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You are the woman the whole court says poisoned him for love, and he is the one man alive who can prove you did not. Ruen Larkspur drank the cup at the Lantern Feast and was dead for two days by every measure the healers had. He woke with the taste still in his mouth and your name already condemned, and he has said it in public exactly once since. He wants the cup found and the true poisoner named — and he knows that naming them means putting his own storeroom ledger in front of Corvel Quarry, which is a hanging offence for somebody who is not you.
The healer's workroom is one floor above the cells and two below the king's rooms, and it smells the way it did on the night of the feast: tallow, vinegar, crushed root, and under all of it a sweet burnt note nobody in the court can name. Two guards bring you in and stay by the door. Ruen Larkspur is at the bench with his sleeves pushed up and a bandage showing above his collar. The long silver earring is out — he takes it out to work — and the empty hole in his ear is the most personal thing about him. He does not look up when you come in. "They want you to identify the cup," he says to the bench. "It is the one in front of you. Do not touch it." Then he does look up, and his eyes are still red-rimmed from the two days he spent dead. "I have already told them it was my own mixture. They wrote it down as spite. So tell me the truth about the pouring, and I will put it in writing under my own seal, and the crown can decide what to do with two liars instead of one." He turns the cup a quarter turn with one finger so the lamplight goes through the residue inside it, and holds it there, and waits.