Kings of the North - Elizabeth Moon [216]
“He must have gone to the jacks,” Garris said.
“I think not,” Kieri said. “They tried assassination once; no reason they would not try it again—don’t touch that!” he said sharply, as Garris reached for the message pouch. Garris stopped, hand out.
“Why?”
“Was it wet when you first saw it?”
Garris frowned. “No … I don’t recall …” Then he paled. “Poison?”
“It might be.” Kieri’s mind raced. Where was the enemy? Would the man have fled, leaving the poisoned “message” behind? Or would he have stayed behind to accomplish more mischief? In the kitchens, poisoning the food? In the stables, poisoning the horses? “Are you wearing mail, Garris?”
“Me? No, I don’t—oh.” Garris’s gaze sharpened. “Are you?”
“No—I changed for practice. I’ll put it on—I want every Squire in mail, and that includes you. Everyone who has it—and send someone to the kitchens—to the stables—” He stopped and took a breath; it would not do to sound so worried. “We must be careful, but steady. I will go change.”
Upstairs, Aulin and Sarol inspected his rooms before he went in. He decided to risk a quick bath: Joriam had it ready, herb-scented, with towels warming before the fire. The old man smiled at him, came to help him out of his clothes.
Pargunese hot baths might be better than this, but he found it hard to imagine. He eased into the hot scented water, and Joriam sluiced warm water from the ewer over him. He would have enjoyed a long soak but could not spare the time. Joriam said, “Soap, my lord—” Kieri turned just in time to see the old man’s eyes go wide—and an arrow take him in the throat. Joriam slumped; the soap dropped into Kieri’s hand.
Across the room, in the door to his bedchamber, stood a grinning stranger wearing a palace tabard; he held a short bow in one hand and an arrow in his teeth. Spitting the arrow into his hand, he said, “I do like it when they’re naked and helpless.”
Kieri hurled the soap at the man’s face; the man put up his hand instinctively, dropping the arrow. As Kieri surged out of the tub and grabbed the ewer Joriam had set down, he saw the man fumble at the tabard, as if he expected to find an arrow there, and then dive for the one on the floor. Before he could reach it, Kieri was on him, smashing the heavy ewer in his face, a foot and then a knee in the man’s belly, hitting him again with the ewer, and again … the anger he thought he’d worked off in the salle roared through him like the winter wind, even when the man lay still, blood running from his nose and ears. Kieri raised the ewer again … and stopped. He could hear his own harsh breathing and nothing else. The taig—he must think of the taig. The man was dead. He might not be the only assassin—and his people needed their king, not a wild man.
He looked for the fallen arrow, found it, and stood up carefully, watching where he stepped in case of any other hazard. As his pulse slowed, he felt chilled … Joriam, poor old Joriam … and who else? How had the assassin made it this far? How had he known where to go? Was it safe to call out?
His hands were blood-splashed; he dipped them in the still-warm bathwater, plucked a warmed towel off the rack by the fire and dried his hands, rubbed himself with it. Then he went back to the assassin, picked up the bow, put the arrow on the string, and walked into his bedchamber. He heard a cry from the corridor just as he saw the bodies of Aulin and Sarol and heard someone running toward him.
He had just presence of mind to drop the bow and grab his sword from the rack when two white-faced Squires, Edrin and Lieth, appeared. “Sir King!”
“An assassin,” Kieri said. “I killed him, but not before he killed those Squires and Joriam, I’m sorry to say.”
“He—you—you’re alive!”
“As you see,” Kieri said. They had both seen more than anyone here but Joriam; after a bath the old scars always showed clearly. “I need to