The Queen's Food Taster

• Chapter 1 The Venomous Crown
• Chapter 2 A Bitter Taste
• Chapter 3 The Shadow in the Cellar
• Chapter 4 The Princess in the Garden
• Chapter 5 Spices and Secrets
• Chapter 6 The Queen’s Command
• Chapter 7 Echoes of the Glass Mirror
• Chapter 8 A Taste of Belladonna
• Chapter 9 The Royal Banqueting Hall
• Chapter 10 Whispers in the Pantry
• Chapter 11 The Red Fruit
• Chapter 12 Fading Breath
• Chapter 13 The Immunity of Monsters
• Chapter 14 Waking from the Poison
• Chapter 15 The Princess's Refuge
• Chapter 16 A Tainted Loyalty
• Chapter 17 The Forest of Hiding
• Chapter 18 Salt and Iron
• Chapter 19 The Huntsman’s Legacy
• Chapter 20 Recipe for Treason
• Chapter 21 The Silver Spoon
• Chapter 22 A Feast of Ashes
• Chapter 23 The Queen's Final Course
• Chapter 24 The Choice at the Table
• Chapter 25 Poison in the Blood
• Chapter 26 A New Kingdom’s Taste

The royal kitchens of Castle Caelum smelled perpetually of burnt sugar, boiled cabbage, and old fear. It was a space designed to feed hundreds, but its primary function was far more narrow: to ensure that Queen Regina did not die with a fork in her hand.

I sat on a three-legged stool near the hearth, watching Master Cook Henrik skin a brace of pheasants with a thumb so slick with fat it looked polished. My jaw hurt. It always hurt on roasted-root days, when the kitchen churned out turnip purees laced with garlic to mask whatever bitterness the dirt had left behind.

"Stop rubbing your face, Ilse," Henrik muttered, not looking up from his board. "You’ll give yourself a rash, and then the seneschal will think you’ve caught the spotted fever. We’ve three banquets this fortnight. I don't have time to train another tongue."

"It’s not a rash," I said, dropping my hand to my lap. "It’s the parsnips from yesterday. They were heavy on the hemlock."

Henrik stopped his knife. The blade hovered an inch above a flap of bloody skin. "Hemlock?"

"A micro-dose," I said, shrugging with a practice born of eight years at the bottom of the palace food chain. "Just enough to make the back of my throat feel like I’ve swallowed an armful of dried pine needles. The gardener’s boy is getting careless with the weeding again. I told him if he mixes up wild carrot and water hemlock one more time, I’ll let him taste the soup first."

Henrik let out a low grunt and returned to his work, the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of his cleaver filling the vaulted stone room. He didn't ask if I was going to throw up. He didn't offer me milk to coat my stomach. In the kitchen, sympathy was a waste of tallow, and besides, my survival was proof that I was doing my job.

To the world outside the iron-studded oak doors of the scullery, Queen Regina was an absolute sovereign, a woman whose beauty was praised in songs that poets were executed for singing poorly. To me, she was a set of very expensive, very dangerous digestive organs. Every plum that crossed her lips had passed through mine first. Every goblet of dark, spiced wine from the southern provinces was swirled over my gums before it reached her silver goblet.

I was twenty-one, and my liver was probably the color of an overripe eggplant.

A chime sounded from the dumbwaiter shaft—a sharp, copper ring that made three scullions instantly drop their paring knives and freeze. The sound meant the Queen’s midday tray was coming down, cleared of its silver covers, ready for inspection. Or, more accurately, ready for the scraps to be examined for signs of royal displeasure.

Master Henrik wiped his hands on his apron, leaving a greasy red smear across his belly. "Get up, Ilse. The seneschal’s on his way."

I stood, smoothing down the rough linen of my smock. The dress was a dead gray, purposefully chosen so that any vomiting, sweating, or sudden hemorrhaging of the eyes would be immediately visible against the neutral cloth. It was the uniform of the royal taste-testers, though I was the only one currently wearing it. My predecessor, an older man named Toby who had a fondness for candied ginger, had misidentified a handful of dried belladonna leaves as dried basil three months ago. He had died loudly behind the flour bins while the Queen was enjoying her roasted duck.

Lord Vane, the royal seneschal, stepped into the kitchen a moment later. He was a man made entirely of sharp angles and dried ink, smelling of lavender water and old parchment. He held a small brass rod, which he used to poke at the silver covers as the kitchen boys laid them out on the long oak pass.

"The roast boar," Vane said, his voice like dry leaves scraping across a tombstone. "Her Majesty found the crackling slightly soft."

"The hogs were lean this autumn, My Lord," Henrik said smoothly, bending his knee just enough to satisfy protocol without disturbing his greasy apron. "We used less lard so as not to distress Her Majesty’s bile."

"Her Majesty’s bile is entirely serene," Vane snapped. He turned his cold, gray eyes toward me. "And you, girl? How was the pear tartlet from the third course?"

"Heavy on the nutmeg, My Lord," I replied, keeping my eyes fixed on the second button of his velvet doublet. "A fraction too much clove in the crust. But clean. No lead in the sugar, no almond flour where it shouldn't be."

Vane grunted. "Good. If you drop dead before the evening meal, inform Master Henrik immediately so he can scrub the pans."

"I shall make every effort to die politely, My Lord."

Vane didn't appreciate the humor—seneschals rarely do—and turned back toward the stairs that led to the upper keep. But before he took two steps, the iron door at the top of the gallery creaked open, and the heavy, suffocating scent of violet water filled the stairwell.

The kitchen fell dead silent. Even the water dripping into the tallow-bucket seemed to slow its pace.

Queen Regina did not often descend into the wet heat of the lower quarters. When she moved through the castle, it was usually along the high marble colonnades where the light caught her dark hair and the rubies sewn into her bodice. But today she came down the narrow stone steps herself, her long train of black velvet whispering against the soot-stained steps like a dying snake.

She was breathtaking in the way a double-edged razor was breathtaking: immaculate, precise, and entirely incapable of mercy. Her skin had the blue-white clarity of winter ice, completely devoid of the freckles or red patches that plagued normal women who spent five minutes in the sun. She was thirty-five, or perhaps forty—no one dared keep her registry—yet she looked as though she had been carved out of salt yesterday.

Behind her came the Princess.

Snow White was fourteen, though she possessed the quiet, awkward stillness of a child who spent too much time trying to make herself invisible. Her hair was black as coal—not the polished blue-black of the Queen’s dyed locks, but the dull, soft color of charcoal—and her skin was pale, though lacking the terrifying porcelain sheen of her stepmother’s. She wore a simple gown of pale blue wool that had clearly been cut down from one of Regina’s old dresses. The hem was frayed where it had dragged on the flagstones.

"Lord Vane," the Queen said. Her voice was surprisingly low, a rich, dark alto that felt like velvet pulled tight over wood. "The salt in the venison stew was coarse."

"Your Majesty," Vane stammered, dropping into a bow so low his brass rod clicked against the floor. "I shall have the salt-grinder hanged at once."

"Don't be absurd," Regina said coldly. "Just cut his tongue out so he remembers to grind it finer next time. Hangings disrupt the laundry."

She stepped into the center of the kitchen, her eyes sweeping over the greasy copper pots, the hanging hams, and the huddled kitchen boys like a hawk deciding which field mouse was least likely to give it parasites. Her gaze settled on me.

I dropped to my knees, pressing my palms against the cold, grease-slick stones. "Your Majesty."

"The girl," Regina said. She reached out with one gloved finger and tipped my chin up. Her leather glove smelled of bitter almond and horses. "You are still here."

"I am, Your Majesty," I said, keeping my tongue flat against the bottom of my mouth so she wouldn't see the dark iron-stains from the tonic Henrik made me drink after every shift.

"Toby died after three weeks," Regina murmured, more to herself than to me. Her thumb pressed slightly against my windpipe—not enough to choke, but enough to let me feel the hard bone beneath her leather glove. "You have lasted three months. Why?"

"I have a very dull stomach, Your Majesty," I said plainly. "Even the bad onions don't move it."

A tiny, razor-thin smile appeared at the corner of her crimson lips. "A dull stomach is a royal blessing. The world is full of delicate people who die of minor inconveniences. I have no use for delicate things."

She let go of my chin and turned her attention to the small girl standing three paces behind her. Snow White had not looked at the meat, or the Queen, or the seneschal. She was looking at a plate of honeyed plums that sat on the end of the prep table, her dark eyes wide and hollow.

"Look at her," Regina said softly, her voice dropping into a tone of quiet, dripping malice that sent a shiver straight down my grease-stained spine. "The pride of the realm. The late King’s blood. And she looks like a starved stray behind an alehouse."

The Princess didn't flinch. She was used to it. She kept her eyes on the plums.

"Step forward, Snow," the Queen commanded.

The girl took two small, quiet steps. Her shoes were scuffed at the toes.

"Take a plum," Regina said.

Snow White hesitated, her fingers twitching at her sides. She looked at her stepmother, then at Master Henrik, and finally her eyes met mine. There was no fear in her expression—only a strange, flat exhaustion that looked entirely wrong on a girl her age. She knew as well as I did that food in this castle was never just food. It was a test, or a bribe, or a sentence.

"Take one," the Queen repeated, her tone turning clipped. "They were sent from the southern orchards this morning. A gift from the Duke of Westmark. He wishes to know if my stepdaughter finds his lands fertile."

Snow White reached out her thin arm. Her hand trembled slightly, but her fingers closed around a large, dark-purple plum that was dusted with a faint bloom of white sugar.

"Wait," I said before I could stop myself.

The word hung in the humid air of the kitchen like a dropped kettle. Master Henrik let out a tiny, high-pitched squeak and immediately pressed his face into his aprons. Vane turned purple.

Queen Regina turned slowly, her heavy black skirts swirling around her ankles. "What did you say, girl?"

I stayed on my knees, but I raised my head, forcing my voice to remain as flat and emotionless as a salt-pork slab. "The southern plums, Your Majesty. They were brought in by the Westmark courier two hours ago. They haven't been washed in the salt-water yet."

"And?" Regina asked, her eyes narrowing into dangerous silver slits.

"The Duke’s orchards sit near the sulfur springs," I said, improvising with the speed of a woman whose head was currently sitting very loosely on her neck. "The skin often carries the dust from the vents. It isn't poison, Your Majesty—just enough to give the Princess an unsightly flux of the bowels before the evening service. It would be... unseemly."

Regina looked from me to the plum in the girl’s hand, then back to me. The tension in the room was so thick I could hear the tallow dripping into the iron pan six feet away.

"Then taste it," the Queen said quietly.

"Your Majesty?"

"You say the skin carries sulfur," Regina said, a strange, bright spark igniting in her dark eyes. "You are the food taster. Taste the fruit from the Princess's hand. If it is merely dirt, you will suffer the flux. If it is something else... well. The Duke will have some explaining to do."

Snow White turned toward me, holding the purple plum out like an offering. Her hand wasn't shaking anymore. She looked at me with a curiosity that was almost detached, as if she were watching a play from the gallery.

I didn't hesitate. Hesitation in front of Regina was an admission of guilt. I stood up, walked the three paces to the Princess, and took the plum from her small, pale fingers.

The skin felt cold. Too cold for a fruit that had been sitting in a warm kitchen for two hours.

I bit into it.

The juice exploded across my tongue. It was sweet—violently sweet, with the heavy, cloying taste of dark sugar and overripe flesh. But beneath the sugar, right at the back of my palate where the bitter-receptors lived, came a sudden, sharp coldness. It tasted of copper, dried bay berries, and the metallic tang of crushed lead.

It wasn't sulfur. It was belladonna, concentrated down into an oil and rubbed into the bloom of the skin. A dose large enough to give a fourteen-year-old girl a grand seizure before her afternoon prayers, leaving her dead in her bed by nightfall with no mark upon her skin.

I swallowed.

The cold feeling slid down my esophagus like a sliver of ice. My stomach immediately contracted, an old, familiar knot of panic rising in my gullet, but I forced my facial muscles to remain entirely slack. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

"Well?" Regina asked, leaning forward, her iron crown catching the yellow light of the lard lamps. "Is it sulfur?"

"No, Your Majesty," I said smoothly, though my throat was already beginning to dry out as if I’d swallowed a handful of ash. "It’s merely too much sun. The skin has turned bitter near the stone. The Princess would find it unpleasant."

Regina watched me for five long seconds. She was looking for the telltale twitch of the eyelid, the sudden dilation of the pupils, the drop of sweat at the temple. But my body had spent three years learning how to absorb small deaths without showing the bill.

"Pity," the Queen said, her voice dropping back into its normal, bored cadence. "Throw the rest of the basket to the pigs. Snow, come along. Your tutor is waiting with the Latin texts."

The Queen turned and swept back toward the gallery stairs. Snow White followed her, but as she reached the bottom step, she paused and looked back over her shoulder.

She didn't look at her stepmother, or the kitchen, or the silver platters. She looked directly at me. Her dark eyes swept over my mouth, where a faint smudge of purple juice remained, and then down to my hands, which were clenched tightly into the fabric of my smock to hide the sudden, hard tremor in my fingers.

She knew.

She didn't say a word, but her small chin gave a single, almost imperceptible nod before she disappeared up the dark stairwell after the Queen.

The moment the oak door at the top of the stairs clicked shut, Master Henrik rushed over, grabbing a bucket of stale beer from under the counter and shoving it into my chest.

"Drink it! Drink the whole damn thing!" he hissed, his face pale beneath the greasy soot. "Drink it and stick your fingers down your neck, you stupid bitch! What were you thinking?"

I didn't answer him. I couldn't. My tongue was already beginning to swell, turning thick and heavy like a piece of salted beef in my mouth. I took the bucket, sank back down onto my three-legged stool near the hearth, and set to work trying to survive another afternoon in the service of the realm.

The stale beer tasted of rusty iron and sour yeast, but I drank it until my eyes watered and my nose ran. I didn't spit the plum up. Spitting was for amateurs who wanted to live to sixty with all their teeth intact; in my line of work, throwing up too quickly meant the Queen’s informants in the scullery would report that the food taster had a weak stomach, and a weak stomach was a fast route to the butcher's block behind the stable.

Instead, I sat near the hearth with my knees pulled up to my chin, letting the lard smoke clear my sinuses while my liver did the heavy lifting. The belladonna was heavy, a thick, suffocating warmth that spread from the pit of my stomach out to my fingers, making my knuckles throb with a dull, rhythmic ache. My pupils felt as wide as dinner plates. Everything in the low-ceilinged kitchen took on an uncomfortably sharp edge: the slick, yellow fat on Henrik’s cleaver, the crust of dried salt on the edge of the pickle barrel, the tiny silver spider swinging from a beam above the bread oven.

"You're a fool, Ilse," Henrik muttered, stepping over my outstretched boots as he carried a wooden trench of offal toward the waste chute. "A big, stupid, long-legged fool. If the Queen wanted the little bitch to have a colic, that was between the Queen and the Almighty. It wasn't your place to step between the hawk and the sparrow."

"It wasn't a colic, Henrik," I rasped. My voice sounded as though it had been pulled through a hedge backwards. "It was four drops of nightshade extract. The girl would have been blue by vespers."

Henrik stopped, the heavy trencher tilting in his fat hands so that a dark dribble of hog's blood dripped onto his wool socks. He turned his head slowly, his small, red-veined eyes narrowing in the dim light of the tallow dips. "Nightshade? In a southern plum?"

"In the bloom," I said, licking my lower lip. It was numb, like I'd been chewing on cold willow bark. "Someone painted it on with a rabbit-hair brush. Very neat. Very clean. The kind of work that takes ten minutes in a locked room with a good lamp."

Henrik let out a long, wheezing breath that smelled of pickled cabbage. He didn't ask who had painted it. There were only three people in Castle Caelum who had access to the high vaults where the apothecary jars were kept under iron lock: the court physician, who was seventy and spent his days trying to turn lead into vinegar; Lord Vane, who was too cautious to pick his own nose without a warrant; and the Queen herself.

"Then you should have let her eat it," Henrik said softly, his voice dropping an octave lower than the scrape of his boots. "The Princess is a sweet enough little thing, aye, but she’s just an extra mouth in a house full of knives. If she dies, the Queen stops looking for treason in the mutton. If she lives, the Queen keeps looking until she finds someone to hang for it."

"I have three years of belladonna built up in my marrow, Henrik," I said, leaning my head back against the soot-stained wall. "The girl has had nothing harder than small beer and thinned oat-porridge. She’d have choked on her own tongue before they reached the second floor."

"And now?" Henrik asked, poking a piece of raw liver back into his basket with a filthy thumb. "What happens when the Queen sees you sitting here breathing by supper?"

"I tell her my stomach is very dull," I said. "Like I told her before."

"She isn't blind, Ilse. She’s got eyes like a butcher counting sheep. She knows what four drops of nightshade looks like on a person’s face. She watched your eyes enlarge while you were standing there in front of the girl."

I closed my eyes, letting the heavy, warm dark sweep over me. Henrik was right, of course. Regina wasn't a fool. She hadn't sent the plum to kill the Princess out of sudden impulse; it had been an experiment. A double-barreled trap. If the Princess ate it and died, the realm was rid of the late King’s only daughter, and the Duke of Westmark would take the blame for sending tainted fruit. If I stopped her, the Queen would learn exactly how much poison her new food taster could take before she dropped.

Either way, the Queen won. That was the thing about Regina: she played chess with the kitchen staff, and all her pawns were made of suet.

By four o'clock, the belladonna’s first wave had receded into a dark, throbbing headache behind my left ear. My skin felt dry, as if I had been hung out in the wind to cure like a side of bacon, but my mouth was functionable again. I pulled myself up by the hearth-shelf, dusted the ashes from my gray smock, and began the late-afternoon preparation.

The Queen’s evening meal was always more complex than her noon tray. Dinner was when she entertained the inner council—Lord Vane, the Commander of the Iron Guard, and whichever regional tax collectors were currently in favor. It meant eighteen separate dishes, each served on silver, each requiring a three-finger taste from the gray-clad girl on the stool before the tray left the pass.

I stood at the long oak table, a small silver spoon held between my middle fingers, while Henrik set out the bowls.

First came the soup: a clear broth of boiled capon and wild herbs, yellow with fat and smelling faintly of sage. I dipped the edge of the spoon into the broth, brought it to my lips, and rolled it over my palate.

"Salt is low," I said flatly. "Sage is old. No hemlock, no copper-water, no wild parsley."

Henrik grunted, marking a notch on a tallow-crayon board.

Next was the lamprey pie, a greasy, dark mound encased in hard-baked rye paste. The fish came from the river three miles south of the keep, where the tanners dumped their lime-vats. If the fish weren't soaked in milk for two days before baking, they carried enough river-rot to give a horse the spasms.

I took a corner of the crust, chewed it thoroughly, and swallowed. My throat burned slightly—a lingering gift from the afternoon’s plum—but the pie was clean.

"Clean," I muttered. "A bit greasy near the tail. Tell the boy to trim the bellies tighter tomorrow."

"He trimmed them till his thumbs bled," Henrik grumbled, but he noted it down anyway.

We worked through sixteen dishes in quiet, rhythmic mechanical efficiency. Smoked pigeon in cherry preserves. Salted cod boiled with leeks. Roasted parsnips with honey and mustard seed. Braised beef tongue sliced so thin you could see the candle flame through the meat. Each received the same treatment: a tiny morsel on the front of my tongue, a slow roll across the gums, a swallow, and a ten-second wait to see if my heart started beating like a trapped rabbit against my ribs.

By the time we reached the seventeenth dish, my mouth felt numb, scorched, and entirely devoid of human taste. Poisoning a monarch was a delicate art, but surviving as her taster was simply a matter of arithmetic. You learned to read the small signs: the slight blue film on the surface of wine that meant arsenic had been dissolved in it; the bitter, almond scent that meant crushed cherry stones were hiding in the plum tart; the heavy, oily slick that signaled dark hellebore in the gravy.

"Eighteen," Henrik said, placing a small silver bowl on the wooden board between us.

It was a dish of roasted chestnuts, peeled and simmered in red wine and clove syrup. Simple food, the sort of thing the Queen ate when she wanted to look pious before the Bishop arrived for evening prayers.

I picked up the small horn spoon, dipped it into the thick, dark syrup, and brought it up.

"Hold," a voice said from the pantry archway.

It wasn't Henrik. It wasn't Lord Vane.

The voice was thin, slightly breathless, and had the faint, raspy edge of a girl who spent her days talking to nobody higher than the chapel mice.

Princess Snow White stood in the dark space between two hanging racks of dried pork. She was still wearing the cut-down blue wool gown, though the hem was now wet with slush from the lower courtyard. She was holding a small leather pouch in her left hand, her fingers wrapped so tightly around the drawstring that her knuckles looked like four white peas.

Henrik instantly dropped his cleaver onto the board with a loud clatter and went down on both knees, his fat thighs groaning against his greasy breeches. "Your Highness! You shouldn't be down here—the lower sculleries are no place for royal blood—the damp—"

"Get out, Henrik," the girl said.

The cook froze, his mouth half-open in a greasy smile. He looked at the Princess, then at me, then back at the door that led out to the butcher's yard. He was a sensible man, Henrik; he knew that when the blood royal started talking in whispers, the scullery staff were usually the ones who ended up in the ditch. He didn't wait for a second order. He hauled himself up with an ugly grunt, grabbed his apron, and scrambled out the side door into the cold autumn wind, slamming the heavy oak latch behind him.

The kitchen was left with only the sound of the tallow dripping into the ash pan and the far-off whistle of the wind down the chimney shaft.

The Princess didn't come closer immediately. She stood by the salt barrels, her dark hair falling forward over her small, narrow shoulders, watching me with an intensity that made my stomach tighten more than the belladonna had.

"You're not dead," she said softly.

"Not yet, Your Highness," I said, keeping my hands resting on the edge of the oak table. "Though if Master Henrik doesn't come back to turn the roasts, we’ll both be skinned by the seneschal before six."

She ignored the joke. She walked forward until she was standing on the other side of the pass, her small hands resting on the iron edge of the silver tray. Up close, I could see the tiny violet shadows under her eyes, deep and dark as bruised plums. Her skin was far too pale for a child who was supposed to be playing in the upper gardens, but her eyes were remarkably bright—a clear, pale gray that had nothing of her stepmother’s silver frost in them.

"The plum was sweet," she said.

"It was very sweet, Your Highness," I replied. "The southern growers use too much sugar to hide the rot."

"It wasn't rot," Snow White said. She looked down at the dish of chestnuts sitting between us. "It was the same thing my father took before he fell out of his saddle three winters ago."

The air in the room seemed to drop five degrees.

I didn't move. I didn't breathe. "Your Highness should not say such things in the scullery. The walls here are made of local granite. They have very large ears."

"My father’s horse was gentle," the girl continued, her voice flat, matter-of-fact, as if she were reading a list of turnip prices from a ledger. "He had ridden him since he was twelve. But the day he died, his mouth was blue at the corners, and his tongue was so swollen he couldn't tell the priest where it hurt. Just like yours was this afternoon when you took the fruit from my hand."

She reached out and laid the small leather pouch on the table between the roasted chestnuts and the capon broth. It made a soft, heavy thud against the wood.

"What is this?" I asked.

"Salt," she said. "And iron filings. The old nurse in the lower tower told me that if you swallow iron after taking the dark oil, it stops the blood from going black."

I looked at the small leather bag, then back at the girl. She wasn't playing a game. She was fourteen years old, surrounded by three hundred men-at-arms who took their wages from her stepmother, living in a house where every meal was a potential execution, and she had spent her afternoon crawling through the lower tower to find iron dust for a kitchen servant she didn't know the name of.

"Why?" I asked softly.

Snow White looked at her own small, scuffed shoes. "Because you swallowed it."

"It's my job, Your Highness," I said, though my throat felt suddenly very dry again. "The Queen pays me three silver pence a month and gives me two pairs of gray stockings a year to chew her bitterness for her."

"She didn't tell you to eat that one," the girl said, raising her eyes to mine again. "She told me to eat it. You took it out of my hand."

"I told her it was sulfur."

"You lied," Snow White said simple-mindedly. "The Queen knows you lied. Lord Vane was in the upper hall twenty minutes ago, telling the captain of the guard that the new food taster has a very strong chest. He said you must have the stomach of a goat."

I let out a short, dry sound that might have been a laugh if there had been any humor in it. "A goat would have died of the parsnips on Tuesday, Your Highness. I’m merely stubborn."

"She will try again," the Princess said. She didn't sound angry, or frightened, or sad. She sounded like a person describing the setting of the sun—a natural, unavoidable fact of life in Castle Caelum. "She has the mirror in the high solar. She goes there every night after the second bell, when the candles are low. She talks to it. And when she comes down, someone always dies."

"The mirror is glass, Your Highness," I said carefully. "Glass doesn't speak."

"It doesn't speak with a tongue," Snow White said, her fingers twitching near the drawstrings of her pouch. "It speaks like ice cracking on a pond. You can hear it from the gallery if you put your ear to the lead pipes. It tells her who is fair, and who is dangerous, and who must be cleared away so the house stays quiet."

She reached across the table, her small, cold hand catching the cuff of my gray wool sleeve. Her touch was surprisingly light, like a dry bird sitting on a twig.

"Don't eat the red ones," she whispered.

"The red ones, Your Highness?"

"The fruit she keeps in the small basket with the silver handle," the girl said, her voice dropping into a barely audible rustle. "The ones from the glass house in the orchard. She doesn't let the gardeners touch them. She waters them herself with salt-water and dried blood from the butcher’s trough. I saw her yesterday. She was painting the cheeks with a feather."

I looked down at her fingers on my wrist. They were clean, but her nails were bitten down to the quick, raw and red against her pale skin.

"I have to taste whatever is on the silver tray, Princess," I said quietly. "If I refuse, Lord Vane doesn't offer me iron dust. He offers me six feet of rope behind the timber yard."

"Then don't swallow," she said. "Keep it under your tongue until she turns her head. Then spit it into the gray wool of your sleeve."

"She watches my throat," I said. "She has watched forty men and women choke in that banqueting hall over the last ten years. She knows the difference between a real swallow and a fake one better than the Bishop knows his Latin."

Snow White was silent for a moment. Then she released my sleeve and reached into the pocket of her blue gown. She pulled out a small, flat piece of dried root—dark, twisted, smelling strongly of horseradish and dry peat.

"Chew this before you go up," she said, shooing it across the board toward me. "It makes the back of your throat go cold and fat. My father used it when he had the quinsy. If your throat is fat, the poison doesn't sink in as fast."

I picked up the piece of root. It was dirty, covered in tiny red hairs from the earth, but it was real. Wild ginger from the lower woods.

"You shouldn't be giving me things, Your Highness," I said, tucked the root into my own apron pocket next to my silver spoon. "If the Queen’s pages see you in the scullery talking to the taster, they’ll tell her you’re building a faction."

"I don't have a faction," Snow White said flatly. "I have two shirts, one pair of boots with holes in the toes, and a pony that’s gone blind in the left eye. The pages don't care about me."

She turned toward the side door, pausing with her hand on the cold iron latch. The wind outside blew a small drift of light snow through the crack at the threshold, dusting her dark hair with tiny white specks that looked like silver salt against charcoal.

"What is your name?" she asked without looking back.

"Ilse, Your Highness."

"Ilse," she repeated, testing the sound on her tongue as if it were a new kind of bread she hadn't tried before. "Ilse the Taster."

"Just Ilse," I said. "The rest is just my job."

She nodded once, pulled her hood up over her dark hair, and slipped out into the gray dusk of the courtyard before I could tell her to take the side stairs to avoid the guards at the gate.

I stood alone in the kitchen for a few moments, the silence settling back down over the copper pots like a grease-film. I picked up the leather pouch she had left behind, opened it, and sniffed. It was iron dust, all right—pounded down from old horseshoe nails and mixed with coarse grey salt. It tasted like blood and stone when I touched a grain to my tongue, but it was the first thing anyone in this castle had given me that wasn't designed to kill me slowly for five silver coins a week.

The iron door at the top of the gallery stair creaked open.

Footsteps descended—heavy, deliberate, the sharp click-clack of silver-tipped heels on granite.

I didn't need to look up to know who it was. The scent of violet water and dried elderberries preceded her like a cloud of cold fog.

Queen Regina stepped into the kitchen. She wasn't wearing her black velvet state gown now; she wore a high-collared mantle of dark red wool lined with fox fur, her long, pale fingers resting on the silver pommel of a small riding whip she carried when she inspected the stables.

"Where is the cook?" she asked, her voice cool and low.

"Master Henrik is checking the cellar casks, Your Majesty," I said instantly, dropping back down to one knee on the flagstones. "The salt-pork was smelling slightly turnip-sour. He wished to be certain the brine hadn't turned before the feast."

Regina moved past me toward the long table. Her skirts rustled against the oak legs as she stopped beside the eighteen silver dishes. Her eyes swept over the soup, the pie, the tongue, and finally rested on the small silver bowl of roasted chestnuts.

"The girl was here," Regina said. It wasn't a question.

"The Princess passed through on her way to the chapel, Your Majesty," I said, keeping my forehead three inches from the grease-stained floor. "She lost her wool glove in the courtyard. She thought the scullion boys might have brought it in."

Regina turned her silver whip over in her fingers, tapping the leather lash against her skirt with a slow, rhythmic tap... tap... tap.

"She is a very small girl," the Queen murmured, looking at the chestnuts. "A small, quiet girl who makes very little noise when she walks. Her mother was the same way. She used to sit in the high garden for eight hours at a time, watching the strawberries turn red, speaking to no one except the gardener's dogs. People thought she was simple."

The Queen stepped closer to me until the hem of her red mantle brushed my knees.

"Are you simple, Ilse?"

"Extremely, Your Majesty," I said to the flagstones. "My father was a charcoal burner from the low hills. He was too simple to know that oak burn hotter than pine, so he burned his own shed down three times before I was seven."

Regina let out a small, dry laugh—a sound like silver coins clinking together in a silk purse. "A charcoal burner's daughter with a liver of brass. The Almighty has a peculiar sense of proportion."

She used the handle of her whip to lift my chin, just as she had done that morning. Her eyes were bright, clear, and utterly dead—like two grey stones sitting at the bottom of a frozen well.

"The Princess is fourteen," Regina said, her tone almost conversational. "At fourteen, a girl’s blood begins to change. She stops being a child who can be fed porridge in the nursery and starts being a... complication. Complications make the realm unstable, Ilse. Unstable realms lead to burnt crops, unpaid taxes, and soldiers living in the hall. We don't like soldiers in the hall, do we?"

"No, Your Majesty. They leave grease on the benches."

"Precisely," Regina said. She dropped my chin and took a step back. "Tomorrow is the feast of Saint Jude. We shall have thirty guests from the eastern marches. The Duke of Westmark will be there. He is very fond of the late King’s daughter. He believes she ought to have a grander house than two rooms in the lower keep."

She reached into the basket she carried under her mantle—the silver-handled basket Snow White had warned me about—and took out a single, large fruit.

It wasn't a plum. It was a quince, golden-yellow, covered in a fine, silky fuzz that caught the lamp light like pale gold thread. But on one side, where the stem joined the flesh, there was a single, deep crimson patch—a flush of red so violent and bright it looked like a drop of fresh blood sitting on a yellow leaf.

"A gift from the glass houses," Regina said softly, holding the quince out between two fingers. "The soil there is very rich. It yields things that don't grow anywhere else in the realm."

She laid the quince directly in the center of the silver tray, right between the capon broth and the roasted chestnuts.

"You will taste this tomorrow at the noon service, Ilse," the Queen said, her voice dropping into a whisper that felt like a cold razor drawn across my throat. "Before the Duke. Before the Bishop. Before the Princess."

She leaned down, her dark hair brushing my shoulder, her smell of violet and bitter almond filling my nose until I thought I would choke on it.

"And if you survive it," she whispered, "I shall give you four silver pence a month instead of three."

She didn't wait for my answer. She turned and swept up the gallery stairs, her red mantle trailing behind her like a line of spilled wine on the dark stone steps.

I stayed on my knees for a long time after the iron door clicked shut.

The kitchen was cold now. The tallow dips were burning low, their yellow flames flickering in the draught that came under the courtyard latch.

I reached into my pocket, pulled out the piece of wild ginger the Princess had given me, and chewed off a small piece. It was bitter, hot, and tasted of wet dirt, but as I swallowed, my throat began to feel thick and dry, just as she had promised.

Then I reached into my smock, took out the leather pouch of iron filings, and set it on the table next to the golden quince with its red blood-spot.

"Four pence," I whispered to the empty room, looking at the golden fruit glowing under the lard lamp. "She thinks I'm worth four pence."

I picked up the small silver spoon, wiped the capon grease from the bowl with my thumb, and set it next to the iron dust. Tomorrow was Saint Jude’s day—the patron saint of desperate causes.

It seemed appropriate. In Castle Caelum, every course was a desperate cause, and the menu was just getting started.