This Woven Kingdom(This Woven Kingdom #1)(43)

Never once had they been wrong.

But try as he might shape his heart to the painful context of the situation, the prince could not condone the killing of an innocent. He could not fathom the murder of the girl, not now, not for the crime of merely existing.

So it had become, in the aftermath of their meeting, critically important to Kamran to reconcile his heart and mind. He’d wanted, desperately, to side with his grandfather, who in eighteen years had always treated Kamran with an abundance of love and loyalty. The prince could learn to accept his grandfather as imperfect; all else might be forgiven if he could only prove today the merit of the king’s argument—that the girl was indeed a threat. It was with this in mind that the prince had consoled himself with a single plan of action:

He would find evidence.

He would prove to himself that the girl was plotting against the crown; that she had ambitions of bloodshed; that she hoped to incite a revolt.

It certainly seemed possible.

For the more he’d thought on it, the more impossible it seemed to Kamran that the girl did not know who she was.

On that score, his grandfather had to be right. Why else the refinement, the elegance and education, the knowledge of multiple languages? She’d been bred for royalty, had she not? Was it not a disguise, the lowering of herself into obscurity? Was not the snoda merely an excuse to hide her unusual eyes, which were likely proof of her identity?

Devils above, Kamran had not been able to decide.

For it was not entirely a performance, was it? She worked every day for her living, scrubbed the floors of her lessers, cleaned the toilets of a gentlewoman.

Deeply agitated, Kamran had drawn his hood low over his head, pulled the chain mail over his face, and gone straight from his grandfather’s chambers into the center of town.

He’d been determined to find reason in what seemed like madness, and the parcels seemed his straightest path to clarity.

Kamran had recognized their seal the night prior; they were from the apothecary in town. Only this morning had it occurred to him that the girl might’ve overreacted to their loss. It had suddenly seemed strange to him that anyone would grow hysterical at the thought of losing a few medicinal herbs—items that were easily found, easily replaced.

It was possible, then, that there was more to their contents.

The parcels might help prove her hand in some nefarious scheme, tie her to some underhanded plotting; uncovering their truth might establish her as a real threat to the empire. It was perhaps not too late, he’d consoled himself, to find a way to support the king’s decision against her.

So he’d gone.

It was a simple matter for him to locate the apothecary, disguise himself as a magistrate, ask questions of the proprietor. He’d pretended to be going shop to shop, asking questions about possible criminal acts committed during the previous evening’s revelry, and had hounded the poor man for every detail concerning his late-night customers.

One, in particular.

“Sir, I confess I don’t understand,” the proprietor had said nervously. He was a wiry man, with black hair and brown skin; a man named Deen. “She purchased only what I recommended for her injuries, nothing more.”

“And what had you recommended?”

“Oh,” he said, faltering a bit as he remembered. “Oh, just—well, there were two different kinds of salve. She had very different injuries, sir, though both treatments were meant to help with the pain and guard against infection, albeit in slightly different ways. Nothing unusual. That was all, really. Yes, it was just some salve and—and some linen bandages.”

Salve and linen bandages.

She’d fallen to her knees in the gutter to save a few coppers’ worth of salve and linen bandages?

“You’re quite certain?” Kamran had asked. “There was nothing else—nothing of considerable value? Nothing particularly precious or expensive?”

At this, the tension in Deen’s body seemed to vanish. The apothecarist blinked curiously at the man wearing a face of chain mail—the man he considered a magistrate—and said, with surprising calm, “When a person is in tremendous pain, sir, is not its remedy worth everything? Valued above all else?”

Kamran managed an indifferent tone when he said, “You mean to say the girl was in tremendous pain?”

“Most certainly. She did not complain of it aloud, but her wounds were severe and had been festering all day. I’ve witnessed many a man in my shop weep over lesser injuries.”

Kamran had felt the words like a blow.

“Forgive me,” Deen said carefully. “But as magistrate you must surely know that the wages of a snoda are paid out predominantly in the form of shelter? I rarely see a snoda in my shop, for most receive only three tonce a week in addition to their housing. Lord only knows how the girl scraped together the coppers to pay me.” Deen hesitated. “I explain all this only because you have asked, sir, if the girl left my store with anything of considerable value, and—”

“Yes, I see,” Kamran had said sharply.

He’d felt sick with self-loathing, with shame. He’d hardly heard Deen as the man prattled on, providing details Kamran no longer cared to hear. He did not want to know that the girl was friendly or evidently hardworking. He did not want to hear Deen describe the bruise on her face or discuss at length his suspicions that she was being abused by her employer.