Page 43 of A Beastly Court

“We’ve met before.” It wasn’t a question. “And in that meeting, you must have learned I am not someone you can poke with your verbal barbs without consequence.”

Brandi’s tongue darted across her chapped lips before she audibly gulped. When she nodded, her white hair swished violently across her face.

I didn’t need a memory to slip through the maelstrom to know who had come out the victor of that previous interaction. I just hoped I’d shown the same mercy as I was choosing to do now.

“If you are as innocent as you claim to be, it would be in your best interest not to antagonize the person who could set you free, isn’t that right?”

The hedge witch sighed, deflating, all the vinegar she’d bottled up against me draining away. She shuffled back to her cauldron to give it a stir, gesturing for me to take a look at what she was making. “Despite your best intentions, Meadow Hawthorne, I don’t think that’s possible, even if these cells and my shackle weren’t as warded as a coven’s grimoire cupboard.”

Cobwebs, damselfly wings, swan feathers… “You’re making Caer powder,” I whispered. “W-why?”

“Why do you think?” Brandi answered miserably.

Now it was my turn to wet my lips and swallow against a suddenly dry throat. Thistle thorns, it was scratchier than if I’d swallowed a robin’s nest. She had to be mistaken. She had to. Maybe Ossian had found out a way to weaponize it against the mallaithe, to disorient the fae hunting trees so they’d be easier to destroy? The same with the sluagh blackbirds, perhaps, befuddling them into breaking from their flock so they could be singled out with an ash arrow?

Why else would there be shelves carved into the wall full of round glass jars filled with white powder?

My mind told me those were all logical reasons, and yet instinct knew they were all false. Oh my Green Mother.

“It’s in everything,” Brandi whispered, a crazed gleam in her brown eyes. “The food, the drinking water. Well, not his, but everywhere else. Keeps the populace susceptible to his illusions, doesn’t it? He keeps it in that big pouch on his belt at all times. He comes down every night to feed and then—”

“Stop,” I pleaded, on the verge of hysteria myself. My world was crumbling around me. And not with the gradual erosion seen by time. This was an avalanche. “Stop.”

“He used to make it himself,” she rambled on, stirring the cauldron vigorously with her golden spoon. The scrape of it against the inner rim was like the screech of a metal roof being torn off its frame during a storm. “But after he brought that old hag in to feed from”—she tossed her head towards the door at the end of the room, from where I could have sworn I heard the faintest music—“he hasn’t had any use for my magic. Except for this.”

She started to laugh. “I was never very powerful, but I was always precise. Guess that paid off in the long run, didn’t it? Look at me now, Ma!”

My stomach twisted as she became more unglued, cackling away and stirring like a madwoman. I chanced a look at the stairwell, knowing I had left the door ajar and wondering if anyone was hearing her. Us. And what they would do to me if they found me here. I took a backwards step.

Brandi snatched my forearm, her too-thin fingers clamping tight. She wrenched me back to her workbench so I could witness. “But he can’t let us go, no, no, no, because what if. What if you need a firmer hand and he needs more magic to handle you? What if he—”

I seized her face in my hands, fingers digging in hard like that’s what it took to silence her tongue. “Stop.”

“I c-can’t,” she blubbered, tears falling freely now even as she continued to stir. “I… I presented myself to him. I was vain and proud and so inflated— Oh Mab, I’m such a fool!”

“Listen to me,” I hissed. She lifted miserable brown eyes, sniffling, and I couldn’t think of what to say now that I had her attention. My mind was reeling, and it took more than a deep breath and a forceful invocation of the Green Mother’s name to form a semblance of a plan. There were just too many variables, too many accusations, too many lies—

“Do you have white papaver seeds here?” I asked, releasing her. Flapping my hands, I shimmied the cuffs of my gown down over my hands to form sleeve-gloves. Then I got to jostling through every jar and bowl and vial strewn about the workstation. She was working on more than just Caer powder, but I was too frazzled to piece the myriad ingredients together to determine exactly what. If only Aunt Peony was here.

“Yes. Over there!” She pointed to a large jar of dark green glass at the end of the table. “Ground fine, it’s one of the seven components of the toirchim tonic.”

My hands froze above the cork stopper, my heart pounding a single hard beat before crystallizing into ice. “Did you say tonic?”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Never mind.” If I didn’t focus on the task at hand, I was going to explode with rage and grief and devastation and a whole host of other emotions I was too overwhelmed to name. I had toirchim glaze in my foraging bag, a compound that made the recipient subdued and compliant, and it didn’t take a great leap in logic to deduce that toirchim tonic did the same thing. And I’d been drinking it every morning.

After wrangling the cork stopper free with my sleeve-gloves, I used a measuring spoon to withdraw a portion of the papaver seeds to confirm their identity. Pure white, they resembled tiny poppyseed-sized pearls. Not a gray one among them—the highest quality. I grabbed her hand and poured the spoonful into her cupped palm.

“Throw one tablespoon of these into the mix when you add the swan feathers,” I told her. “No need to grind them, the heat will break them down. It will lessen the efficacy of the Caer powder.”

Brandi tried to jerk back, flattening her hand to rid the seeds from her palm as if I’d given her a cluster of writhing mealworms instead. My nails dug into her wrist, preventing just that.

“N-no! He’ll find out!”

“He’ll only find out if you lose your nerve. Be brave, Brandi,” I pleaded. “For me. For all of them.”

She glanced over her shoulder at all the miserable faces trapped behind the iron bars, then jerked her chin to the shelves with all the Caer powder reserves. “But what of all that?”