The door opens behind me before I can answer. A man enters with one of the palace servants at his side. He is narrow-faced and middle-aged, dressed plainly enough that he might have passed unnoticed in any corridor if not for the measuredreluctance of everyone else in the room to look directly at him. His eyes remain lowered as he approaches the table.
“The taster,” Petunis says.
The servant places a fresh setting before him. Small portions are drawn from each dish already laid out. A bit of fruit. A slice of bread. A spoonful of preserves. A cup poured from the same pot intended for me.
I sit back in my chair and tell myself I am only irritated.
The man begins with the tea. He lifts the cup, drinks, swallows, and waits. Nothing happens. He reaches for the bread, then the fruit. He is moving toward the last dish when his hand falters. It is slight at first. So slight that I almost think I imagined it. A brief hesitation in the fingers. A pause in the throat. Then the cup slips from his other hand and shatters across the stone.
Nyara startles upright.
The man makes a sound I will hear again later whether I wish to or not, something wet and strangled that seems to tear its way out of him rather than pass through his mouth. He staggers once, reaching for the edge of the table, and dark blood spills suddenly over his lips.
He does not fall gracefully. He strikes the floor hard enough that the whole room seems to jolt with him.
For an instant no one moves. Then everything does. The attendants rush backward. One screams. The servant near the wall drops to his knees as though that might somehow remove him from whatever has just happened. Nyara has gone pale, one hand pressed to the table so firmly that her rings bite into the wood. Petunis does not flinch.
I am already on my feet.
The taster convulses once. Again. His eyes are open but wrong, fixed on nothing, the whites veined red. More blood runs from his mouth, too much, far too quickly. By the time the guard at the door reaches him, he is still.
Dead.
The chamber goes silent in the wake of it, not calm silence but the sharp and splintered kind left behind by a scream.
Petunis rises at last. “Do not touch anything on this table,” she says.
As though I still have an appetite after watching a man die next to my breakfast. One of the attendants breaks and runs for the door. Petunis does not stop her. She turns instead to the guard now crouched beside the body. “Seal the chamber. No one enters, no one leaves, and no dish from this room is discarded until I say otherwise.”
The guard bows his head. “Yes, my lady.”
Petunis looks at me then. For the first time since I entered the room, I do not mistake control for coldness. There is fury in her face, banked deep and dangerous.
“You may be annoyed with me now,” she says. “Later, you may thank me.”
My stomach twists, sudden and violent at the thought of how close the cup had been to my hand. I hate that she is right.
Nyara stands slowly, still pale. “Was it meant for her?”
“For whom else?” Petunis asks.
No one answers that.
I lower myself back into my chair because my knees have begun to feel uncertain in a way that has nothing to do with weakness. The dishes in front of me look unchanged. Beautiful, even. I cannot stop staring at the fruit. At the gloss on the skin. At the cut edges glistening in the light.
Someone wanted me dead enough to poison my breakfast on my first morning in this palace. The thought should feel surprising, yet it does not. It feels like the natural continuation of everything else.
A healer is sent for. Another taster. Two guards. A woman from the lower kitchens who swears with shaking hands that the food never left her sight. A man from the upper service halls who says the trays passed through three hands and no more. Petunis questions them all with a calmness that grows more unnerving the longer it lasts.
I remain where I am. Nyara does too. At some point, fresh tea is brought in from another kitchen and poured under the watch of six different people. No one offers it to me until it has been tasted twice.
By then the body has been removed, though the dark stain remains between the stones where he fell. Nyara is the first to speak once the chamber empties again. “I think,” she says carefully, “that I should perhaps stop complaining that the capital seems severe.”
Petunis gives her a cool glance. “That would be a beginning.”
Nyara huffs a breath that might have become a laugh in any other room. “I had planned to spend the morning looking for a place in the city.” She smooths her fingers over the edge of hercup, not drinking. “Lord Eskarin offered to show me what parts of the capital are worth seeing and which parts are not.”
I look at her. “Did he?" For some reason I already dislike this Lord Eskarin and I do not know why. Perhaps it is because he seems to want to steal away my best and only friend.
