Three tasters have died this year. The fourth has decided to find out why before the next banquet.
In the palace of Castamere every dish the queen eats passes first through the mouth of her taster. Three tasters have died this year, each of a different poison, and the queen has not so much as fallen ill. Someone at court is not trying to kill the queen at all. With the Midwinter Banquet a month away and the royal succession unsettled, the newest taster, a visiting ambassador, the queen's unacknowledged child, her spymaster and the court poet are tangled in a plot where everyone tastes everything and nobody swallows the truth.
5 roles. You take one; your friends take the rest, and the narrator plays any left over. Anyone can bring a character of their own into a role instead.
A cook's apprentice from the lower city who took the taster's post for the wages and a palace bed, knowing exactly what happened to the last three.
The envoy of the Desert League, sent to negotiate a marriage treaty, who has discovered that the court he is negotiating with is quietly eating itself.
The queen's unacknowledged child, raised in a country house and summoned to court this winter for reasons no one will explain.
The queen's spymaster for twenty years, an elderly woman with a lapdog and a perfect memory, who has never once been surprised in public.
The court poet, a fashionable libertine whose satirical verses have made him the most dangerous man at every banquet.