The Poisoned King (Impossible Creatures Book 2)

by Katherine Rundell

The court was watching her. She could feel their opinions burning against her skin. She whispered, “Please, Grandfather. Everyone’s looking.” “Of course they’re looking!” The king was becoming angry. She knew his anger. It was a cold beast. “You are a princess. A princess exists to be looked at. To be seen, and admired, and coveted, and envied, and adored. That is your job. To be watched. It is your only job. Do you understand that?” Anya’s flush rose up to her eyes, and she said nothing. “Argus?” Prince Claude turned to his older brother. “Can’t you control your child?” “Leave my girl be,” said her father sharply. “Father, have some wine.” But Anya turned to look at Claude—his face so much like her father’s, but leaner, sharper. “Control? Control me?” “Control you, yes. Disobedient children need to be controlled.” And then all the anger and futility she felt inside the castle exploded out of her, and she pulled back her head and spat at her uncle’s feet. The saliva lay, a wet insolence in a puddle on the floor. The whole court stared at it.

So Anya became, gradually, a perfect princess. She walked so that it looked like she was gliding. She danced waltzes, and spent an hour a day sitting at her backboard to perfect her posture, her feet pointed and crossed at the ankle. She was drilled in charm by a professor from Lithia. She learned the twenty-one official smiles and the five approved laughs: delighted, amused, polite, warning, and repressive. She was taught sentences to repeat—How kind of you to come. Have you traveled far? Isn’t it beautiful weather? The king was pleased—but he did not let her return to the forest. “She’s an asset to us now,” he said. “She must stay.” When Anya thought ahead to her life as an adult, she saw a long tunnel of processions and handshaking and waving. Then she would turn away, and kiss Gallia particularly violently. There had to be a way out, but she could not see it.

So she kept her counsel and became more silent, more alert, more sharply noticing: a child made of love and anger and waiting, waiting, waiting for something to change.

His smile, if anyone had encountered him, would have struck them as entirely acceptable and proper. A man may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

“You are not tired. You are panicked, and angry, and afraid, and lost. You will continue to be all those things until you get up and do something. Then you will just be angry and afraid.”

The gaganas around gave a caw of agreement and drew closer to her, the small, shivering girl, her beating heart, and her rage: the furious child they were pledged to protect.

Anya dressed carefully. If she was going to ask questions without rousing suspicion, she would need to look sweet and pretty. She chose a soft blue mermaid-spun silk, tight at the waist and just brushing the floor. It hid that she was wearing boots she could run in. It is harder for people to guess you are burning with fire and rage when you are clad in sky-colored silk.

Bravery is an unpredictable beast. The human animal is often startled by its own unexpected, unsuspected cowardice. But once or twice in every lifetime, we are surprised by our own courage. The panicked bird of Anya’s heart slowed; became something slow, clear-sighted, leonine.

Christopher asked, “Is that a language?” “Yes!” said Anya. “Gaganan. A lot of it’s in the angle of tilt and the eyes, and a flick of the wings—I use my hands, obviously. Some things are simple—up is ‘yes,’ down is ‘no.’ But some things mean multiples—two up, two down means both ‘I admire you very much’ and ‘You are at risk of being attacked by a herd of marauding sheep’—you work it out from context. Twice down to the right is the worst swearing they have.”

The human creature is such a deceptively simple thing to look at. You can watch someone peel an orange or trip up a flight of stairs, and forget that inside they are both strange and infinite. Take a human by the wrist and you have in your hand a piece of unending longing.

Anya knelt on the stones, scooped up the water in her hand, and drank; for minutes she knelt there. Soon her stomach was tight as a drum from the water, but still there was the burning in her throat. “I’m still so thirsty,” said Anya. “The water doesn’t help.” Naravirala nodded her great head. “Then it is not thirst for water. It is thirst for something else.” “For what?” “For truth, I imagine. For justice.” She looked harder at Anya: at the dark rings under her eyes and the shine within them. “For something more than that, too. Something darker. Take care, child, that you do not burn through your own heart and leave yourself with nothing but a scorched scar to rely on.” Anya wiped her mouth and looked the sphinx straight in her huge tawny eyes. “I won’t,” she said. But the sphinx’s words had helped her understand. She knew what it was, that burning in her body. It was a thirst for revenge.

For the first time, Koo opened his sticky-lidded eyes, and the first thing he saw was Anya Argen: her blond hair a dirty gray, bruised, bloodied, and ravenously hungry in the eyes. The day any living thing first opens its eyes to see the world is a stupendous day—whether that thing is a human baby or the smallest pup—but for gaganas even more so. The personality that radiated from Koo was immediate. He was all mischief and adoration, beak to tail. Koo half fell, half fluttered to Anya’s knee and took joyful, immediate, and total possession of her. He croaked his first word. “Mine.” Anya laughed. “Yes,” she said. “Exactly.” She set him on her shoulder, and he settled into the upper crook of her collarbone with a pleased wriggle. “Mine,” he said again. “Mine, mine.”

You better not kill this baby too

Its eyes and ears were huge, its legs long and thin: clearly a newborn. “A longma!” she said. The longma colt had green scaled wings, and they fluttered as it moved but did not lift it from the ground. Anya stood still, and it came and pressed its green shining head against her chest, then against Christopher’s. Its eyes were deep brown.

Don't kill this baby either

There was fresh fish, fried, in a sauce as delicate as sea-foam, and dumplings with prawn, and bread so soft it was almost cake. There were tiny sweet red tomatoes, small as her little fingernail, and she ate them by the handful. She spread the bread with a layer of butter as thick as her thumb and added a piece of sweet, pungent cheese.

“Dessert!” he said. “At least half of a meal should consist of dessert, in my opinion; perhaps two-thirds.” He uncovered the dishes; one held profiteroles filled with homemade centicore-milk ice cream and dripping with chocolate sauce, another doughnuts sprinkled with what looked like tiny luminescent gems. “Sugar crystals,” said Nighthand. “Made with kanko spit.” The third was an immense white cream cake topped with bunches of dark blue grapes, the color of nighttime.

Nighthand sighed. He uncovered another dish: freshly peeled peaches, with custard where the stone would be.

Nighthand uncovered another dish: this one was full of jellylike sweets. “Masticandos! I invented them: the first batch was so chewy I nearly lost a tooth. They have blackberries in them, and a little dryad grape juice.”

The dragon drew in a long, rasping breath. “Do you know why dragons hoard gold?” They waited, unspeaking. The dragon’s face convulsed, and then he spoke again. “It is not merely that we love gold, though we do love it, yes—its shine, its cold weight. It is that dragons are old enough to have seen the world, and seen mankind. Mankind is not to be trusted with hoards of gold. It poisons him. No creature is safe in a world in which any one of mankind has limitless gold. That way lies only chaos. Dragons keep that chaos at bay.”

The low ceiling began to rise; slowly at first, and then faster and faster, until walls erupted out of the hole at breakneck speed, shooting upward with a shower of plaster. They rose ten, fifteen, thirty, forty feet, and soon Anya was looking at a great tower room, wide as a ballroom and sixty feet high. At last the walls stopped, still vibrating. Ratwin sneezed at the dust. “I won’tses says I tolds you so’s,” she said. “But I will says, bravos and felicitationings to me.” Together they stepped into the room. Anya craned her neck to look around at the walls lined, all the way to the almost invisible ceiling, with… “Books,” breathed Irian Guinne. There were huge tomes in brown leather, small books covered in blue silk and oxblood-red cotton, jewel-encrusted spines with gold lettering, paper in white and cream and silver and green. A dozen ladders stretched up alongside, wired to brass fixings to keep them in their place.

“Thank you! What can I give you in return?” “Nothing.” The oldest spoke. “Water. Land. Sky. Star. We trust only in things that cannot be owned.” Anya did not wish to be rude, but—“People can own land,” she said. “No. They only think they can.” Anya did not say, “I will own a whole island when I become queen.” But perhaps they saw the thought, for one said, “How could you own the world’s earth: soil and green and sod?”

“Do not,” Nighthand said, and his voice, now, was softer than it had been, “let Claude Argen decide how you feel about the world. Fight him, yes. But keep the fight outside your body, not inside it. I can see you vibrating with rage from halfway across a room, girl. Do not let men who are not fit to touch the corner of your shoe decide how you feel about being alive. That way lies misery and broken bones.” He hauled Anya up, lifting her three feet off the ground.

“Ah,” said Gallia, and she looked hard at her charge. “I do not believe in the existence of an innocent heart. Not beyond the very youngest of children. Innocent is not the same thing as good, or true, or faithful, or generous.”

What do you do in the face of evil men? In the face of evil men protected by strong men and served by weak men? She thought of Rillian Gerund, and Samvel, and the crossbow the guard had aimed at her heart. What do you do with the knowledge that so many human souls are so bitter and so weak? Where could she put it down, the horror she had carried ever since? It was so heavy, and she was so tired.

It would have been a glorious thing, Anya thought, to take shelter behind the magnificence of a dragon. But she must be her own dragon now.

“They don’t know that,” said Jacques. “I may not have fire, but I have my ferocious reputation.” And the small dragon looked so valiant and so proud and so palpably afraid that Anya wanted to catch him and hold him close, gentle him against her heart. But of course she did not, because it would have been the worst insult she could have offered. Instead, Anya curtsied: the curtsy that had been drilled into her since her first toddling steps, required every time she had been in the presence of the king. This, though, was different. One hand flew up like a bird, and one foot swept behind her, and Princess Anya Argen, Duchess of the Silver Mountains, Countess of the Winged Forests, swept to the ground in tribute to a tiny dragon. It is the gesture with which fealty is given, or gratitude offered, or honor paid. It’s almost always misused: used to signal unearned obeisance to the born rich, the born powerful. It was not misused, in that moment, on that day. Jacques said nothing. He looked at her, and at Christopher, long and hard, and then he took off and flew, tiny teeth bared, toward the castle.

Her friendship felt rare—not because she was a princess, but because she seemed to offer friendship in the way that a bird does; cautiously, and then all at once. It was like being befriended by an insistence.

It came to Anya in that moment with a total crystalline certainty: she wanted nothing to do with death. She wanted nothing to do with endings. She wanted beginnings—new ideas, new plans, new joys, new truths, new futures. These things would not reach her across the gulf of killing. Anya said: “I won’t kill you. I won’t give up my own heart just to see you dead.” She looked at the throne. “And I won’t rule from that throne: not ever. Nobody should. We will find a better way.”

It is neither an easy nor a simple thing, to abolish one system of government and establish another; but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. Birth, Anya said, was a mad, a frivolous, a lunatically unhinged way to decide who should rule a kingdom. It left you vulnerable to uncles.

“Fear is a fair exchange for love, Nighthand.” She looked at him. “Fear has wisdom in it, if you treat it well.”