“Oh, it's in our dining hall. You get to have lunch with us today…” Sara looked at him and winked.
It made sense that they ate daily, he'd seen them do it after all, but he hadn't been aware that they had a dining hall like his section had. The buildings were smaller, and set back from the rest of the school enough that no one would have ever gone into one by mistake. The walk wasn't that long, even if they had to walk at his pace, which still kind of limped along. Tor almost wished he had something better than browns to wear, since the girls both wore blacks, and really nice ones at that, made of fine, airy materials. Meant to keep them cool in the late summer heat? Neither looked hot, no sweat or anything, so they probably wore their amulets for that. He did. Otherwise even the school would have been too warm for him. Never the blistering heat of the Capital, but hot enough to annoy and make him damp in all the wrong places.
The room they took him in to was filled with people. Most in black but a few in much livelier colors, some of the girls in pretty dresses even. Many of them ate already, which made him more than a little hungry in response. The food smelled really good too. Maybe not palace level good, but at least two or three times better than what they got at the other dining facility across campus. At the front of the room the older bearded man, wearing a large, well draped black velvet coat, a bright green shirt under that and a red floppy hat, along with black trousers made of something that Tor couldn't identify and didn't bother trying too, watched him enter.
“Ah! Mr. Baker. Just the man. Please, come and join us.” The voice was warm and he gestured regally enough that the move wouldn't have been amiss in the palace itself.
As he got to the table he saw that it held plates of food, each dish was different, some obviously things he'd never encountered before. A few looked like raw meat, and one of them seemed to still be alive in a glass of water. An eel? He'd heard of them but had never seen one. Did people really eat those? Alive? Eek. It didn't look very good to him. It slithered in the clear glass, a grayish black that shone even in the water, making it look slick and slimy.
“The test is a simple one. Use your device on this food and find what's poisoned before we eat. Begin as you will. I don't know how the device might work. Do you need anything in particular, or a special condition for the food?”
Pulling one of the little copper rectangles from his belt he activated it with his thumb and just moved towards the food. He went slowly at first, not knowing if anything would happen at all. Most of the people in the room, students mainly, but a few older people, including servants, watched with a bored quality. Maybe they saw things like this all the time? As he approached a plate with mashed potatoes, gravy and beef slices the device in his hand lit up.
It didn't glow itself, instead, as he'd intended, the space around the hand holding the device glowed with a golden light so bright that it was kind of hard to look at. Tor wanted to make sure that the signal never got missed by mistake after all. If you sat in direct sunlight, it would be clearly visible. Good. He moved over the beef, holding the copper close to it, nearly touching, but the unit stopped responding, it was obviously the mashed potatoes then. Or the gravy. Either way, he wasn't going to eat it.
“I can't tell which part in particular is poisoned though, unless I separated them somehow, is that required for the test? I think it would make a bit of a mess and I don’t really want to touch poison, if I can help it.”
The older man smiled and shook his head, “No, I think knowing what not to consume is enough for now. Good to know it could be used to do that though. Knowing which part of a dish is tainted could help lead to who had access to the food for investigations. Please, continue.”
The next two plates were fine, but then he got to a fish dish that lit up. Again it had a sauce, this one some kind of fruit based thing. The eel, however unlikely that was, didn't make the device glow at all. Gross, but apparently it could be eaten and was even close enough to things he ate regularly to count as nutritious and wholesome. In all he found five plates of food that had been poisoned. The man nodded and clapped.
“Very good! One last test then…” The man clapped and a simple pot pie came out. The man indicated it with his head, telling Tor to test it.
Nothing happened.
Until he started to take the device away and it crossed the side of the ceramic baking dish. It obviously wasn't food, but the dish itself made the air light up. He didn't understand it, but Trice did.
“Poison on the dish? So that if you touch it and then put your hands to your mouth…” She pantomimed the action, getting a glowing look from the man. He actually clapped his hands.
“Indeed. Exactly right Patricia. I would say your device is a ringing success. I'd like to test it further, if I could borrow it? Or… do you have more than one again?” The man seemed excited for some reason.
“Oh, yeah, ten right now, five on me, so here, take this one.” He handed over the one tested, and the man got the girls to help him open a large wooden case that had glass jars inside, powders and liquids. Were they all poisons? The answer came pretty quickly, when one after the other, they all were all opened, corks popped and stoppers breached, only to make the new device cause the air to glow with what looked like very bright sunlight.
The old man suggested that Tor get something to eat. That sounded like a wonderful idea, since his stomach growled at him a little. Not so loud as to be embarrassing though, thankfully. After testing one of the plates of food in front of him again, just to be sure he hadn’t missed anything, a fish dish with a white cream sauce that came with braised asparagus, he did. That, even more than the testing itself, seemed to get attention. Was the fish not good here? It tasted fine. Better than that, really good in fact. They used slivered almonds in the sauce, Tor thought, which gave it a little texture. Trice looked at him wide eyed and then smiled. She held the device that the old man was testing and Sara put the poisons back in the case carefully, making sure she didn't touch anything else with her hands.
Tor got that; a simple sneeze could spread deadly poison around the room. I occurred to him that playing with poisons in the dining hall might be just a little dangerous, but no one blinked overly at it. Whatever else these people were, they weren't cowards at least.
So, probably insane? Good to know.
Just as they were finishing a man who looked to be a few years older than Tor walked over, obviously someone special, if based only on height. The guy was about six-four or five, so a short royal, for a guy, or one of the merchant class? Hard to tell without just asking. He eyed Tor with a smile, but didn't approach directly, heading to the older man instead.
“Dean Hardgrove?” The words made Tor stop eating. “These devices… Would they be available for purchase or lease soon do you think? My parents have gotten into a bit of a pickle with the Count and Countess Ward and it would be… good if I didn't have to become a Baron in the next few weeks, I think.”
Two things popped out at Tor, first, that the old guy he'd seen several times was the Dean. Thank all gods he'd always been polite to the man. Not that he wouldn't be normally, but some of the situations he'd met him in had been stressful. Tor hadn't always been at his best at those times, had he? For that matter, Tor reflected, the guy had always been exceptionally nice to him, the son of a humble baker from Two Bends. It made Tor rather like him, since as far as he could tell, the man treated him just as well as he did everyone else, and that standard was high.
The second thing was the man announcing that the Count and Countess of Ward were being a problem for his people.
Them again. Not his favorite people personally at the moment.
He reached into his pocket and pulled two of the poison detectors and held them out to the man.
“Here you go. Let me know if you need more of them. No wait…” He pulled another from his pocket and handed it over too. The last he had with him other than his own. “Just in case they come after you too.”
Trice walked over and gave him a hug, which he took to mean it was a good move. She didn't kiss him, but then being around all these poisons, who could blame her? Also, it was the public dining hall of her school, in front of her friends and peers, so that could be the reason too. That she even hugged him here made him feel special. She didn't have to after all. At school she didn't really have to keep the fiction that their marriage plans were real after all. For that matter, since it was a noble arranged marriage thing she didn't even have to with her parents. They'd be all right with the idea of her marrying him as a business deal type thing, right? So was the hug real?
Tor decided to pretend it was, regardless. He got little enough attention from women; this tiny bit was a luxury. Might as well enjoy it while it lasted.
The man in front of him stood straighter. He had a smile on his face, but also looked baffled at the same time.
