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So many things flashed into my mind at that statement. King Julius was paranoid about poison. He’d likely used poison to kill off other family members to gain the throne, as the rumors around Royersford whispered of. There was a chance that someone had tried to poison him in the last few weeks, since the riots.
But more than that, a few other things started to tick away in the back of my mind. The king’s foot wound was simple and the cut looked relatively clean. It shouldn’t be festering the way it was. It should have been an easy matter of keeping it clean, applying a healing salve, and letting the skin knit back together. Especially when the palace was, apparently, full of healers.
Unless there had been something on the blade that had made the cut that kept the wound open and invited infection. Unless whoever had treated the injury before had meddled with it to make it worse than it was. Unless someone was trying to assassinate King Julius through the subtlest means possible.
Prickles raced all over my skin. My deepest instinct was to feign ignorance and to let the wound get worse and kill the man. But I was a healer. I had to heal. And who would rise up to take King Julius’s place if I let him die? After Gomez’s death, Jace’s brother, Sai, had taken the crown of the Kostya kingdom, but if what the other Sons had written about just before I left for the Old Realm was correct, he was only a mediocre king, and the Kostya kingdom was still in a precarious position.
“Well?” the king demanded, showing me I’d let the moment go on for too long.
I did the only thing I could think of to prove I wasn’t one of the people trying to kill him. I held up the glass to show him where the water level was, then took a small swig myself, made a show of swallowing, then held up the glass again, pointing out the new water level as proof that I’d ingested my own tincture.
“Alright,” the king said, making an impatient gesture.
I handed him the glass, and he downed the entire contents, grimacing at the bitter taste. All around us, the noblemen and courtiers looked stunned that the king would take the medicine. Stunned and perhaps alarmed that someone was actually trying to help the man almost everyone wanted dead.
“I will leave the tincture with you, your majesty,” I said, handing the bottle to Mara so she could give it to the half-naked woman—who was the only one in the room who seemed to genuinely care about King Julius. “Take two droppers in water four times a day until the infection heals.”
“Do you hear that?” the king asked the half-naked woman. “You are the only one to administer this medicine, Eva. No one else is to touch it.” He glared at everyone else in the room as he issued the order.
I hid my surprise at the interaction by reaching for a bandage to wrap around the king’s foot. The king knew people were trying to kill him. He suspected they were all around him. It could have been paranoia, or King Julius might just have been wickedly smart to keep his enemies as close as his friends.
It came as a surprise a moment later to discover that, in a way, I was now one of those friends.
“I have always had a soft spot in my heart for my people on the frontier,” the king said, speaking kindly to me.
I glanced up at him and asked, “Your majesty?”
“Even though you lot are mischievous and disobedient, I know that you are loyal,” the king went on. “At least, those of you in the cities are. You are from Yacovissi, are you not? That is what your records at the college state.”
My hands shook horribly as I tied off the bandage. I could barely get enough spit into my mouth to form the words, “Yes, your majesty.”
The king grunted. “I’ve heard the rumors that my disgusting brother fancies himself a king of the forest onmyfrontier, but those rumors are nonsense, aren’t they?”
My heart dropped into my stomach, and my stomach fell to my feet. Did King Julius know how powerful Magnus was or not? For decades, the city-dwellers of the frontier had ignored and underestimated the forest-dwellers, and in the end, that had been their downfall. Did that willful ignorance extend to the Old Realm as well?
Of course it did, but I didn’t know how much to say or whether to encourage the ignorance.
“I don’t know, your majesty,” I said, hoping I could buy myself time to figure out what would have me dismissed and what would get me killed. “The frontier is filled with rumors.”
King Julius grunted. “That is a truth if ever I heard one! The information my spies have sent back is weak at best. Who would believe that a pack of boys murdered Gomez in a bathtub? Or that there is such a person called JorgenIceblade?”
He chuckled at the so-called ridiculous notions, then glanced around at the noblemen and courtiers until they chuckled as well.
“It is preposterous to think of mywhorebrother as a king, or that there is more in the vast emptiness of the frontier than a handful of wild men living off the land. Rufus is a fool if he thinks he and the rest of the traitors will do anything but die without supplies reaching him from the kingdom. He’s going to rue the day he destroyed those bridges.”
“It…it was only the one bridge, your majesty,” one of the noblemen said.
I would have gasped aloud if I didn’t think it would draw unwanted attention to myself. Only one of the bridges had been destroyed?
“Yes, but two others were badly damaged,” another of the noblemen said. “I doubt anything heavier than a cat could cross those ones without sending the whole thing into the ravine.”
“It might be enough to send carpenters across to rebuild the bridges,” yet another nobleman argued. “If the boulders could be cleared from the pass and the destroyed bridge rebuilt, it might be enough for those other bridges to be reconstructed. We could send another army across the mountains within five years at most.”
“Another army made up of who?” the first nobleman snapped. “There are only a fraction of the men under fifty in the kingdom that there were ten years ago. Years of foolish wars and—”
“Silence!” King Julius boomed so suddenly that I fell back on my ass.
The noblemen who had been debating backed away quickly, as if they expected the king to draw a sword and execute them on the spot.
