch at my eye. Here.” He touched his face. “It grew worse throughout the day, and later that night, when I was reading a bedtime story to my youngest, it became quite painful. I went to one of her mirrors, blinkingto dislodge the irritation, when a trickle of gold fell, like tears. More gold fell as both my eyes continued to twitch. It was actually quite lovely, like I was going to a masque. Euphemia suggested we ought to host a ball.” His jaw clenched. “Then there were more twitches, more tics. Not just in my eyes, but in my fingers, along the sides of my hands. My arms and torso, my legs and feet. Even…” He gestured to the towel.
“And the twitches…” I paused, unsure of how to phrase the question. “Do they feel…like normal tics?”
“There’s nothing normal about this!” King Marnaigne snapped, his anger sudden and booming.
“Of course not, Your Majesty.” I hurried to appease him. His outburst reminded me of Merrick’s bad moods, brought on sharp and swift and without warning. “I only meant…could you describe what they feel like? It’s obvious that they’re quite…severe.” He stared up at the ceiling in stony silence. “Are you in any pain?”
“I look like a freak of nature, of course it pains me!” Marnaigne struck his hand against the table with enough force to splinter off a bit of gold decoration from the legs.
“Physical pain,” I clarified, keeping a steady voice.
“The…” His hand suddenly jerked to life as he struggled to find the words. “The…twitches or tics or whatever you want to call them—theshivers—are uncomfortable, certainly. The tremors can be quite strong. But the worst of it…” He sighed. “When one of the…attacks begins…I can feel the oil moving beneath myskin.”
“The oil,” I repeated, wanting him to further explain without putting my words into his mouth.
“This gold…stuff,” he said with frustration. “I can feel it moving in my body, like a living thing. I know it’s not supposed to be inside of me, and I just want to…I just want to…”
As he spoke, his cheek began to tremble, caught in a spasm, and before I could stop him, the king slashed at his face, freeing the fluid beneath. It dripped down his chin, giving him an otherworldly leer.
“You shouldn’t do that,” I said, wrestling his hands away.
“I can’t stop,” he protested, his voice rising to a whine. “I don’t want it in me. It just…it has to come out. I have to free it. I have to…” He swiped at his cheek again, releasing more of the gold.
“Have you tried to not scratch at it?” I asked, struggling to grasp his hands. They were slick and slippery with the fluid. “I know it must be uncomfortable, but what would happen if you try to make it through one of these…attacks…without hurting yourself, without freeing the gold?”
He shook his head, miserable. “It doesn’t matter. It comes out all the same.”
“How?”
“Through my pores, through my eyes, through my nose, through…anywhere it can.” King Marnaigne winced, sitting upright, grabbing at his knee as it began to tremor.
“There was a footman who was sick,” Aloysius spoke up. I’d had him remain in the far corner of the room, there to answer any questions I might have but a safe distance from the king and his mess. “They tied him to his bedposts to keep him from harming himself. The gold came anyway. Toward the end…he went mad with the pain, likening it to having metal filings shoved through his skin, excoriating the wounds raw with every breath he took. He struggled against the bindings with such wild force that his wrists snapped. He worked himself free and promptly slit his own throat.”
I gasped at the sudden and swift end of the valet’s tale.
Aloysius flexed his fingers, studiously avoiding my eyes, unfinished. “I’m told that the…material…closed up over the incision,keeping him alive for quite some time…. He had to perform the suicide three times before it took.”
My stomach flipped over as I imagined the poor man’s blood running together with the brilliant gold. “How ghastly.”
“Don’t forget that maid, before him. I caught this from her, I’m sure of it,” King Marnaigne stated without ceremony.
“A maid?” I echoed. “I’ll need to examine her as well.”
Aloysius sucked in a deep breath. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. She too is dead.”
My chest deflated. “I’m sorry to hear that.” I paused, weighing my words with care. “Did she…succumb to the disease or was there…an outside force?”
Aloysius ground his back teeth with a grimace. “Her mother, in an attempt to heal the wounds, wrapped her in wet leather dressings. She believed that as the leather dried, it would tighten the skin, closing off the pores and stopping the flow of…fluid.”
“I assume it did not help?”
The king squirmed uncomfortably from the table. “With nowhere else to go, the gold began pouring out of the girl’s mouth, dribbling out in clotted streaks. She suffocated.”
