CANDY

Chapter Four

When I awoke I was hungry. My nap had turned into half a night's sleep and despite my intentions I'd missed dinner. I wondered idly what drug the court physician had given me, and why I wasn't more upset about it. Perhaps it was because I had nothing of importance to hide. Perhaps the drug was still acting upon me. It didn't matter. I was pretty sure now that the court physician, while mistaken in his suspicion of me, cared about the princess and was no more poisoning her than I was.

Once more, despite its being about three in the morning, I found an attendant outside my door, awaiting my expressed wishes, which, I admit, were first and foremost for food, since I'd missed both tea and dinner. I was led directly to the kitchen, where a sleepy cook (not the head cook, but an underling) joined me and asked what would please me. I could have gone into the TARDIS and had whatever I wanted, but that didn't occur to me until I was already humbly requesting a tuna sandwich and a cup of tea. I hadn't taken more than two bites of the sandwich and three gulps of the tea (nice and hot, too!) when Nyssa and Tegan appeared on either side of me at the kitchen table and couldn't keep their hands off my forehead and wrists.

All I could think of to say was "Why aren't you lot asleep? Do you know what time it is? Enough, stop it! I'm fine!"

"We couldn't wake you, Doctor!" Nyssa was breathless.

"We were so worried!" Tegan was near tears.

"I'm fine!" I didn't want to confess that I'd carelessly allowed myself to be drugged. "Fine and hungry."

"Doctor," said Nyssa, "there is a poisoner about."

"Maybe," I admitted.

"We saw you lying there."

"Oh, for heaven's sake."

"… in your clothes. Your shoes. On top of the covers. What were we to think? Tegan thought you were dead. I had to pick her up off the floor."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to worry you. I guess I was really tired." All the while I was dying to tell my friends what had happened. Not only did I hate lying to them, even by omission, but I had no one but them in whom to confide, and I longed for the relief of that confidence. Nonetheless I smiled and made light of the scare they'd had. I felt like a heel.

The court physician didn't seem likely to go along with Prussian blue so I explained the situation to the princess and she agreed that Nyssa should try to synthesize some in the TARDIS. As backup, she would search for a source in a neighboring land. She had a connection, she said. I didn't mention that I thought I knew what kind of connection she had, but I did wonder who might be able to tell me whom the princess was kissing in the garden. Someone must know. What were the chances that the someone who knew would also be the someone who told?

At breakfast, at which I found myself hungry enough to participate, I casually asked whether the palace didn't generally have more visitors than just the three of us. "No," said the prince. "Grigs is usually full of tourists but they don't come here. They go on tours of the big candy companies."

"We landed on your premises by accident," I admitted.

"But we are honored to be here," Nyssa hastened to add and Tegan, her mouth full of kipper, nodded enthusiastically.

"It must be lonely, though," I ventured, "all isolated like this, with only us, blundering through."

"Not at all," said the princess, soberly. "We are used to keeping our own counsel." She had barely touched her food. "We value our privacy."

After breakfast, Nyssa withdrew to the TARDIS to see whether she had the right components to start making Prussian blue or whether we needed to shop around, so to speak. I took Tegan aside and asked her if she would be willing to cozy up to staff and report back to me with any gossip that came her way. "What do you mean, 'cozy up,'" she asked, warily.

"Be friendly, interested, helpful. Keep your ears and eyes open."

She narrowed her eyes at me. For a moment I thought she had guessed the outcome of my visit to the court physician, but then I remembered that I hadn't even told anyone I'd seen him, much less how the visit had gone.

Vandon had gone off somewhere with his tutor, whom I still hadn't met, and the princess had excused herself and not specified where she was headed. I thought following her might be difficult, considering the only time I found myself unattended was either in the Caramel Room (to which, of course, I would have to be escorted), when I faked a faint, which was getting old and could land me back in the clutches of the court physician, or in the TARDIS. I was pretty sure the princess was neither in the TARDIS nor in the Caramel Room. What I needed was an ally among the attendants, who might take me where I needed to go and keep shtum about it. Maybe Tegan was finding me such an ally even as I ruminated.

One of the ideas that tumbled around in my head was that I could find an ally on my own. All I had to do was flirt a bit. I wasn't enthusiastic about that. Misleading people is all right in a good cause but not in matters of the heart.

Then I had a thought totally unrelated to the prince, the princess, poisoning or even my friends: who had chosen my attire when my normal clothes had been too soaked to wear? How in the world had anyone accidentally reproduced a favorite outfit of one of my past selves? I asked the ubiquitous attendant to take me to see the royal tailor and was accommodated. The tailor was in and, to my surprise, was a very old, or old-appearing, woman. She met us at the door of her workshop and came out, closing the door behind her; apparently, I was not to come in (the attendant retired a discreet distance off down the hall). "Hello," I said, holding out my hand. "I'm the Doctor."

"I know," said the tailor, neither frowning nor smiling, ignoring my outstretched hand, which I allowed to drop to my side.

"I see," I said, not really seeing. "Well, I wanted to thank you for the fine clothing you had brought to me when my own items were drying."

"They weren't drying," she said, flatly. "They needed dry cleaning. Did you need anything else? I'm a little busy right now."

"No, sorry, I didn't mean to disturb you, but… can you tell me where you got your inspiration for this outfit?"

She was silent for so long I thought she might not have heard me. I was opening my mouth to repeat my query when she suddenly looked sharply into my eyes and held the gaze long enough for me to feel uncomfortable and lower my eyes. She took my chin and lifted my face so she could look longer into my eyes; whatever she was doing, she wasn't done yet. She had to be reading my mind; that was the only reasonable explanation, not that it was reasonable, but nothing else even approached sensibility. Finally she let go of my face and turned away. "Yes, I see, it is all clear now. You have been many people and will be many more people. Did I choose the wrong self?"

"No, no, you chose well. I am still me."

"You are still you, but you have no idea who that is. Interesting."

"You got that outfit from my mind, not even my conscious mind, not even my current mind, and without meeting me in person. May I ask, not to be rude, but how did you do that?"

She laughed. "You came here resolved not to flirt with me. You are clueless but honest. You want to help, but to help, you need to invade the princess' privacy. Of course it is worth doing because her privacy versus her life is an imbalanced scale; her life is worth more than her privacy. She may not see it that way, though, and that might prevent you from saving either. Whatever will you do?"

"I guess I'll ask you if you know whom the princess is seeing romantically." It is hard not to lay all your cards on the table when you're dealing with someone who already knows what you hold.

"And if I don't tell you?"

"Then I won't know until someone else tells me."

"Or you see for yourself."

"I have already seen for myself," I said, "but I don't know who I saw. She was kissing a man. He looked to be about her age, her real age, not the age she looks."

"You'd know about that…."

"Yessss…. Dark hair, longish, rather tall, hard to tell from my vantage point, maybe taller than I. Commoner, if clothes are an indicator, though he might have been dressing down for the sake of anonymity. That's all I could make out." Then I added, "Am I the only mind you can read or can you read… just anybody?"

She smiled mirthlessly. "I don't get to choose. I didn't choose this gift to begin with. Gift. It is not always a gift." Then a slight twinkle enhanced the smile. "You're easy."

"So do you know who he is and are you going to tell me?"

"I know who he is."

"Can you read his mind?" She shook her head. "Pity. It could save the princess some embarrassment. We'd know if he was responsible."

"That would tell us nothing," said the tailor. "If he were completely innocent, worthy of her love, and I make no assumptions about her feelings, he could still be poisoning her unwittingly."

"You… you knew about the poison?"

"Your mind. I told you; you're easy." She paused. "If I tell you who he is, what will you do?"

I tried to read her face but it was as inscrutable as my mind should have been. The truth is, I had no idea what I would do with the knowledge I didn't yet have; I was still focused upon acquiring it.

"Perhaps you can tell that I am not from Grigs." It was my turn to shake my head. "I am from Barcla. Do you know any Shellaran history?" I shook my head again. "Everyone in Barcla speaks Grigsi. Half the people in the world speak Grigsi."

"An empire?"

"Yes, not so terribly long ago. Generations, but not so many. There were battles for independence, peaceful granting of independence and takeovers by other imperialists, but that's politics. Language and culture were already overwhelmed by the empire. Now Grigs is small and powerless. What is now Grigs was just a principality within a larger entity, not the colonies but a ruling entity. That's all gone now. It still calls itself a principality but it's not part of anything smaller than the planet. When the princess dies, a child will be in power and enemies will vie for the chance to swallow little Grigs whole. The child himself will be swallowed whole."

"You are from Barcla," I said, carefully. "Why are you here?"

The tailor glanced over at the attendant, who was making a show of not eavesdropping but who nonetheless noticed the glance and moved farther down the hall. "My family is all in Ambarba. My grandfather was nominally a diplomat, also minor royalty, but actually a spy. He married here, had a family…. Some were executed, as he was, others escaped, back to Barcla - but they eventually left - and only I stayed, as a ward of the prince… the princess' father-in-law-to-be. He was a young prince too, but I was his ward. He was 17. I was 15. I don't suppose you can guess what kind of guardian he was." Her eyes had never left mine but now I could feel them so intensely that I lowered mine. This time she didn't grab my face. "Yes, I see you know. Well, the princess doesn't. She has no idea."

"Ward means hostage. And the princess - she thinks… what? Wait, she was traded. Someone knew. It was an easy trade, then."

"She was spirited away from me, back to Barcla. I don't know what she was told there. How the old prince hated the treaty. He really had no choice; his son insisted. Me, I sort of disappeared too, but I'm still here. It's good to have a skill. The skill they all know about. I won't say it's good to have the one they don't know about."

"And you got to see your daughter grow up."

"My daughter is dying. Her grandson will be the ruler of Grigs for as long as Grigs lasts. I don't expect it to exist for another generation. Even so I may not live to see the end of Grigs."

"Do you want Grigs to stop existing?"

"It isn't up to me."

I wanted to comfort this woman, but she clearly did not want my comfort, or anyone's comfort. "Why won't you tell me who the princess' lover is?"

"I can't read him."

"But you know who he is. Ah, because you can read your own daughter. Of course you can!" I didn't mean to let a sigh of frustration escape me but somehow it did, and although she had been opening her mouth to speak, perhaps to tell me what I needed to know, she shut it again and said nothing. "Don't you want to save your daughter's life?"

"He can't be poisoning her. They've been in love since they were nine years old. He is my cousin's son. His name is Norell. He hasn't got a title. He hasn't got anything. She will never marry him, not because of the title but because she is invested in seeing her son on the throne. Norell doesn't know they're related, nor does she, but at any rate he has nothing to gain by her death. Nothing. He loves her. I think she loves him. She has been through a lot. She may have no stomach for love."

"The stomach is not involved." I was sorry I said it as soon as it came out of my mouth, even before the tailor scowled, turned her back, retreated into her workshop and slammed the door in my face. The attendant was at my side in an instant and I allowed myself to be shown back to the Caramel Room, where a tidily wrapped candy graced my pillow.