Free The Kingdom of Little Wounds by Susann Cokal Page A

seventeen separate courses of last night’s feast. Taking turns, the physicians bend to the yawning wound and sniff, trying to sort rich viands from rank poison.
    As he dissects, Candenzius dictates observations, and Dé writes them down.
A sharp odor, a sweet odor, a lesion in the belly; watery intestinal matter, a leathery texture to the liver.
    Dé imagines horrible, thrilling possibilities: mandrake, wolfsbane, death cap mushrooms, belladonna. When he was at his French university, he made a special study of toxicity. Paracelsus wrote that disease comes from poisons emitted by unfavorable stars, but there are just as many lethal substances here on earth as there are pricks of light in the heavens.
    Light pours thick through the window, angling down to fill the cavity in the center of Sophia. No candles are necessary here. The Princess is a split fig, with the claws of a dead bird, eyes gone to white marbles. She is animal, vegetable, mineral, and she reeks of an army’s worth of injury.
    “Shall you say it was murder?” old Venslov asks Candenzius, at last, as they run out of organs to unpack and have still failed to name a specific substance. “Shall you identify a cause?”
    Candenzius draws a last breath, savoring the complicated odors around the corpse. Weighing the advantages of a spectrum of answers. Folding his sticky hands together.
    “This is what I will tell the King,” he says: “Although the Princess died a virgin, her body has been violated. The man — or woman — who killed her is extremely cunning, as sophisticated in skill as in evil, for the means used is still indeterminate. We shall dedicate ourselves to breaking down the poison into its components. We must begin by a meticulous distillation of the fluids in her liver, which we will ask the King to save from burial.”
    The three physicians nod solemnly, relieved to have found a direction. Dé admires Candenzius’s artful turn of a speech, no less than his mastery of anatomy. He does not speak this admiration aloud, lest Candenzius’s fall from favor — which seems inevitable, given his very particular views — come quickly, and Venslov resume the chief position. Fawning is an art even subtler than medicine.
    “Well done, Doctor,” Venslov flatters first, and Dé is relieved at the chance to echo him. Candenzius smiles modestly, blinking those fine eyes, and thanks the other two for their assistance.
    Then the three of them look at the brimming basins, asking themselves how to put the Princess together again for her funeral, or if they should even try.

Q UICK
    L YING almost weightless in the simple bed of her inner chamber, Queen Isabel mourns her daughter. The first child to live after a series of miscarriages, the child who saved her from a shameful divorce, after which she would have returned to France forever disgraced and known for her inability to breed. Sophia, whose name means “wisdom” and whose character was forever pleasing, until the foul
Morbus
Lunediernus
seized her and her siblings.
    Princess (Duchess?) Sophia, twelve years old and now deceased.
    Crown Prince Christian, eleven.
    Princess Beatte, nearly ten.
    Princess Hendrika, nearly nine.
    Princess Amalia, seven.
    Princess Margrethe (named after Christian’s ancient cousin, the Duchess of Marsvin), six years old.
    Princess Gorma, at five years of age the likely last child of the Lunedies.
    Another series of miscarriages followed Gorma’s birth, and Isabel is now thirty-nine, an age at which the womb turns rotten and bears bad fruit if any at all.
    To distract herself from this grief and shame, Isabel remembers a journey she took as a child, before she’d even heard of this northern land and its capital city, when she was still young Isabelle des Rayaux, a daughter of the Loire Valley. As part of her education in the ways of the world, she traveled by barge to the palace of her extravagant Uncle Henri, Duke of Pau d’Impors, who was wealthier than any duke had the