The Kinder Poison

by Natalie Mae

  “Jet?”

  His jaw clenches against my palm. “I know. That’s part of the job, too. I can’t expect to protect people if I won’t hurt the ones who would harm them.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say.”

  He stays quiet, his brown eyes finally focusing on me.

  “I was going to say, you only have to go as far as you want to. Torturing the prisoner was your father’s choice. I know you love him, but you don’t have to make the same choices he has.”

  He smiles like I’m being naïve. “That’s what the job calls for. It’s just the way it is.”

  “That’s a lazy answer.”

  That was definitely supposed to be a thought that stayed in my head, and Jet blinks in shock, and I quickly drop my hands. “I mean, you already know that’s not the kind of person you want to be. So make sure you don’t become that. Go out of your way not to.”

  “But that’s exactly what my father intended, too. He didn’t used to be the kind of person who’d torture someone else.”

  “Then keep people around who know what you want! Who aren’t afraid to call you out. Like Melia.” I smirk, and finally a real smile cracks Jet’s face. “The world changes whether we like it or not,” I say, my chest pinching as I think of Hen and her job offers; of all the places she’ll go without me. “But who you are is always something you have control over.”

  I don’t know if it’s surprise I imagine in Jet’s eyes, but something shifts as he looks at me, like I’ve just shown him a door he didn’t know was there. It’s only then I realize how close we’ve drawn. How close our hands are, and how, if we clasped them, we’d be a breath apart.

  “You’re not going to call me a coward?” he says quietly.

  I shrug. “Anyone who does is being hypocritical. We’re all afraid of something.”

  He lifts a brow—and slips his hands into mine. “And what are you afraid of?”

  I laugh, but more to quell the jolt of panic in my chest. At some point we crossed the awkward line into something else, and I’ve just realized why he feels so familiar. I’ve had warm brown eyes look at me this way before. I’ve felt power thrumming under my fingertips like this, dangerous and alluring, drawing me so coyly in I don’t even recognize I’m falling until the day he’ll decide to step back.

  This is how it started with Gallus, too.

  “That’s not how this works,” I say, looking away.

  He laughs in surprise. “‘This’? And what is ‘this’?”

  “I’m just a part of your story, all right?” I draw back, though pulling away from him hurts as deep as a cut. “I don’t have to answer questions. No one’s going to care what my answer was.”

  He raises a brow. “I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about, but I wouldn’t share your answer either way. This is just between us. And I assure you, I care.”

  “Fine, I—” I hate that it feels like I’ve already made a mistake. But I only need to remember what that first day without Gallus was like, and know I’m in no hurry to be there again. “I’m afraid to tell you what I’m afraid of.”

  “Now, that’s cheating.”

  “Not if you consider I’m more afraid of you finding out what it is than I am of the thing I’m afraid of.”

  He thinks about that a moment, his smile weak. “You truly won’t tell me? You know a lot of my fears now. At least assure me you have one.”

  He reaches for my hand again, and I draw back, pretending not to notice the flash of confusion on his face. But he doesn’t insist. He waits, enveloping us in the smell of leather and sage, firebugs dancing at his back and the moonlight frosting his hair, and I know I can’t enjoy any more star-filled nights with him. I can’t notice how easy it feels to be at his side. I can’t imagine him in the place of my mysterious rescuer, destined to be by my side through thick and thin.

  Because it’s all too easy to imagine him in a minute or a year, after he remembers he’s a prince and I am nothing, giving me the same pitying smile as Gallus. But you couldn’t have thought this was serious, right? You’re just a stable girl, Zahru.

  What am I afraid of?

  Being broken. Being used. Being left behind, again . . . by someone exactly like you.

  “Snakes,” I say, clearing my throat. “I’m really afraid of snakes.”

  Jet gives me a look. “Snakes?”

  “Have you changed your mind about ruling?”

  He puts up his hands. “Snakes are a legitimate fear. Come on. We’d better check on Marcus, and then we really should get moving.”

  I nod, my stomach twisting at the careful distance he keeps between us, the start of a new line of my drawing. But this is the way it must be. We’ll both be grateful at the end of it, and when he’s settled into his new life in Nadessa and I am home, we’ll smile over the small time we had, without any regrets for the time we didn’t.

  But as I help Melia ready the horses, my fingers sliding over the mare’s soft hair, I can’t get the first part of our conversation out of my head. Going home suddenly feels a lot more like running away. Like something much more important than me is dangling above a churning river—and all I’m doing is watching the water rise.

  XVIII

  THIS time, we stay closer to the roads.

  Marcus keeps a careful eye on the distant travelers and wagons, but there aren’t many people moving this late at night, and even fewer who turn their gaze to the dark. The only person we risk passing is an old oxherd, whose herd of oxen mill directly in our path. But she only nods her covered head and lets us pass without comment. I find myself lingering as we go, listening to the animals’ quiet words. They think of food, of rest, of gratitude for their keeper. So unlike certain heifers I know back home.

  And despite the ache that thought inspires, despite the distance between those heifers and me, I can’t help but feel it’s going to be a good day. It’s almost the third morning of the race, leaving only forty-eight hours until the contest defaults. We’ll reach Osjerg just as the city is waking and boats are readying for trips up the river. This time it’ll be Marcus who comes with me so no one recognizes Jet again. In the meantime, Melia is going to write Fara to assure him I’m alive and on my way home.

  This attempt will work. I will get to say “and they lived happily ever after” at the end of this journey yet.

  Still, before I go, something in me itches to speak with Jet again about taking his place on the throne. Maybe there’s no future for us, but that doesn’t mean he can’t have a future as our king. He’d only need to go to the first checkpoint and wait for the Mestrah to announce the default. He could restart with his siblings, then choose to save yet another poor soul from execution, becoming the most merciful, progressive leader we’ve had in a long time.

  I just have to figure out a clever way to spin it. To get him to see he’d be the best ruler without him shutting me out and changing the subject.

  “Hold up,” Marcus says, pulling on the war horse’s reins. “I need to save a cactus.”

  He dismounts even before the gelding has stopped, and strides toward a grouping of rocks. This is exactly the kind of cryptic thing I’d expect a hardened soldier to say, that perhaps truly means “I’m running reconnaissance!” or “I’m setting a trap!”, and my curiosity gets the best of me.

  “Save a cactus?” I whisper to Jet.

  “He has to relieve himself,” Jet says.

  “Oh,” I say, thoroughly disappointed. “Right.”

  I wait for Jet to say more, but he only draws the listening scroll from his belt, unfurls it, rolls it again, then asks Melia for the waterskin—all without so much as glancing at me. I wonder if he’s thinking about how I pulled away from him. I hope he doesn’t think it’s something he did. I have the sudden thought that this is definitely not the way I want to leave things, and when Melia notices me w
atching them, I nod.

  “Can I switch with you?” I ask her. Jet jerks his head up, and I give him a shy smile. “Is that all right?”

  “Oh.” He fidgets with the waterskin and recorks it. “Yes. Sure.”

  Melia casts a suspicious glance between us, but she dismounts in a single motion, her plum-hued tunic twisting around her legs. I get down and thank the mare for carrying me with a kiss to her nose. In return she itches her entire head along my side.

  Melia, she rumbles as I give the Healer the reins. Melia.

  “Yes, back to your favorite,” I mutter. Melia smiles, a mischievous glint in her green eyes. I’m sure she thinks Jet and I did more than talk last night, and even though I know we didn’t, I still feel heat bloom in my face. I turn away quickly, bracing myself for what I’ll find in Jet’s eyes, but his gaze is on the horizon, on the distant glint of city torches. And he looks tired. His riding cloak and tunic are frosted with sand; his eyeliner has all but worn off. The feathered metal of his armor, shiny and bright when we started, is dull in the light.

  Despite this, I lean against the gelding and put on my best smile.

  “You know,” I say. “You look like you could take on a country right now.”

  Admittedly, subtlety is not my strong suit. Jet gives me a look. “You’re going to make me wish I was still riding with Melia, aren’t you?”

  “I think you’re not keeping a very open mind about this. What you should see is yet another opportunity to spend time with a delightful young lady who just wants to compliment your strengths.”

  Marcus snickers from behind the rocks. “We’ve converted her!”

  Jet groans, though I catch a hint of a smile. “Gods, fine. But I’m sitting in back this time.”

  He sits off the rear of the saddle so I can pull up, and I smirk as I settle in, until he moves behind me and I remember there will be literally no space between us. Smirk: gone. It seems that just because I’ve told my head to stop wanting him doesn’t mean my heart is listening in the least, and as he takes up the reins, I’m hyperaware of his stomach against my back, his arms around my shoulders. Smooth, muscled arms that direct the horse with the softest touch of his hand. I concentrate on the life and luck symbols pressed into the pommel to distract myself, but I do not see this boding well in the long term.

  “Whoa, easy,” Melia says to her mare when the horse shies beneath her and pivots north. The war horse and Jet’s gelding jerk their heads up, too. They look off past the distant oxen, who shift restlessly, mooing and breaking rank.

  “What was that?” Marcus says, returning with his crossbow drawn.

  Listen, the gelding says.

  It’s quiet, whickers the war horse.

  They swivel their ears, and I get the uncomfortable feeling it is not in reference to our surroundings. They hear something moving whose thoughts are silent. And since, from my experience, no animal goes without thinking for longer than a few moments, that something must be human. They weren’t alarmed by the old shepherd, so it can’t be her. Someone must have followed us from the road.

  “We should move faster for a while,” I say, shrinking into Jet.

  “Did you see something?” Marcus asks.

  “They hear something.”

  I nod to the horses. They’re still watching the northern dunes, nostrils wide. Marcus’s gelding paws the sand.

  Unnatural, he snorts. Hyra.

  Stranger. The horses jitter at this, the mare sidestepping before Melia collects her again with the reins. Wariness crawls up my spine. The rational side of me reasons they only mean the person isn’t someone they can see, but maybe being in the desert has heightened my sensitivity to their emotions, because I feel as uneasy as I did when I saw Kasta watching me at the banquet.

  “Could be jackals,” Melia says, running her hand on the mare’s neck to soothe her. “I saw some slinking around back there, watching us go by.”

  “It’s not an animal,” I say. “It doesn’t think the right way.”

  Marcus shoots a concerned look at Jet.

  “She’s a Whisperer,” Jet says, pulling his hood up.

  “Oh good,” Marcus says, brightening. “That actually answers a lot of questions I had.”

  “Shall we run for a few kilometers?” Melia says.

  “At the least,” Marcus says, pulling onto the war horse. “Jet, can you keep us quiet?”

  Jet nods. “I’ll redirect our noise onto another path as long as I can. Hopefully whoever it is will follow the decoy.”

  We start off, first at a jarring trot that resurfaces all my concerns about sitting this close to Jet, and then into an easy lope that might be the end of me. Jet’s weight shifts at my back, heavy and warm, and it takes reminding myself I made a decision, and picturing our pursuers as cannibalistic corpses, to keep my imagination from taking me to a place from which I’d never fully recover.

  “It’s a nice night, at least,” I choke.

  “It is,” Jet says, his voice a pleasing tenor in my ear.

  I clear my throat and remember I have a mission to attend to. “What will you do in Nadessa?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, adjusting his grip on the reins. “I’m staying with Marcus and his boyfriend awhile, and then . . . we’ll see. There are so many places I want to go. I don’t know where to start.”

  “Well, there’s a really nice place north of here, with a beautiful palace full of starlit pools—”

  “Zahru.”

  “I know, but I can’t help it. Don’t you feel like you’re throwing away an amazing opportunity?”

  The sound of the wind fades, as does the hiss of the horse’s hooves against the sand. We’re in our own little bubble. But the saddle creaks when Jet shifts, so he must only be silencing the background noise.

  “No,” he says. “I feel like I’m finally free after years in captivity. Haven’t you ever wanted anything else? Haven’t you ever dreamed of what you could do if you weren’t a Whisperer?”

  And just like that, he’s cornered me. It would be lying to say I knew my place in the world, that being a Whisperer was all I’d ever hoped for. After all, the very reason I’m in this mess is because I wanted something different. And whether I like it or not, Jet is just doing the same thing—living the life he wants, not the one preordained for him.

  “She’s silent,” he says. “Gods, is it possible you have nothing to say?”

  “Sometimes I think before I talk,” I snap.

  He snickers.

  “That’s not a fair question, anyway. I’m a Whisperer. Of course I’ve wanted more. You’re a prince.”

  “But if someone handed you everything you needed to live a different life . . . would you take it?”

  Somehow he’s the one who’s taken the clever approach to this argument. I can’t answer that question without supporting him. Without acknowledging that in his position, I would do the same thing.

  “I—I don’t know,” I say. “It’s not the same. How did you turn this around already?”

  He laughs. “Just tell me what you would do. No judgment. I’m honestly curious.”

  I sigh. “Well, before this”—I gesture to Melia’s tunic and the horse—“I wanted to be an adventurer. I wanted to see different parts of the world. Find hidden treasures, sit in crowded taverns telling stories of all the things I’d done.” I shrug. “You know, be someone interesting.”

  He’s quiet for a long while. “You don’t think you’re someone interesting now?”

  “I’m a Whisperer, Jet. People aren’t exactly lining up to hear about camels and vengeful cats.”

  “Is that why you—” He relaxes as if he’s gotten the answer to something. I don’t like the knowing tone in his voice when he speaks again. “You realize after this, I won’t be a prince. Not that it should matter, but any expectations you think ar
e on me for . . . whatever . . . aren’t going to be there.”

  I think he’s telling me that this—us—might actually be possible, and now I really have to fight the careless part of my brain to stay quiet.

  “You want to be an adventurer,” he says. “You want to see the world.” He leans around my shoulder. “Come with me.”

  All the sound dies except for his voice.

  “We can go anywhere. See anything you want. It’s probably ideal to be away awhile anyway, at least until the priests name a new sacrifice. They won’t even bother to look for you if they think you perished with us. And you’ll have every story imaginable when you return.”

  My heart jumps into my throat. “You’re serious?”

  “When else would you be able to do this? It’s perfect. We could head straight for Nadessa’s border. We’ll be out of the Crossing’s path within a day.”

  “But—” His face is alive with excitement, imagining where we could be tomorrow; in a week. But there’s something more there, too. A hope. Not just for himself, but for me, and it’s so real and raw and exactly the kind of thing I want to be true that my heart breaks just looking at him. Because of course this is what I want. Not just the adventure, but to feel like someone could want these things for me and mean it without caring what it looks like to anyone else.

  I want so badly to say yes.

  But whether I like it or not, I am still a Whisperer, one with responsibilities.

  “I . . . can’t,” I say.

  The excitement falls from his face. “You can’t? Why not?”

  “My father. He needs me. I can’t just disappear.”

  “Well, what does he need until you can return? You saw how much gold I brought. We could send him anything. Food. Clothes. A new house, if he needs it.”

  I shake my head. “No, he needs me. He needs help running the stable.”