Bitter Almonds

You stare at his text for a long time after the conversation ends.

He writes like a man carving into stone. Every comma placed. No softness anywhere, and yet you've read the exchange four times, and the fourth time you notice he answered every single thing you said, even the parts you didn't expect him to.

At the third hour after dusk, Mircea knocks.

"The king requests you in the library."

"Requests?"

Mircea's scarred eyebrow lifts. "His word, Envoy. I was surprised too."

The royal library takes up three floors of the citadel's central keep, ringed with iron galleries and rolling ladders, lit by green-shaded lamps. It smells of leather and cold stone and, faintly, of something sharp and chemical.

That smell is coming from a long oak table near the fire, where a silver-haired woman in a physician's apron stands over a row of glass vials, a brass microscope and what's left of Verity's bottle.

"Ilinca Moraru," Mircea murmurs. "Royal physician. Don't touch anything."

Ilinca looks up. She has a broad, clever face, laugh lines that must have been there when she died, and the silver eyes of all of them. She looks at you the way your grandmother looked at a child who'd come in without a coat.

"So this is Ava, the girl who almost drank poison at the king's table." She tuts. "Sit. You're gray. When did you last eat?"

"I'm fine."

"You're not, and I'll know if you lie, I was a village healer for forty years before I was anything else. Mircea, bring her bread."

"I said nothing reaches her mouth that has not come through me."

The voice comes from above. You look up.

Severin is on the second gallery, one hand on the iron rail, looking down. He must have been there the whole time, silent among the books. He comes down the spiral stair without hurrying, and the lamplight slides over him, and you hate, genuinely hate, that your pulse jumps.

He stops on the other side of the oak table.

"Sit," he says.

"I'd rather stand."

"I'd rather a great many things." But he doesn't push it. He takes a heel of bread from the plate Mircea sets down, tears off a piece, eats it, waits a breath. Then he slides the plate across to you. "Eat."

You look at the bread. You look at him.

"You're tasting my food."

"Yes."

"That's insane. You're the king."

"Vampires can taste any poison ever brewed," Ilinca says, not looking up from her microscope. "And it does nothing to us, or close to nothing. Makes him a bit cross."

"He's always a bit cross."

Ilinca snorts. Severin does not.

You eat the bread, because you're starving and because he's watching you like he'll stand there until dawn if you don't. When you've eaten half of it, he sits down across from you and folds his hands, and his face goes back to the throne room.

"Tell me about the bottle."

"I told you. Verity Kinsale sent it. My mentor. Director of the Envoy Office."

"How did it reach you?"

"Emlyn gave it to me. He said it came in the diplomatic pouch the morning I arrived."

"Sealed?"

"Yes. Directorate wax. Gray, with the Sighet crest."

"You saw the seal yourself."

"I saw it." Your fingers tighten around the bread. "What exactly are you accusing my government of, Your Majesty? Say it."

His silver eyes hold yours. "I'm not accusing. I'm asking. Your kind generally take that as the same thing."

"That's because when you ask, it sounds like a sentence."

The corner of Ilinca's mouth twitches.

Severin leans forward. "Then let me be plain, Miss Tregarthen. Last night someone put enough poison in a sealed bottle to kill a woman of your size four times over, and arranged for that bottle to be poured at my table, in front of my whole court, on the second night of negotiations everyone knows I intend to fail. If you had died, by morning every news service your Directorate controls would have said that the vampire king murdered a human envoy at dinner." His voice doesn't rise. It doesn't need to. "Who benefits from that, Envoy? Not me."

"Not anyone in Vienna either," you say. "We want the Accord renewed. That's the whole point of sending me."

"Is it?"

"Yes!"

"Then why did they send you?"

It lands right where you've been bruised for a week. You feel your face heat.

"Because no one else would come," you say. Quietly. "Three senior ambassadors said no. I said yes."

Something flickers across his face, there and gone.

"And did no one ask," he says, "why three senior ambassadors said no?"

You don't answer. You can't.

He sits back. For a long moment the only sound is the fire and the tiny clink of Ilinca's glass.

"I'm not your enemy tonight," he says at last, and it sounds like it costs him. "I don't know yet who is. Until I do, you'll stay in the tower, you'll eat what I've tasted, and you'll tell Mircea before you go anywhere at all. Those are not requests either."

"You're very fond of things that aren't requests."

"I am a king. It's a hazard of the work."

"Then here's one of mine." You put both hands flat on the table. "I'm not a prisoner. If I stay in your tower, it's because I've chosen to. And I want to know everything you find out about that wine. Everything. The minute you know it. If someone tried to kill me, I'm not going to be the last person in this citadel to hear why."

He looks at you for a long beat. You think he's going to refuse.

"Agreed," he says.

You blink. "Just like that?"

"You argued well. I find I don't enjoy it as much as I'd like to." He turns his head. "Ilinca."

Ilinca straightens from the microscope. She isn't smiling anymore. She takes off her spectacles, folds them, and sets them on the table with great care, the way a doctor does before bad news.

"I know what it is," she says. "I've only tasted it once before, in a sample a defector brought us in 1991. I'd hoped never to taste it again." She looks at you, and her voice gentles. "It's called Lethe-9, child. A nerve agent. Slow, quiet, looks like a heart attack in a healthy young woman. It's made in exactly one laboratory in the world."

Your mouth has gone dry. "Where?"

Ilinca glances at Severin. He nods once.

"Outside Graz," she says. "In a building with no sign on the door. It belongs to your Directorate, Ava."