AllFreeNovel
Share Us
They used a boy.
In the green and bramble, his smell was sweet as plums and peppermint leaves. How do they find us? I suppose it is simple enough to track an animal, to find its drinking places, its sleeping places, its loving places. And by a pool clear as air they sat a boy down in the softly blowing dandelion seeds, a boy with large, calm eyes and the most hesitant beginning of a brown beard, told him to be very, very still, like a good boy, and he might see something to tell his children about.
I did not want to go. The scent of it is horrible and wonderful, and we all of us try to ignore it, to bend our heads into the roses and blot out the smell, to pretend that golden beehive up in the poplar is of much more interest. But eventually it wins out, the sweetness and the longing, the almost-memory of a thing which we are not, could never be, the curiosity, to touch such a foreign substance, like ambergris or the tails of crystal fish—to kneel in the lap of grace and be touched, for only a moment, by something which smells of violets, and thick salted bread, and wholeness.
He held out his arms to me, and it blew off him like steam. I ground my teeth, but I went to him, foolish as a virgin, and knelt near him, knowing that next would be the bridle and the whip—but I could not help it, his innocence wrapped me up soft and golden and if I could but lay my head in the lap of that purity, I would know what light was made of, and warmth, and grace. He would not hurt me, the scent said; he was not capable of it.
He held out his arms to me, and slowly I sank into him. His hands went to my pelt, my mane; he gurgled a childish pleasure, and I opened my mouth to breathe him in. But the breath that came was not my own, for he sighed gently upon me, as though blowing out a candle. The secret music rose up, and I started in his embrace, for it was the sorrow-and-blood song, the marrow-and-grief song.
“What are you doing, child?” I cried.
“I wanted to hear the sound the wind makes out of you.” He shrugged, his brown eyes warm and delighted.
“But how did you know of it? It is ours, our own thing, and not yours to play.”
“My mother and father taught me everything about you, forelock to withers, so that when I found myself with your head in my hands, I would not hesitate…”
THE
POISONER’S
TALE
MY PARENTS NEVER WORRIED FOR EMPLOYMENT. They were poisoners, the best of their breed, and when they had a son, they called him Bryony, after the black herb that makes the palms itch until the owner claws them to gleaming ribbons. They resolved that I would be a prodigy among poisoners, and set about my training as soon as I entered the world.
My mother drank tiny slivers of mandrake, powdered finer than hummingbird wings, in her morning tea, and it passed to me through her milk. She rubbed my lips with hellebore, just enough to taste—brackish and foul, if you’d like to know, like river water after a storm. My father made fried eggs with translucent crescents of night-shade sizzling in oil, salads of oleander and monkshood, pies of yew berries and rosary peas. All these things they fed me, tiny portion by tiny portion, so that when I was grown, none of them could hurt me, any more than blueberries might hurt another boy. They delighted in finding new things to wean me with: cherry bark that causes a plague of gasping until the breath is entirely gone; foxglove that inspires riots of excited murmuring, nearly poetry, before a convulsive death; thorn apple, which grants extraordinary visions, then a black blindness. Once my mother bade me hold a sprig of mistletoe and one of hemlock in each hand and eat a needle of one and then the other, while she wrote down my descriptions of stomach seizures.
There were more exotic venoms—the saliva of a rabid wolf, harpy milk, basilisk bile. But we always found the simplest poisons to be best. You cannot imagine what can be made from a buttercup.
It was, in its way, a happy childhood. I was loved, I ate well—and pinkgill is not at all an unsavory mushroom when used judiciously, and eaten by those whose bellies are staunch and steadfast as ours. We lived in a rickety, bare-roofed house on stilts near the long blue river, which was cold as a corpse’s cup and prone to flooding. Poisoners are paid well, of course, but if one displays one’s wealth, then one is often asked its source, and we thrived on a discreet business. The riverside was a poor part of town, where folk slopped their garbage onto the current and cursed their chickens in braying voices, and so we chose it, and my parents practiced their art on me with tender attention.
Curiously, however, the layering of poison upon poison in my blood did not prove entirely benign. My skin grew stretched and thin, like a snake’s, and quite as untrustworthy. When I was just a boy, my father was teaching me to mix bilewort, holly seeds, and elephant ear to make a draft that would plant the seeds in the subject’s stomach, resulting in a very festive arrangement bursting from their mouths a few weeks after application. When we finished, he spread a bit of the stuff on my tongue, like a sacrament—for my parents believed sincerely tha
t death was a sacred covenant between poisoner and condemned, and like all sacred things, required due reverence. We give a person the world distilled, and thus deliver them from it. What more profound act can there be? I closed my eyes, prepared for profundity. The brew tasted dry and dusty, like flowers left too long in a white vase, but there was a sharp tang to it, an arrow of sourness that flashed bright across my throat.
I looked at my father, surprised, and held out my hand: A little holly sprig sprouted there, its berries vermilion against my skin. It grew smoothly from my palm, the child of some combination of oil and seed or root and blossom that I had suckled in over the years. We laughed nervously and trimmed the miniature bush down to the skin. Eventually, it scabbed over, but from then on I was occasionally plagued with effusions such as these, twisting out of my flesh like new limbs.
And so I became both source and practitioner—but I was not allowed to actually sprinkle the food or mix the draft, no matter how I might long to experience the exchange of one world for another. My education was purely alchemical.
“If we let you loose the venom from your own hand, it might spook the unicorn,” they said, grinning, knowing I did not understand. But I observed many poisonings while I was beardless and giggling, concealed behind door or hollow wall, beneath hanging tapestry or bed. Shall I tell you of my favorite, while we have the time? You must be curious—we are so alike, you and I.
The Doge of a far-off country, a place full of red rocks and red roofs and stoops dusty with sage and sap, was possessed of two daughters, the one devilish and heartless, the other sweet and good as milk. Such men are often afflicted thus these days. In this city of red rocks and red roofs, which was called Amberabad, the first child of the Doge was called Hind, and she was the sort that liked to dance with men and eat iced cakes and read books with pictures she ought not to see. The second was Hadil, who liked only to please her father. As they grew, alike in beauty and poise, the Doge frowned into his cups and weighed their differences. He was a complex man, and decided to teach them a lesson, though perhaps a switch to the back of one and a stiff drink to the other would have sufficed. But he was, as I have said, a complex man.
Now Amberabad was a prosperous, though small, city, which sat like a fisherman with his legs dangling in a salty spit of sea. A tiny inlet fed blue water into the center of the territory, and all along it grew weeping cedars, at which the young men would laugh, calling them the future wealth of Amberabad. For the present wealth of Amberabad was amber, which is so plentiful in those parts that one may walk along the narrow, rust-colored beaches and pluck wet, glistening stones from the sand. Some even fish for it, with fine nets of nettle and flax, drawing red-golden gems like salmon from the frothing water. The city smelled richly of resin, and strangely of burning jewels, and cast its shadow in pale yellow streaks on the earth, for Amberabad was a city in the sky, suspended between the trunks of the great seaside cedars.
Long garlands of chicory, milkweed, and tightly budded roses wound around the delicate bridges that led from tree to tree as in some cities streets will lead from ministry to cemetery, and in others canals will lead from market to haberdashery. The people of Amberabad are exceptionally fleet of foot, and hardly any of them fall. The Doge’s palace is, rather predictably, built out from the widest part of the trunk of the greatest of cedars, and all of its rooms are enameled in amber, studded with carvings of blossoms, women, soldiers, horses at full gallop, and any number of heroic scenes. All the rooms are red and gold with this gleaming material, and with the soft, furry planks of cedar which show through the occasional strategic gaps in the walls.
In these rooms walked the sisters Hind and Hadil. Hadil wore long strings of amber beads, lacing over her body in complex patterns, close at her throat and looping wide over her wrists and waist, crisscrossing her modest, high-collared chest. Her eyes were bright and gold as sap, her hair as deep a red as the most costly resin. Hind too wore long strings of beads, but hers were cast from amber pitch, the strange black ruin left behind when amber is burned to make that costly oil which her sister so resembled. These black beads whorled round, loose at her throat and close at her wrists and waist, crisscrossing her barely contained breasts.
In these rooms Hind tried to coax her sister to read the books she read, which had woodcuts no girl should see, and to eat cakes which would make her spidery figure ample, and to leave open the amber doors of their room so that men from other cedars might swing across the milkweed garlands and sing to them through the hinges. In these rooms Hadil tried to rein her sister close, and close up the hinged doors when the night streamed darkly in, and crumble the cakes onto the sill for passing birds, showing her sister instead plain brown breads and raw roots. She tried to train her sister’s wanton eyes to prayer books which had no woodcuts at all, but only psalms and hymns, which Hadil would sing on the balconies of her high house until her voice became known as the Bell of Amberabad. In these rooms neither sister yielded to the other, and they sat sullenly upon their red couches, the one chewing her roots, the other her cakes.
“Why will you not play with me, as a sister should?” Hind would cry.
“Why will you not pray with me, as a sister should?” Hadil would whisper.
And so their father called upon us, and we traveled in our little caravan to this city, which, my father said, was over-fat, nearing the time for a fasting, as he usually said of the opulent cities where our arts were most appreciated. He was something of an ascetic, my father, tall and thin and imperious, his sparse hair gone slightly green from the same little drafts of poison to which I was happily accustomed. The Doge was unspecific in his letters as to the shape of the lesson, only as to its intended content. Thus we pored and pondered until we had devised what we thought an acceptable tutorial.
It was a very complicated boil: shattered oyster shell and quartered toad, lily of the valley and autumn crocus cut carefully from the insides of my cheeks, jack-in-the-pulpit and poached rhubarb leaves, smoked and reduced and thickened with cane for weeks. At the last, pearls were dissolved into the brazier, and toad eyes pierced and allowed to dribble into the mire. We baked them into sweet candies, with a light flavor of anise and dusky peppers, and presented them to the girls at a banquet, posing as cooks. I watched from behind my mother’s voluminous chef’s skirts, a little kitchen waif gawking at the finery.
