Jaer raised a brow. All this time and no one had bothered to suggest that the princess was ill with anything else? "Now that is a strange picture you paint, Lady. Can a man ask why they would be so determined not to look for a bit of venom in her?"
He could actually name one reason: How very bad it would look to have the Starks going the same way as the Targaryens. So pretend she has a plague because what does it matter if a girl-child died? Never mind that it was the girl-child who would inherit if something should happen to her brother. How much longer until her twin fell ill as well?
He looked again at Toria Lannister. It was one thing to be a lord's daughter, another to be the daughter of a Great Lord, but to be close to the throne was a game of entirely different rules. These were games he had been raised to play, but the Starks and their kin were not Targaryen for all their blood ties. He hoped for their sakes that Toria's kindred were as fast to learn as she seemed to be.
Jaehaerys leaned closer to her and kept his voice even lower than it had been earlier. "Tales in the streets say that your cousin has slept without waking for weeks. She fell ill of a sudden, fevered as she fell into dreams from which she cannot wake. That is not a plague. That is a curse easily laid by several brews. If it is one of them that holds her, I will know." But what he would be able to do even if he had Lazralene and Elia to help, he did not know. Poisons of those kinds were dark things, and some had no remedy. Or if they had, it was lost with Valyria and no living man would know it.