The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [138]
When she slipped in, they were all too drunk to notice her. She crept upstairs, found her chamber, and collapsed onto the bed. Sleep rose up and took her.
“My lord! My lord Nevyn!” The voice came bellowing through the dark. “Are you in there?”
Someone was shaking the tent-flap as well. Nevyn sat up and threw his blankets back.
“I am! Who is it?”
“Caudyr sent me. The little false king is dying.”
Nevyn pulled on his brigga and boots, grabbed a shirt, and ran out of the tent. The servant—little more than a boy—carried a lantern, and Nevyn followed its gleam as they hurried up the hill. At the door to the royal broch he paused and pulled the shirt over his head.
“Where are Caudyr and the lad?”
“In the false king’s old chambers. Prince Maryn had him put there under guard.”
As soon as Nevyn opened the door to the royal suite he smelled vomit, and the stench had a bitter tinge. He ran into the bedroom and found it ablaze with lantern light. On his narrow bed the child-king lay, his wooden horse beside him, while Caudyr stood at a table littered with packets of herbs and medicaments. The room stank of vomit and excrement. Nevyn crossed it in two strides and flung the shutters open at the windows.
“What have you been doing for him?”
“Salt water and lots of it. He’s been vomiting on his own, and I’ve been trying to wash his insides clean.”
Nevyn went to the bedside and laid a hand on the boy’s face: clammy and cold, and his skin had a greyish tinge. At the touch he opened his eyes, then closed them again. A vomit stain lay on the blanket near his face.
“Blood,” Nevyn said. “You can see the tinge. Let’s hope it’s just the straining.”
Caudyr turned and pointed to a basin on the floor. Blood and a lot of it clotted in the watery vomit. Nevyn squatted down beside the boy and touched him again. He wanted a look at the child’s pupils, but this time Olaen kept his eyes shut.
“Come now, lad, look at me,” Nevyn whispered. “We’re here to help you. Open your eyes and look at me.”
Not a twitch, not a stir, not even when Nevyn gave him a gentle shake. Carefully he pried the lad’s eyes open and found the pupils widely dilated even though it seemed he slept. When Nevyn swore under his breath, Caudyr came limping over.
“Is it too late?” Caudyr said.
“I fear me it is. He’s slipping away from us.”
Caudyr let out his breath in a long sigh. Nevyn got up and pulled a blanket over the boy’s thin shoulders—a futile gesture, but he had to do something.
“When did this happen?”
“Well, a guard fetched me some while after midnight,” Caudyr said. “He’d looked for the regular chirurgeons but couldn’t find them. Someone thought of me, and so I gathered up my supplies and got here as fast as I could.”
“He’s been poisoned, of course.”
“Of course. The last person to see him was his nursemaid. The guards told me she brought him up some honeycake—a little treat, she said, from the kitchens.”
Nevyn glanced around and saw, lying broken on the floor, a pottery plate. When he picked the pieces up, he found them sticky. One trampled bit of cake lay near the table, which he scooped up with a fragment of plate. When he sniffed it, he smelled nothing unusual. With a shrug he laid it on the table.
“I want to talk with the nursemaid.”
“Through there.” Caudyr pointed at a little door in the wooden partition. “Come to think of it, I wonder why she didn’t hear the noise I’ve been making?”
Nevyn felt abruptly cold. He flung open the little door, stepped into the tiny chamber, and in the spill of lantern light saw what he’d feared to see, a middle-aged woman lying twisted and dead on the floor. A rumpled pallet, all stained with excrement and vomit, lay nearby. She must have lost control of herself, Nevyn supposed, and got up to get a chamberpot, only to fall and