The Alpha King's Bride novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: What Was in the Cup

Aldric's POV

The head gardener found me at dawn on the south terrace and held out his cap in both hands.

"Your Majesty, the roses under the Queen's window died in the night. Every one."

I went down to look.

The whole bed was black, down to the roots, and the soil around it smelled of honey.

The reports on my desk had mentioned her morning tea every Sunday for four years.

I knelt and took a handful of the dirt in a cloth.

Then I sent a runner for the Crown physician, and I did not wait for him to dress.

He arrived with his coat buttoned wrong and a leather case under his arm.

I gave him the cloth, and I gave him the empty silver flask I had found lying in the black bed.

"Sir, what am I looking for?" the physician asked.

"Whatever is in the tea."

He worked in the cold room beside the kitchens for most of the morning.

I paced the corridor outside.

When he came out his face was grey.

"Wolfsbane root, Your Majesty. Ground very fine, steeped in honey."

"Wolfsbane kills."

"In this dose, no. It dulls the nose and blunts the mate sense. And there is something else." He held up a glass tube with one pale hair floating in the amber. "A strand of human hair, steeped. Light brown, I think, or sandy."

Sandy.

I closed my hand slowly on the doorframe.

"What does it do?" I said.

"The old texts call it a bond tonic. Whoever drinks it feels a pull toward the owner of the hair, as strong as any fated bond, and goes blind to every other mate. I have never seen it brewed. It is forbidden in three kingdoms."

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