The Taster Who Caught the Regent's Poison novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Open

Linyuan tasted the Regent's table under his eye, broke into his study for the jar, and ended up over his desk in his arms; the next morning the honey was dosed.

The Regent's supper table was laid with plain white porcelain and nothing else.

Linyuan noticed because the Emperor's table, three halls away, glittered with red lacquer, and he had never once seen the Regent touch it.

"Sit," Duan Shiyan said.

He had not changed his robe, and he had not lifted his chopsticks.

Linyuan stood beside the chair with his tin cup and his own spoon.

"I'm not sitting down to dinner with you."

"You are not dining. You are working."

"Then I'll stand."

The Regent shrugged one narrow shoulder, and Linyuan began.

There were six dishes, and he tasted each one standing and named what was in it.

"Lotus root, rice wine, white pepper, a pinch of ginger."

"Yes."

"Duck, star anise, and a tangerine peel older than I am."

"Yes."

"Bean curd with crab roe, and someone put salt in the stock twice."

The Regent lifted his chin, and the corner of his mouth moved.

"The cook will be told."

After the sixth dish Linyuan waited a hundred breaths, as the rules require, while the Regent watched him do it.

The Regent had long, heavy-lidded eyes, and they never left Linyuan's mouth.

"Clean," Linyuan said at last.

"You do realize you are protecting the man who poisons your Emperor."

"I'm protecting my pay."

The Regent took up his chopsticks, lifted a slice of pear from the last dish, and held it out across the corner of the table.

"Open."

"I just tasted it."

"Then you know it is good."

It was a small, silly order.

Linyuan opened his mouth anyway.

The pear was cold and sweet, the chopsticks touched his tongue and drew away, and he chewed with his ears burning.

"Better," the Regent said, and ate the next slice himself.

Linyuan stood there and tried to remember that he hated him.

At the third watch of the night, Linyuan lay on a pallet in the Pavilion's side room and did not sleep.

The Regent's study was across the hall, and the jar of sleepwort had to be in the study.

A taster who wants proof does not wait for permission.

He crept in barefoot, with a candle stub.

The first drawer held tax rolls.

The second held a bundle of letters tied in black ribbon, and he left those alone.

He was feeling along the back of the third drawer when lamplight came up behind him.

"The second drawer was warm," Duan Shiyan said. "The third is the right one."

Linyuan turned with the candle in his fist.

The Regent stood in the doorway in a thin white under-robe, with his hair down.

It fell past his waist, black and straight and heavier than Linyuan had imagined.

Without the cap he looked younger and more tired, and more dangerous.

Linyuan already held the jar in his left hand, a small celadon one with a cork.

"You have stolen it," the Regent said. "What now?"

"Now I take it to the Emperor's physician."

"She is the one who gave it to me."

That stopped Linyuan for one breath, and one breath was too long, because the Regent crossed the room.

Linyuan swung the jar, the Regent caught his wrist, and the jar hit the rug unbroken.

Linyuan drove his knee up and his shoulder into the Regent's chest.

For a moment they fought honestly, and the Regent fought like a man who had once been taught.

Then Linyuan's back hit the desk, and the tax rolls slid to the floor.

The Regent held both of his wrists in one hand above his head.

Linyuan lay breathing hard through his nose, and so did the Regent.

The Regent's loose hair fell around them both.

"You should be afraid of me," the Regent said.

"I'm trying. It isn't working."

"No." The Regent looked at his mouth. "I noticed."

"Don't look at my mouth."

"You taste poison for a living. I would like to know what that mouth does when it is not working."

Linyuan's face went hot to the ears.

"I've never kissed anyone," he said, because he was a fool and it came out before he could stop it.

The Regent's grip loosened a little.

"Neither have I," Duan Shiyan said.

Linyuan stared up at him.

Duan Shiyan was thirty-one years old, and he was a virgin.

So was Linyuan.

"We are a matched set, Taster," the Regent said, and Linyuan laughed, cracked and wild, and the corner of the Regent's mouth tipped in answer.

"I have wanted you since the first cup," the Regent said, very low, "and I am not going back to my bed."

Linyuan thought about it for exactly as long as it took to see how tight the Regent's jaw was.

A pulse was beating in the side of his pale throat.

Linyuan pulled his wrists free, took two fistfuls of the Regent's robe, and hauled his mouth down onto his own.

The Regent made a sound that Linyuan felt in his teeth.

It was a bad kiss.

Linyuan bit his lip by accident, and the Regent bumped his nose, and neither of them cared.

Then the Regent tilted Linyuan's jaw with one cold hand, the way he had in the antechamber, and said against his mouth, "Open."

It stopped being bad.

The Regent's tongue came in slow and sure, and Linyuan heard himself whimper.

He dragged the Regent closer with his heels, and he felt exactly how much the Regent wanted him, even through two layers of silk.

"You're hard," Linyuan said, stupidly.

"Evidently."

"For me?"

"Su Linyuan," the Regent said, "you are the only person in this palace who has put his hands on me without being paid."

The Regent's hand slid down between them, found the cord of Linyuan's trousers, and stopped there.

"Yes," Linyuan said loudly, before he could be asked. "Go on. I'm not a porcelain cup."

The cord came loose with one pull.

The Regent's long fingers closed around him, and for a moment the whole world was the weight of that palm.

Linyuan had touched himself in the cold kitchen loft a thousand times, quietly, with his eyes shut.

It had never been anything like this.

The Regent's hand was dry and slow at first, and Linyuan rolled up into it without a shred of shame.

"More. Tighter."

The Regent tightened his hold.

"Faster."

He went faster, a little clumsy, learning, and Linyuan showed him the way with his hips and his breath.

"There. Don't stop that."

"I am not stopping," the Regent said hoarsely.

Linyuan pushed his own hand inside the white under-robe, because he refused to lie there being handled like a dish.

The Regent was long and hot and hard as wood, and already slick.

When Linyuan closed his fist, the Regent's forehead dropped against his shoulder and he shook.

"Linyuan," the Regent said into his collar, the first time he ever used the name.

"That's not how a Regent talks."

"Be quiet and do it again."

Linyuan did it again.

They found a rhythm that was theirs, fast and ugly, with the desk creaking under Linyuan's back.

The Regent was beautiful when he lost his careful face, and Linyuan watched every moment of it go.

Linyuan broke first, with a shout he buried in the Regent's shoulder.

The Regent followed three strokes later, silent, his long body locked rigid against Linyuan's, his teeth set in Linyuan's collarbone.

For a while they lay on the tax rolls and only breathed.

Then the Regent lifted his head, took a silk handkerchief from his sleeve, and cleaned Linyuan's stomach with grave attention.

"I'm still taking the jar," Linyuan said.

"Take it. There is a second jar behind the lamp."

"You are impossible."

"Yes." The Regent's face was calm and soft and wrecked in a way Linyuan had never seen.

"Will you sleep here or in the side room?"

"Side room."

"Good," the Regent said, and let him go.

At dawn Linyuan stood in the Emperor's antechamber with his hair still damp and his mouth still sore.

The breakfast tray came in with congee, pickled radish, and a small pot of honey with a wooden dipper.

Linyuan tasted the congee and the radish, and both were clean.

The honey was sweet and bright and ordinary, and under it, thin as a hair, was the cold-tea taste of sleepwort.

He turned.

Behind the screen the boy had woken early for the first time in months.

Zhao Yunhe was sitting up with the honey dipper in his mouth, grinning around it.

"It was on the table," the Emperor said. "I was hungry."

The tray guard in violet stood by the door and said nothing.

On the tray, folded under the radish, lay a card in a long clean hand.

*Forty-two.*

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