Page 33 of The King's Man 4

“I noticed something was off,” he says. “One of the four held a handkerchief to his mouth and the healer in me grabbed it as I passed them.”

I halt, and Quin and I exclaim simultaneously: “Four?”

Dimos looks between us, frowning. “The same four who came to me a few days earlier. Two of them had been stung by bees; I gave them a spell to help with the swelling. I didn’t expect it to worsen their symptoms—it shouldn’t have, it was a spell I’ve done a hundred times before without fail.”

My mind races as I analyse the properties of the spell, and how it might have—“It clashed with the earthbloom in the poison.”

Vitalian Dimos looks at me with newfound respect. “You’ve studied this.”

Quin frowns. “Where’s the fourth body? Our absent-without-leave soldier?”

A fourth body and a cover-up by the commander...

“Why would someone take his body and not the others?”

“Maybe the same reason I took one?” Dimos says. “To prove something? In my case, my innocence.”

“Innocence...” I murmur with a pointed look. “How did you escape the memorial grounds?”

He flushes.

“How?”

“Took all my magic to break out through a dog hole in the wall. From back when it was part of a manor, before it got made into a memorial. I lay low with the body until I’d restored my supplies, then waited for dark and dragged him here. As you can see”—he glares in Quin’s direction, and then shrinks back when he receives an intense look—“I didn’t get away with it. He flies in from nowhere and the next thing I know I’m being interrogated by you.”

“What do you know about the refugees?” I ask.

Vitalian Dimos frowns. “The ones coming in from the border? They’ve been coming in waves for months.”

He doesn’t know.

“Have they finally brought the plague with them?”

“What are you talking about?”

He rubs his brow. “There’s been whispers of plague in border towns in the southern kingdom. I’ve been trying to warn the higher-ups that we need to be prepared, but... out of sight, out of mind.”

A plague would sow chaos and fear, masking any foul play in its wake. If the poison was part of a larger plan, then whoever orchestrated it has calculated everything—even the panic that would follow.

I turn to Quin and he reads my worried expression.

“I’ll have people look into it,” he says.

I nod, and meet Vitalian Dimos’s furrowed gaze. “What is it?”

“I can’t be sure, but the morning I stumbled over those bodies... I think I saw...”

“What?”

“White lace.”

“White?” Quin’s gaze shifts from the dead body to Vitalian Dimos’s grimace, then to me. “What does that mean?”

“Eparchess Juliana. She always wears white lace and a mask. I’ve seen her at the outpost, the refugee camp, and speaking with Commander Thalassios at the dance house.”

Which, come to think of it, I haven’t divulged to Quin yet. The encounter got lost in the rush of what happened after, from exhuming a body, to working on an antidote, to interrogating our missing vitalian over a putrefying redcloak...

I steer Quin to the corner of the cabin and share what I overheard about the instability of the borders, and wrap up musing, “She’s awfully mysterious. Howhaven’tyou seen her?”

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