His throat started to close up and breathing came only in painful shallow gasps.
God!
Desperately he worked over to his desk and grabbed the poison detector he normally took with him to meals; he held it over the cup, which lit up brightly.
Right.
They’d poisoned him then.
Why? Who would do this to him? Tor wanted to vomit, even tried to make himself, sticking a finger down his throat, but nothing happened. He fell to the floor still clutching the detector. The last thought he had before everything went dark was a simple one; what kind of moron invents a poison detector and then let himself get poisoned?
If it hadn’t hurt so much, Tor would have said he deserved it.
Torrance came to, lying in his own bed. The boxes and barrel were gone and the woman in the room with him wasn’t anyone he knew, or had even seen before. She looked at him when he stirred a little and came to his bed side. Her clothing was all blue, a dark and heavy looking material, practical and loose, but with trousers and a tunic, not a skirt, so some kind of work clothes?
She brought him water, and without even being asked, the poison detector, which he triggered before even checking the cup. It was clean. He drank as much as he could, which wasn’t much, and then waited. The woman left and didn’t return, but half an hour later the Dean and Kolb came in.
“Hey…kind of a hard way to get some rest, don’t you think?” The big man teased, his voice was light, but his face held a dark, slightly grim look.
Tor nodded. A very hard way to go about it indeed. A stupid way too. Not something he’d be recommending anyone try for themselves.
The Dean looked at him, a hard look that spoke of fear and dread. “We, um, found the cask and the note that went with it. It was clearly poisoned and the hand that wrote the note was consistent. Meaning one person wrote the whole thing. Other than that we don’t know who did what or when. It may be too soon to leap to conclusions. People don’t generally advertise like that if they’re planning to kill you, so it may well be an attempt to guide blame away from the real culprit.”
That was sensible, of course.
Leaping to conclusions never seemed to help anyone, as far as he’d noticed in life. Still, someone had tried to kill him. Again. Why? Who? These things didn’t have answers yet and it was driving him crazy. More to the point, why would anyone bother? It wasn’t like he was special or anything. In the end Tor was just a schoolboy, even if you corrected for the Squire thing and being one of the many “Countier’s Lairdgren”. If someone didn’t want him around, wouldn’t it be easiest to just ignore him and not give him invitations to functions?
He wondered why no one had come to visit him either. Was that a sign of guilt, or were they just being kept out in order to let him rest? He asked the Dean, or tried to at least. His voice wasn’t working at all. It sounded like someone had poured sand down his throat then stomped on it for a while to mix it around. Really it was worse than that.
It seemed to take forever, but he managed to sit up, and immediately wished he hadn’t even tried. Now he threw up, or at least his body went through the motions. Nothing came out, which was almost worse than if something had. He signaled for a pencil and paper, but no one understood what he meant. He pantomimed the action of writing again. Finally, frustrated, he slowly climbed from bed and slumped to the hard chair across the room.
Tor took up his old note pad and wrote carefully, his hand shaking so much it was barely legible.
Where is everyone?
Had they all abandoned him when the King and Connie decided he didn’t belong at palace functions? Or… Tor had nothing after that. A wave of sadness came over him then, so deep that he couldn’t believe that it was possible to feel that low. He was really alone here, wasn’t he? He knew he wasn’t loved by anyone, but he’d thought his friends were, well, his friends.
Kolb went to the door and called out softly, which Tor appreciated. His head felt like the inside of a kettle drum. Not that he knew what that really felt like, but if he imagined it, that feeling would be… this. Hollow, thumping and ringing. Not fun at all.
After only a few seconds Rolph, Trice and Sara all came in, each had their head hanging down like they were guilty of something. They might have been, but Tor doubted it. It was one thing to decide not to be someone’s best buddy, another to try and kill them. No one here had any reason for that at all. Not that he knew of anyway.
Rolph asked for the room, and even though he had an uneasy look on his face, the Dean left. Kolb followed, but stopped at the door.
“I expect my Squire to be alive when I return.” He didn’t say anything else, but the tone conveyed weight. A promise to back the words up if needed. Possibly with violence.
Rolph just nodded as if it was serious.
No one spoke for a time, but both Sara and Trice cried. Finally Tor wrote something for them.
‘You know, if your parents didn’t want us to get married, they could have just sent a note!’
Trice burst out into loud sobs.
Chapter six
Tor didn’t want to be mean, but the crying was starting to get on his nerves. It either was the case that the Morgans, or at least one of them, had poisoned him, or, and he tried to be very clear when he wrote this last bit out, someone else wanted him to think that. It was actually far more likely to be the second one he pointed out while Trice cried. That or her parents were morons that wanted to be caught.
How likely was that?
Not very.
Tor had talked to both of them at length and not only had they seemed like good people, they seemed intelligent to him. Even if they were secretly evil poisoners, that would have taken a lot of acting talent to pull off, and they would have had to know to set the ground work by trying way back then. That turned out to be too hard to convey with his nearly illegible handwriting at the moment. Darned shaky hands. The tremors seemed worse now than they had been when he’d started writing as if all the stress was making it even harder. Of course, for some reason as he wrote and the shaking got worse Trice cried harder and Sara started in too.
At least the tall blond did it quietly.
Across the room Rolph prowled, looking alternately angry and guilty, finally, Tor wrote down one word on the note pad, then underlined it and held it out for his tall friend to read.
What?
Sara and Patricia didn’t get it, but Rolph certainly did. They’d just known each other too well for too long for him not to. The Prince sighed and sat down with a thump on his own bed, which got the girls attention, even if it wasn’t enough to stop the crying.
“Well… both my parents have sworn to me that they weren’t behind this in any way, and that they’ll lay down their own lives to catch whoever did this to you. Even if it was the Morgans…” This pronouncement got a panicked wail from the normally emotionally solid girl. “However… They could both be lying about it. I mean, you were snubbed at the palace gates not once, but twice. That doesn’t happen by accident, at least not that I’ve ever heard. Sure, mom cried about it for days and even locked herself in her room over it, but dad just got kind of flat like he does. It’s the same if he’s angry, sad… I don’t know what all, because it’s just so expressionless, right? I thought he was upset about it at the time, but what… what if he was just mad at Tor?”
That got everyone’s attention and except for the occasional sob, much lighter than before, everyone focused on Rolph. Maddeningly the Prince didn’t say anything else. He scribbled at first, then realized that he couldn’t make out the words he’d just written, so Tor started over and tried for clarity. It still looked like a seven year old had written it.
‘Why would he be mad at me?’
It seemed a trifle excessive if it was all about him calling the King “Rich”, wasn’t it? Oh, sure, having him
