To anyone else, it might only look like applying pressure.
There.That was where the foreign, malign gathering congealed thickest, beating eagerly through Osian’s body. Meilyr gathered those parts like sheafs of grasses, firmed his hands and pulled.
Osian convulsed. Cried out in breathless agony.
‘What are you doing!’
‘Aldreda, wait,’ Demelza said.
The Heir Apparent’s sword at Meilyr’s throat would not have stopped him. He pushed his hands higher, up to Osian’s chest. Pulling, across his ribs. Past his lungs. His heart. His throat—
‘On his side,now.’
Pedr and Aldreda rolled him as Osian retched tar-thick brown and blood across the stones.
Then he quietened. A little dark saliva bubbled at his mouth.
Meilyr wiped it away with his thumb and brushed the damp hair out of Osian’s face. ‘That is the worst of it removed,’ he said, emptied save the roar of his pulse. ‘He needs an antidote now. Rest. Hopefully…’
‘Get a stretcher.’ Aldreda pried herself from the shock and rose, commanding. ‘Get the royal physicians to Osian’s chambers. Now.’
Meilyr stumbled back from the scene as Osian, limp but alive, was lifted onto a pallet and moved off the dais.
‘Everyone stays right here,’ Aldreda ordered. ‘Not you, Highness Cadogan. With us, quickly.’
He raced after them through the cacophonous hall, through the blur of the corridors and up. His hands throbbed, the pain the only thing anchoring him to his listing body.
Time quivered into detached, swollen instances.
‘What was the poison? Do you know?’
It still seared his hand, his tongue. ‘Fox’s tears. I can make an antidote with the supplies in my rooms.’
‘Go. Order anything you need – you, do as he says.’
The slow unfurling of golden henbane, the most vital ingredient, which the prince would die without. The spice of burdock root. The hum of nettle. The tremor in his fingers, subdued by the work. The monolithic climb up those tight stairs and the vastness of the parlour before he could reach the bedchamber.
‘He needs to drink this. It needs to be kept down.’
The royal physician got to work. Meilyr worried his hands through the reflexive desire to step in as they tended the prince with their assistant. Osian was still ashen, but more alive laid in his bed than he had been in the hall.
‘Good work.’ Aldreda wore a similar academic practicality. ‘If this works, I owe you a great debt.’
Meilyr pressed his nails into his palms. ‘You do not, Majesty. Not at all.’
Osian spluttered – Meilyr flinched forward, but the physician and their assistant managed to restrain and settle him enough to keep the antidote down.
‘Fox’s tears?’ The physician glanced at Meilyr, approving. ‘How in the name of the gods could you tell?’
‘I have come across it before. It… I have worked with it before.’
‘A good eye, or good nose, perhaps.’
‘Or good taste,’ Aldreda said.
The physician glanced between them but knew well enough to let it go. ‘Whoever did this must not have used enough, or His Majesty was very fortunate in the amount he ingested.’
Wrong. Osian would be dead if Meilyr had not expunged the poison manually.