Aldreda asked, ‘Do you have an input, littlest brother?’
‘Not particularly,’ Wystan said. ‘And I can’t argue with Osian’s handling either, much as I’d like to. It all just seems… pointless.’
‘Pointless?’ Aldreda raised her eyebrows.
Meilyr had tensed at Osian’s side, a hare hearing wolves chatter.
Osian wanted to reach for him. Thefearfor him gripped sharply, drying his sour mouth and crawling flame through him.
A gradual claw of liquid fire, darkening his vision.
‘My Prince?’
Meilyr’s earnest concern, like a lifeline somewhere at his side. An instant before Osian realised something was very wrong.
An instant before he touched his own chest, as the flames engulfed his veins and seared him from the inside.
TWENTY-SIX
Yet love remains a venom
far deadlier than hate.
The Red Book,
translated by Idwal gan Hywel
TWENTY-SIX
Osian coughed so violently it rocked the table. He spluttered, coughed again.
Horror erupted as the violence of it ricocheted through the hall. They had seen this scene before.
‘Osian!’ Meilyr, already on his feet, grasped him desperately, uselessly.
‘No!’ Aldreda cried as the space rumbled with toppled chairs. Shouts of fear.
‘Osian—’ Meilyr fell to his knees as Osian came out of his chair and retched across the stone. But sense lanced through the horror. With Meilyr’s hands on him, he could feel it, could taste it at the back of his mouth.
This was not sorcery. Osian’s blood cried out, but not from that.
‘This is not sorcery,’ he said – to himself, and Aldreda, Demelza, Pedr, Blythe, Wystan.
His food? No, too vast – his wine?
‘Hand me his goblet.’
Aldreda shoved it into his waiting hand, and he inhaled the acrid scent. Took a gulp, rattled it around his mouth. Spat.
‘Poison.’
‘Gods—Healer!Poison!’
‘He has ingested too much. Help me get him on his back.’
Terror splitting his skull, Meilyr knelt over the prone prince. Osian’s skin bleached grey, and he mouthed like a banked fish, withering visibly.
Damn it, there was nothing else for it. Meilyr reached with the senses of his blood and pressed into the feeling of Osian, into the woven threads that bound their blood, their flesh. It was its own form of drowning: a complete engulfing, like jumping into the sea, salt and currents and heat. Pain. Shared, mirrored pain. Meilyr winced with it, then laid his hands on Osian’s stomach.