The Taster Who Caught the Regent's Poison novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Honey

The boy emperor woke up laughing and cheated Linyuan at cards; that night Linyuan knelt in the Regent's study, and then the Hu brothers demanded an Audience.

Linyuan made the Emperor drink a pint of warm salt water, and the boy hated him for it with his whole heart.

"It tastes like the sea's armpit," Zhao Yunhe croaked.

"The honey is still in you. Drink."

The boy drank, retched into the basin, and wiped his mouth on his yellow sleeve.

Then he looked up with watering eyes and, for the first time since Linyuan had known him, laughed out loud.

It was a hoarse, surprised crow of a laugh.

The attendants stopped whatever they were doing.

"I'm awake," the Emperor said, amazed. "Taster, I'm awake. It's noon, and I'm awake."

"It's the salt."

"It is not the salt."

He grabbed Linyuan's wrist with a thin hand that shook.

"Do you play cards?"

Linyuan played cards the way a noodle boy from the outer city does, with great skill and no honour.

By the end of the afternoon the Emperor had cheated him out of six strings of pretend cash.

He hid a card in his sleeve, accused Linyuan of hiding one, and giggled until he coughed.

His hands shook around the cards, and they shook worse at the table.

When lunch came in, he ate from his favourite red lacquer bowls.

His fingers trembled so hard that the rice spilled.

Master Gu himself brought the tray.

He was a short, thick man with flour up to his elbows and a burn scar across his left hand.

He set the red bowls down.

"Not you, boy," he said, when Linyuan reached for a lid.

"You taste from your own cup, same as always. I won't have the set touched by a taster's mouth."

He tapped the rim. "That lacquer cost more than you do."

"I know the rule, Master Gu."

"Good." He cuffed Linyuan's shoulder, gently, the way he did every day. "You look thin. There's a bun for you in the kitchen."

He left.

Linyuan stood in the doorway with his tin cup and tried to work out what was bothering him.

It was only that the boy always seemed worse after meals, and he could not make that fit.

Then the Emperor shouted, "Taster, you cheated!" and Linyuan went back in and lost another six strings.

That night he did not knock at the Regent's study.

He walked straight in.

Duan Shiyan sat at his desk in his cap and his violet robe, writing in an even hand.

He looked as though the night on that desk had been a quiet dream.

His supper tray waited on the side table.

Linyuan tasted every dish with a face.

"Clean," he said at the end.

"I thought so."

"You left me a card with a number on it."

The Regent put down his brush.

"I keep a count. It is a habit."

"He's sixteen."

"I know how old he is."

His voice had not changed, but he looked at the brush instead of at Linyuan.

"He laughed today," Linyuan said. "Out loud. He had forgotten how, and I reminded him with a pint of salt water."

"Yes. I heard."

"And tomorrow you will put him back to sleep."

"Yes," the Regent said. "Probably."

Linyuan looked at him for a long moment.

He was furious, and he could not tell whether it was at the Regent or at the way his own knees remembered the Regent's hand.

So he did the stupidest, most exact thing he could think of.

He walked around the desk, took the brush out of the Regent's fingers, and set it in its rest.

"Push your chair back."

"Linyuan."

"Push it back."

The Regent pushed it back.

Linyuan knelt on the rug between his knees.

The Regent's hands tightened on the arms of the chair, and his eyes went huge.

"I taste things for a living," Linyuan said, quite clearly. "Keep your hands on the wood. I want to know what you taste like."

He heard the Regent breathe in.

He untied the sash and parted the silk, and the Regent was already flushed and eager under his hands.

Linyuan bent his head and took him into his mouth.

The Regent tasted of warm skin and salt and a little of sandalwood soap.

It was the best thing Linyuan had ever had in his mouth.

He did not know what he was doing, so he did what he did with soup, and paid close attention.

He learned what made the Regent's stomach clench.

When he drew his tongue slowly along the underside, the Regent made a rough noise and his hips rocked.

When he drew back and breathed on him, the Regent swore.

"Taster."

"Mm."

"Do not," the Regent said hoarsely. "Do not stop."

Linyuan took more of him, as much as he could, and used his hand for the rest.

The Regent was thick, and he stretched Linyuan's jaw, and Linyuan loved it.

His eyes watered, and he did not look away.

The Regent's knuckles went white on the chair arms.

"Linyuan," he whispered, over and over, like a man trying a word he had never been allowed to say. "Linyuan. Linyuan."

Linyuan hollowed his cheeks.

The Regent made a broken sound and let go of the chair, and his hand went into Linyuan's hair, shaking.

"I am going to," he said. "Move."

Linyuan did not move.

He held the Regent's hip with one hand, kept his mouth where it was, and looked up.

The Regent came with a groan Linyuan felt through his own chest, and Linyuan swallowed every drop and licked him gently clean.

Then he sat back on his heels, wiped his mouth, and felt a moment of real and shameful triumph.

The Regent of Liang lay boneless in his chair with his cap crooked, staring at Linyuan.

"No one has ever knelt to me for anything but a favour," the Regent said.

"I'm not asking for a favour."

"I can see that."

Linyuan ached in his own trousers, and he had not touched himself once.

The Regent saw that too.

He slid his foot, still in its black silk slipper, along the rug until the toe rested between Linyuan's thighs, and pressed.

Linyuan gasped.

"Take what you want," the Regent said softly. "I would like to watch."

It was filthy and wonderful, and Linyuan did not need to be asked twice.

He rolled his hips against the slipper, one hand braced on the Regent's knee.

The Regent watched his face.

"There," Linyuan said. "Press there. Harder."

The Regent pressed harder.

Linyuan came all at once, shuddering, with his forehead on the Regent's knee and a sound in his throat he had never made before.

Afterwards the Regent took him under the arms and pulled him up into his lap, robes and all, and held him.

His hand stroked Linyuan's back in long, unsteady strokes.

"I should have you whipped," he said into Linyuan's hair, without any conviction.

"Try it."

"I would rather learn what that mouth does next."

Linyuan laughed, and the Regent laughed too, quietly, and it was the first time Linyuan had ever heard it.

Someone knocked at the study door.

The Regent stiffened, set Linyuan on his feet, and tied his sash one-handed so smoothly that he must have practised.

A guard handed in a scroll sealed with yellow wax and stamped with a wolf's head, the seal of the Hu family.

The Regent read it, and the soft look went out of his face.

"The Hu brothers," he said. "The Emperor's mother's brothers."

"What do they want?"

"An Audience in nine days."

He turned the paper to the light.

"The boy must read the Autumn Edict aloud before every minister, awake and in his right mind."

Linyuan took the scroll and read it twice.

It was well written, and it was a trap.

Someone in the Hu household had learned that the Emperor laughed in the afternoons now.

Linyuan was the only person who had made him do it.

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