Chapter 12 – A Taste of Poison
“I’m fine…I’m fine, didn’t I tell ye I’m fine,” mumbled Wen, one beefy arm flapping. “Just a…fucking scratch…”
It was not just a scratch.
Grimly, Remin watched as one of Genon’s journeymen caught the waving arms and pinned them down, arms that were fishbelly white, hands that were still blue with cold. Wen had been lying in the snow for some time before they got him to the infirmary.
“If it’s just a scratch, you can hold still while Gen closes it up.” Remin stepped into the small room at the back of the infirmary, shutting the door behind him. Lying facedown on a narrow cot, Wen’s tunic had been cut away over the massive expanse of his fat back, where blood pumped from multiple stab wounds.
It was anyone’s guess how they had missed his heart, but Remin knew what Wen would say, with a mixture of pride and defiance: he was too fucking fat to stab.
“Hold him down, if you want to be useful,” said Genon tersely, threading a fresh needle.
Obligingly, Remin nudged the journeyman aside and crouched down, whistling lightly through his teeth.
“Wen. Wen. Look at me,” he said, and the cook’s muddy eyes swam up to his. “You can sleep in a bit. Can you tell me what happened?”
“Dunno. Went for a piss,” Wen said, the words emerging in staccato bursts. “After the bread…someone behind me. Hit me.”
“Did you see them?” Remin squeezed his big, beefy hands. Wen had hands like a brawler.
“No. Fucker.” His shoulders twitched, blood welling from the wounds on his back and streaming down his sides. “Didn’t see…nothing.”
“They didn’t say anything?”
“No.” He snarled through bloodless lips. “Tried to dr…dra—agh,fuck, stars and blazes, fuck!Fuck you, Gen!”
“Keep talking,” Genon replied, tugging with thread and needle. “Finish your story and I’ll give you some nice medicine.”
“Tried to…drag me,” Wen repeated, panting shallowly. His eyes rolled up. “Stupid…bastard…”
He wasn’t going to make it to the nice medicine. Remin gripped those big hands as they went limp, and looked up to see that Genon had finally stopped the blood from pouring down his back. His breathing was shallow, but steady.
“He’ll live,” Genon said, answering the unspoken question. “So long as he doesn’t suffocate himself, lying on his belly like this. One of the kitchen lads found him. Lucky it wasn’t long before he went looking.”
“That the boy with Auber?”
“Aye.”
“Tell me if you need anything.” Remin’s voice was cold, but he was gentle as he arranged Wen’s arms on the cot. He had known this would happen, sooner or later. It had happened before. It would happen again. And Wen was an obvious target.
Knowing that didn’t make it any easier to control his own reaction. A spiral of useless thoughts and emotions, grief and fury and blackest hate for the fucking Emperor, who wouldnot leave him alone.It made Remin want to push everyone away, send his guards off, make himself the bait and hope that the assassin would show himself. When he was younger, he had done exactly that, more than once.
It did no good. Assassins only came in their own time.
There was an order to these things. The note Juste had found in the barracks and the open window in the solar circled in the back of Remin’s mind, but first he would eliminate the possibility that someone had tried to kill Wen for his own sake. It wasn’t impossible; Wen was offensive all by himself.
But that theory was immediately obliterated by the boy who found the cook in the snow.
“Me and Jules got him, Your Grace,” said the lad, a stocky boy of fifteen or so. “He didn’t come back, so I went looking, and I saw the…the blood, and yelled for Jules…”
Perhaps that had saved the boy’s life, if the killer was still close by. After that interview, Remin went to see the tracks in the snow himself, well-muddled with the high traffic between the kitchen and the storehouse. The essentials were clear. Around the corner of the woodpile, he could see the place where Wen had been stabbed, the sudden burst of red in the snow, the place in the snowbank where Wen had fallen, and the trail where someone had tried to drag him out of sight. This boy had interrupted them, and the murderer hadn’t been willing to risk witnesses.
“Unlucky,” said Juste, who had arrived quickly and begun investigating in his own way. “They should have cut his throat, if they wanted to be sure. Trying to drag a man Wen’s size?”
“Did they mean to search him?” Remin wondered, his brow knotting. It was the only reason he could think why they would have tried to drag the vast cook out of sight.
“If they did, they didn’t find what they wanted.” Auber dangled Wen’s heavy key ring from his fingers. “I checked.”
