A Poison Dark and Drowning (Kingdom on Fire, Book Two)

by Jessica Cluess

  “And I found them, the ones that would allow me to call for a specific person or creature. There was something wrong with our original trio: me, William, Blackwood. We should have had a witch. Such a spell requires all three magical races.”

  “So you got Mary Willoughby.” My voice was weak and flat.

  “Yes. We carved the new circle on Midsummer’s Day—certain rituals work best at certain times of the year. We summoned William. R’hlem answered. He brought his beasts with him, and the sky turned black.” He released me.

  I swallowed; my throat felt like sandpaper. “You didn’t find him,” I murmured.

  Mickelmas stood. “I thought long and hard. And then I realized.” He walked to the hearth and waved his hand over the fire. Embers lifted into the air. He began to weave words out of smoke.

  “William came from a town in Wales called Rhyl,” he said. He wrote,

  WILLIAM HOWEL OF RHYL

  The words hung in the air. He waved his hand again and the words changed, the letters shifted, before gradually forming a new word.

  RHYL WILLIAM HOWEL

  RH’WILLIAM WEL

  RH’LLIAM E

  RH’LEM

  R’HLEM

  I was standing, though I didn’t recall getting to my feet. I stared at Mickelmas’s ashen words until they dissipated into nothing and left the scent of smoke lingering in the air.

  “You told me he left and never came home.” My tongue felt leaden in my mouth. This couldn’t be real.

  “William left us that day, and the man as I knew him never returned. You interpreted it as you saw fit.” Mickelmas lifted his head, as if daring me to challenge his logic.

  I interpreted it? As though it was my fault for not being clever enough to see?

  “Don’t you dare,” I growled. Feeling flooded back through my body. My head hurt, my eyes burned, and flame licked up my spine—Mickelmas stilled when he saw what was coming. I walked toward him, sparks raining onto the carpet. “You were going to tell me the truth the night that Korozoth attacked. Why did you hide it?”

  “I thought I’d never see you again,” he said simply. “When I realized how much better it would be with you on my side, I thought the whole truth would be inconvenient.” He held a hand up, as if to appease me. “I’d have told you eventually.”

  “After I’d murdered my own…?” The word father failed in my mouth. No, no, this couldn’t be true. Mickelmas was wrong. He’d been tricked all those years ago, when he opened the portal into the sky and R’hlem fell to the earth.

  But on the astral plane, R’hlem had been covered in blue flame….

  “And now that you know, are you so much better off?” he muttered. With a sweep of his arm, he transported himself to the other side of the room, away from my fire. “This is bigger than any one of us. Magicians can take back this world. Forget this piddling war against the Ancients; we can end the war against our people! You’d throw all that away?”

  I killed the fire. My skin was cold once more, slight curls of gray smoke rising from my fingertips. I stepped toward him and slapped him across the face. My handprint was emblazoned on his cheek.

  He looked slack with surprise, then bared his teeth and stuck a finger in my face. “If you ever do that again, I’ll turn you into a chair.”

  “Go ahead. I’m the last Howel for you to ruin.” How had I ever trusted him?

  “It’s because of my warning that your aunt took you to Yorkshire in the first place.” He thumped his chest. “You could show more gratitude.”

  Gratitude.

  “My father’s a monster because of you. My mother died of grief because of you. Because of you, England could fall!” I screamed. “You’ve lied to me since the moment we met. I hate you!” I conjured those words from the darkest place in my soul, then threw out my hands and unleashed a stream of fire. Mickelmas vanished, and I scorched the wallpaper, the red silk curling into charred flakes. Shaking, I took the water on hand—the tea in Mickelmas’s teapot—and doused the flames. I didn’t want to burn down Agrippa’s house. The wet, burnt odor lingered in the air.

  Mickelmas reappeared. “Well, I’m the only one left for you to hate, my duck.” He counted on his fingers. “R’hlem skinned Charles Blackwood alive; Mary Willoughby was burned at the stake; your aunt took off for God knows where after she dumped you at that school. If you want to blame someone, look at your own precious father. He put magicians ahead of your family.” He smirked. “You don’t even have his noble excuse. Tell me, will you go to the Order and tell your darling Imperator what I’ve revealed tonight?”

  I hated him beyond anything else in the world. For being right.

  “If I see you again, I will kill you,” I spit.

  “Then we will not meet again.” There was no remorse in his voice. With a flip of his arm, he sheltered his cloak about me, and an instant later I found myself alone in my bedroom.

  Cold. I was freezing cold. I tried to get my shaking under control. I sat on my bed, grabbed the sachet of herbs from my table, and crushed it in my grip, unleashing its bitter floral scent. Why had I gone to the astral plane? Why?

  My father is R’hlem.

  No, I couldn’t even think those words. A sob escaped, and I bit down on my knuckle to keep silent.

  I couldn’t stay in this room; no, I needed something. Someone.

  I needed Rook.

  I ran out the door and down the hall, into the gentlemen’s corridor. It was improper and impulsive to barge into his room in the middle of the night, but I needed him. I needed his arms around me, needed to listen to his heart beating. I needed to hear his voice telling me I was safe. Turning the doorknob as quietly as I could, I slipped inside his room.

  “Rook?” I whispered. He was sprawled upon his bed, asleep. Moving into the room, I shut the door behind me and lit a candle. By the light, I could see that he’d not got out of his clothes yet. His coat was off, and his shirt half-unbuttoned down the front, exposing his chest and a few swollen scars. He lay on top of the covers and gave a soft moan as I drew closer. Sweat stood out on his brow, matting his hair. When I sat down beside him on the bed, I reached out and touched his face…and my hand came away slick with blood.

  Blood was smeared along his cheek, coating his arms up to the elbow. He moaned again, his eyes fluttering open. He looked up at me, no pain in his expression. I pulled the blankets back and looked frantically over his body to find the source of the wound, only to find him unharmed.

  God, the blood wasn’t his.

  “What happened?” I whispered, smoothing his damp brow. He was a banked coal beneath my hand.

  “I’m so tired.” His eyes closed again.

  Lighting more candles, I poured some cold water into his washbasin and sat beside him again, wiping the blood off his face. Rook sat up, the glazed light of fever in his eyes.

  “Henrietta.” He kissed my neck. I froze as his lips brushed my skin. Rook was pulling me back to lie down with him. I didn’t let myself go with him—God, there was the blood still to clean up, which made my skin crawl. And Maria said I had to keep him calm. And Rook…This wasn’t like him. That night in the garden, he’d been so shy and gentle. Now he was more aggressive, his hands and lips greedily exploring my body.

  “Wait,” he said, stopping. “We’re not married yet, are we?” He sounded disappointed. I placed my hand over his heart. The skin of his chest was smooth, but the scars throbbed with infection. My face flushed to think of his question. No, we weren’t married.

  “Not yet,” I said. “You need to wake…and clean yourself. Something’s…happened.”

  Now that he was more awake, Rook took over from me, washing his face, his neck, cleaning out the half-moons of dark blood trapped beneath his fingernails. He stripped out of his shirt. His body was lean and sculpted, even with the scars. I hastened to get him something clean to wear, nervously helping him slide into it. After a few minutes, his hair was damp, his face scrubbed, his shirt unsoiled. He looked all
right, yes, but he radiated disease.

  This couldn’t be the night he turned. No. No.

  “What’s happening to me, Nettie?” The sincere confusion in his voice killed me. Biting my lip to hold in a sob, I rinsed a sliver of soap in the red-tinged water. So much blood, and none of it his. There wasn’t a mark on him.

  Rook, what have you been doing?

  “You’re having a terrible dream,” I said.

  His hands caught my waist and spun me around. Our lips met, the kiss deepening quickly. With a swift move, we were lying on the bed.

  “It’s become a good dream, then,” he whispered in my ear.

  My whole body seemed to vibrate as Rook gathered me to him. But it was all too fast. My mind screamed to stop even as I kissed him. Finally, I put my hands against his chest, holding him back. Slowly, very slowly, our breathing calmed, and I pulled away. I still had to learn the truth.

  “What happened in the dream? Do you remember?” I asked carefully.

  “A man was attacking people.” Rook sounded distant, as if he were falling asleep once more. “He deserved what he got for attacking that woman.”

  He deserved what he got. I did not speak, only moved my head to his chest and listened as his breathing deepened, until finally he was truly asleep. I looked at his face in the candlelight. He looked peaceful now. No one would ever picture this normal, beautiful boy with someone else’s blood all over his hands. That wasn’t him. That was the thing inside him.

  But he’d had someone else’s blood all over his hands, and now he smiled in his sleep.

  “Do you remember Christmas Eve when we were eight?” I whispered, lifting my head to see his face. His eyelids fluttered, but he didn’t wake. “I still missed my aunt in those days. I was crying at bedtime, and one of the teachers smacked me and told me to be quiet. After everyone had fallen asleep, I snuck down to the kitchen. You used to sleep near the stove on winter nights, remember?” I traced a finger across his cheek. “You let me crawl into bed next to you. You didn’t care that I was crying. You just put your arm around me and let me blubber on and on.” Holding back a sob, I kissed his forehead. “I think that was when I knew I loved you.”

  I laid my head on the pillow beside Rook’s, listened to his soft breathing, and tried to collect my thoughts.

  R’hlem—I wasn’t going to start calling him my father, not even in my head—was the true reason that Rook was transforming. If R’hlem hadn’t come back from that alien world, if he hadn’t brought the Ancients, if he hadn’t brought Korozoth, if Korozoth hadn’t marked Rook…On and on my thoughts spun in a painful whirl.

  If I had to go to R’hlem to save Rook, I would. Finally, fitfully, I slept.

  I woke a few hours later to find Maria standing over the bed, looking shocked.

  “What are you doing here?” Maria said, putting down the cloth and medicine she’d been carrying as I hastened to sit upright. Rook shifted beside me, caught in the grip of an actual bad dream. Maria’s eyes flicked to him, her expression now inscrutable. Finding the two of us asleep with our arms about each other was compromising beyond belief.

  “It’s not what it seems,” I whispered, struggling to get out of bed. My head still felt shrunken from the drink.

  She didn’t sound convinced. “Good thing I found you before anyone else did. It’s time for his morning potion.” She uncorked a glass vial filled with that brackish liquid. Another potion. Another bit of poison to kill the monster. When Maria leaned over the bed to wake Rook, she gasped and dropped the vial. The medicine started to spill out onto the sheets, and I rescued it.

  “What?” I asked, but then realized she’d noticed the bloody cloths by the washbasin, and the water that had turned a cloudy red. I was a blistering fool. Why hadn’t I got rid of those last night?

  “Is he hurt?” She pulled the blankets aside and discovered that Rook was not, in fact, wounded. Her eyes scanned me. “You’re both of you fine.” Her gaze darkened. “What in the Mother’s name did he do?”

  “What makes you think he did anything?” Now that I was fully awake, the horrors of last night returned in vivid color. Meeting R’hlem on the astral plane, Mickelmas’s revelation, Rook’s fever: how was any one person supposed to bear it all? My hands started sparking. “Why wouldn’t you suspect me?”

  “Don’t be daft.” Maria softened. “If he’s too far gone—”

  “If he is, who’s to blame? You’re the one who added poison to his treatments!” I hissed.

  Maria’s eyes flashed.

  “I told you there’d be only so much my methods could do.” She spoke in a harsh whisper, so as not to wake Rook.

  I couldn’t listen to this, so I grabbed the bloody cloths and washbasin. If he woke up and saw them, he’d ask questions. I ran, my feet freezing on the carpeted hall. The water sloshed as I hurried. Inside my room, I threw open the window and emptied the filth onto the garden below, then put the rags in the basin and set them on fire. Maria entered and closed the door behind her, nose wrinkling as I poured water on the now-ashed cloth. Gray smoke billowed upward.

  “You can’t hide what he’s done.” She sounded sympathetic, which was worse than anger.

  “Leave me alone!” My skin tingled. I was dangerously close to going up in flames.

  “Calm down.” She didn’t show any fear as my hands started smoldering. Something about her pitying expression drove me over the edge. Without warning, my whole body ignited, and I stared at her from behind a curtain of flame.

  Maria stepped forward and summoned my fire.

  Blue flame swept into her palm in a ball, hovering just above her fingertips. Putting her hands on either side of her fire, she twisted and twirled it, whirling faster and faster until it spun before her face, a perfect sphere.

  She was using elemental magic.

  I stood there in shock as the flames died on my skin, only a few telltale embers remaining to sizzle on the cold floor. Maria changed the fireball’s rotation, molding it until it grew smaller and smaller and, in a puff of smoke, disappeared entirely.

  “If you want to have another tantrum, I’m a bit out of practice,” she said, one eyebrow quirked in a challenge.

  How?

  She jerked her head toward the bench by my vanity. “May want to have a seat. You look a bit put out.”

  Slowly, I sat.

  “Where did you learn that trick?” I whispered. Because it was a trick. It had to be.

  In response, Maria merely picked up a vase of flowers from my bedside table and poured some of the water out onto the wooden floor. Waving her hands, she lifted the puddle into the air in a shimmering disc. Without a single word, she turned the water into a ball of ice. With swift, clean movements, she shaped the ice into several elegant images: a figure eight, a seven-pointed star, a perfect rectangle. With a flick of her wrist and a twitch of her fingers, the ice obeyed her most complicated desires. Finished, she melted it back to water and poured it into the vase. Her technique was perfect, beyond anything I’d seen any sorcerer accomplish. And all without a stave.

  “I thought you were a witch.”

  “Mam was a witch.” Maria settled the vase back on its table, primping the flowers. “But my father was a sorcerer.”

  Of course. There could be no other explanation.

  “Do you know his name?”

  “You know it well.” Her small face became pinched with anger. “He was your own Master Agrippa.”

  Back at Agrippa’s house, Maria had looked up at his portrait with that distant expression. Her eyes, such a warm brown, had been familiar to me for a reason: they were Agrippa’s eyes. I was the stupidest person alive not to have seen it. My mouth fell open.

  “He met my mother when he was touring Scotland on some business for the Order, researching the highland covens or the like. He left her flat without knowing she was with child. Not that he’d have married Mam, of course.” She gave a sharp laugh. “Who’d want a witch as a wife?”

  “He’d
have wanted to know about you.” My first instinct was to defend Agrippa, even now.

  Maria snorted. “Aye. Likely he’d have ordered me burned at the stake with my mother.” I froze utterly. “Surely you knew he was the one signed the burnings into law.”

  Words of defense or explanation evaporated. There was no excusing that. Maria continued, “I only know it because I saw his name on the order. The executioners showed it when they came.” She breathed deeply and tugged at her hair. “They arrived at dawn, in those black cloaks and black boots, smashing down doors and dragging us all out in our shifts. To this day, I recall only wee bits of that morning. The chickens’ white feathers flying. Glint of the dawn’s light on a silver belt buckle. Our door splintering to pieces with one kick from the tallest man I’d yet laid eyes on. Their staves, all held in the same position.” Maria paused. “Some of the coven resisted, but the only magic powerful enough to stop them was death magic, and no true witch would use it. The sorcerers bound us and put us in carts, all on your Order’s blessing. Then they drove us up to the hill, where they’d assembled the pyres.”

  Here, her voice failed completely. She sat down heavily at the foot of my bed, letting her hair fall like a curtain to shield her face.

  I pictured Agrippa sitting at his cozy desk in the library, writing out an order to have a group of women dragged to the stake. I imagined him smiling so kindly, so gently, as the women screamed in the fire.

  In a small voice, Maria continued, “They took six from the wagon. I was holding on to my mother’s skirt when they pulled us apart. Even now, I can feel the cloth slipping from my hands.” Her shoulders shook, but she kept going, her voice pitched higher with every word. “Then they tied them to the pyres as the sun crested the hill. They wouldn’t let me look away. Held my head so I could see ‘justice’ being done; that’s what they called it.”

  For an awful moment, there was no sound but her strained breathing. I went to the bed, trying to think of something to do or say. Finally, wiping her cheeks, she said, “If you were me, would you carry soft feelings for your father?”