And yet the attacks were so different . . . how could they be from the same group, with the same motivation?
I had to learn more. I had to know what they believed, what they wanted, what motivated them. I had to understand them, if I had any hope of surviving.
I raked my fingers through my hair again, and turned back to Naomi. “But I don’t know how court works,” I said softly. “That’s the problem.”
NINE
“HOW CAN YOU NOT HAVE KNOWN ABOUT THE POISON attempt last night? You should have eyes everywhere.” My father banged his fist against the council table, making it shake. I flinched, but Thorn, master of intelligence, stared him down.
“We do have eyes everywhere,” she said. “But mistakes were made.”
“Mistakes where the queen is almost killed.”
“Yes,” Thorn said. “I can only apologize for that, and apologies mean little. But the taster is alive, and no one else was harmed.”
“That is not an excuse. Your queen could have died.”
“Perhaps you should not be serving on this council, Sofia,” Norling said, “if you cannot perform your job correctly.”
“I am doing my job,” Thorn snapped. “And now we have more evidence to work with. The servant last night had connections with the Gustavites. She told us so.”
I leaned forward. “What do you mean, connections?”
“Your Majesty?”
“Is she one of the leaders? A new recruit? What did she say?” The need to understand burned inside me. I had to know why. But Thorn only shook her head.
“She was not specific, Your Majesty.”
“But she told you she had connections with the Gustavites?”
“Not in so many words. She was raving. In between her pointless protestations of innocence, she talked about the corruption of the court. She said it needed to be purged. To me, that suggests a strong connection with Gustavites. They were responsible for the attack at the banquet.”
“It doesn’t prove it, though,” I said. “It doesn’t even prove she’s one of them.”
“The most obvious answer is usually the right one.”
“But do you have evidence?”
“The information suggests—”
“But that information failed to notice someone was going to try and poison the court, twice. We don’t need rumors. We need proof. I’m just saying we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. It isn’t safe. The first poisoner used arsenic, didn’t they? But this one used cyanide. Why would they change that, when cyanide is so much easier to detect?”
“We will not jump to any conclusions, Your Majesty,” Holt said. “But it is possible they were attempting to obscure the connection, or they felt a more direct approach was necessary. Either way, we must prevent this from happening again.”
He began to lay out additional security measures, and everyone around the table nodded, and agreed, and planned. Mostly this seemed to involve extra security at the Fort’s entrance, a thorough check of all current staff, and the use of additional tasters, from the raw ingredients to the moment before I took a bite.
They didn’t spare a word for why a group might want to poison us all. And the why was everything, wasn’t it? No matter how many checks we had, someone could always figure out how to slip through. We needed to understand them.
“Do we have a copy of their book?” I said, in a pause in the discussion.
Holt frowned at me. “Which book, Your Majesty?”
“Their book. Gustav’s book. It would be useful to study it, to understand them better.”
“Freya,” my father said sharply. “You cannot be seen with that book. And what would it tell you, that you don’t already know? They want to kill you.”
“But why? If we can figure out why they hate us so much—”
“They hate us, Your Majesty, because we have more than they do,” Thorn said. “Nothing more or less than that. The court has money, and it has power, and they want that for themselves. Jealousy can be a powerful motivator.”
If they hated how extravagant and wasteful the court was, I could sympathize.
“Your sensitivity does you credit, Your Majesty,” Holt said. “But we cannot take a soft approach, not with all that has happened now.”
“Is it really sensitivity to care about the feelings of mass murderers?” Sten spoke quietly, his expression fierce. It would have been easy to forget he was here, near silent but always listening, if it weren’t for the intensity of his gaze on me. “I would ask why Her Majesty sympathizes with them, when they killed almost everyone any of us knew. Is that how we should conduct our diplomacy now?”
“No,” I said quickly. He continued to stare at me, and I couldn’t fit my thoughts into words. “I only thought—”
“Your Majesty may have a tender heart,” he said, “but you should remember why we are all here. It would be dangerous to appear too sympathetic. Do you not agree?”
A shiver of fear ran down my spine. He was still suspicious of me. If I seemed too sympathetic, I’d look like I was involved. And I wasn’t sympathetic, not to the idea of killing hundreds of people, not to any of it. But this was a puzzle, and you had to look at it the right way, without letting emotion muddle your thoughts.
But I couldn’t do that here.
I sat in silence, picking at the splinters underneath the table, as they returned to their discussion of guards and patrols. How could I get that book without any of them knowing? I couldn’t exactly buy it from a bookshop, even if I could leave the Fort. Someone like Thorn might have a copy, one she’d confiscated if not one she’d read, but she didn’t seem likely to share.
“We still need to find more tasters,” Norling said, “after the loss at the banquet. But to find people we can trust—”
“We should find a way to avoid using tasters at all,” I said. “They clearly don’t work—”
“They work far better than the alternative,” my father said.
“Then we need to find another alternative. Some other way of detecting it, some test. If we get scientists to study—”
“Freya!” My father’s shout almost made me jump. He was glaring at me, his face red. “All our resources must go to finding and punishing these murderers, and on protecting you. I suggest you focus on keeping yourself safe, as well.”
“I don’t want other people at risk because of me.”
“But they are. That’s what it means to be queen.”
I swallowed. A lump wedged itself in my throat. “How many tasters died at the banquet, for nothing?”
“None of them, Your Majesty,” Norling said, her voice a little softer than I’d heard it before. “Three tasters died, but not the one who was actually assigned the dish. It seems the tasters were eating anything returned to the kitchens, as well as performing their duties. By the time we realized there was an issue with the cake, several of them had eaten it, and two of them died. But not the one doing his job. So you see. Two poison attempts, two tasters who have survived. Put the worry out of your mind.”