She knows, for Danny has served this chocolate to the Duke before, that there is no outside morality imposed upon the choice of memory. Saffron always, invariably, sees one of the times she helped somebody. Danny sees those as well, or he sees moments of creation, breakthroughs of hard work and study.
The Duke saw a moment he cleverly destroyed a family. He told the table about it, in salivating detail, and the quiet bliss the nobles had found in the chocolates evaporated. Why would Danny grant him such?
The extra-large chocolate is set down before Saffron and she cuts it in two with her silver fork. It is in the last second before she takes her bite that she notices the color of the honey drop on top is a little deeper than usual. Molasses, perhaps, and it is her single clue that this is something different than what she is expecting.
Bitter Chocolate of Agony Observed
She falls, tumbling, faster and faster. It is a moment she has never seen before. She is five, and Rosie is four, and Rosie has been stung by a hornet. In real life she barely remembers this, but she is here now, and Rosie is wailing. She holds up her arm to show Saffron, and Saffron sees the welt. And then—she feels the welt. In seeing the pain of her sister, it triggers her own sense of pain, and her arm stings and swells with it. Rosie runs off to find their mother, and Saffron falls—
She is eleven, and her best friend has taken a header off of the chicken coop. Busted her nose but good. Saffron sees it, and her own face swells in response, painful, aching, broken. She helps her friend home, and at every step she feels the pain of the broken nose. Until the friend is turned over to her mother, and Saffron runs home, the pain dissolving, the memory released—
She is in the bakery, and the enforcer punches Rosie, and Saffron staggers back with the pain of it as they drag Rosie away—
She is at the hanging, and the body falls—
It is last year, and Danny has sliced right through the pad of his thumb with a bread knife. Skin wounds bleed like billy-o, and Saffron carefully stitches it up for him, feeling the pounding of the blood in her own thumb, feeling the piercing tugging of the thread pulling through. Through the roar of the pain she hears Danny musing: I wonder if I could do something with pain.
Why would you want to? says past Saffron.
You wouldn’t think a Lemon Tart of Regret would be useful, and yet.… says Danny. There might be something there.
Saffron laughs. Only you would slice open your thumb and wonder how to turn it into a new pastry. Go for it. But leave me out of this one.
Do you know how much I love you? says Danny.
And she is falling away from that memory, falling back to the table, even as her last words echo: I love you too. More than anything.…
* * *
The entire table is looking at her. She has been gone a few minutes longer than usual. Hopefully not so long as to give the game away. Her face, she feels now, is still wincing from the pain of the sliced thumb. She consciously relaxes her jaw, loosens her face, breathes.
She is supposed to entice the Duke to eat this chocolate. And how exactly is she going to do that, with everything she just saw plainly visible on her face to the whole table?
She waves at the servitor to take the other half of her chocolate to the Duke. She does not yet trust herself to speak.
The Duke looks at the half-eaten chocolate, then back at her. “For a moment I thought your husband had decided he was willing to poison you,” he says. “But now I see he is merely willing to torture you.”
That gives Saffron the thread to walk down. “His skill with confections is the most important thing to him,” she says, and she keeps her head high, not minding that her lip trembles. The Duke understands this. He will see himself in Danny.
“So explain to me why I, and my table, should go ahead and try this particular confection,” he says. “After seeing its most … interesting results.”
She looks evenly into his face. There is only one answer that will work with the Duke, and this is truth.
At least, part of the truth.
“You will see pain,” she said. “Not your own pain, but another’s. A moment of exquisite pain that someone else is suffering.”
The Duke’s face relaxes, just barely, and he laughs. “No wonder you were so conflicted. My little weaklings.” He gestures around to the table. “Go on, then. Eat.”
Her heart sinks, watching as one by one the reluctant guests pick up their chocolates, their faces frightened or stoic by turns. If the Duke does not eat his bite quickly, then this is for nothing. The nobles will spill to him everything they felt, and there will be no more chance to do this again, and she and Danny will be strung up for daring to oppose the Traitor King.
The memories for some of them will be long this time. She cannot help that. One lucky woman, younger than the rest, is shaking off the trance already. “I saw my brother break his arm,” she says, shuddering, and her hand unconsciously goes to her own arm.
Saffron breathes, willing the woman not to say any more. This is confirmation to the Duke that what she said is true. You see someone else’s pain. The chocolate is not poison. His face relaxes a tiny bit more, he is weakening. He wants to try it.
“You can aim for the right memory if you give it a nudge,” Saffron says, and this is true in general of their work, if irrelevant in the case of this particular chocolate where you will see everything. “Wouldn’t you like to see … what you did to my sister?” Her eyes meet his and she is breathing fast, she can’t help it, and he is feasting on every moment of her pain. If this works.…
The Duke’s eyes never leave hers as he raises the chocolate and places it on his tongue.
* * *
The linked memories keep the Duke under for three entire weeks, writhing in a remembering coma, first on his chair, then moved to his bed, then moved to the dungeon. For three weeks is enough time for someone to find the food-taster’s grandfather, and let him out, and for the whole chain of command to be rearranged. The Duke is declared incapacitated and relieved of his regency, and kind Lord Searle takes over in his place.
When the Duke finally does wake, the pain and malnutrition have left him wasted away to nothing. His eyes fall on a glass cake stand placed beside his filthy, flea-infested mattress, on the stones of the dungeon floor. Inside is a single chocolate, identical to the one he was served at his final dinner.
If he were stronger, one might call his laugh the laugh of someone who finally sees a worthy adversary at last.
The chocolate, of course, was made by a baker, a simple baker who refused the honor of being Regent Searle’s head pastry chef, and asked only to return home to his two loves: his work and his wife.
The chocolate was placed there by Saffron, who stayed to watch the Duke writhe for twenty minutes before she slipped silently away, knowing full well that that pain will account on her soul; that she will revisit this spot if she ever eats that particular chocolate herself again.
The Duke is never leaving this dungeon. And the only real question is, how does he wish to go?
Trembling hands knock the glass dome to the dungeon floor. It shatters, an echo that remains in the Duke’s ears long after the shards have come to rest.
The Duke takes his last bite of food ever on this earth, and remembers, as he falls.
About the Author
TINA CONNOLLY lives with her family in Portland, Oregon, in a house that came with a dragon in the basement and blackberry vines in the attic. She is the author of the Ironskin series (Ironskin, Copperhead, Silverblind) and her stories have appeared all over, including in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Tina Connolly
Art copyright © 2018 by Anna & Elena Balbusso
The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections Page 3