The Kinder Poison

by Natalie Mae

  “So to be clear, if our tent rips to shreds, we have no backup plan.”

  I’m getting tired of important questions like this being met with silence.

  “Of course,” I say, “if you’ve changed your mind and we aren’t going in the direction of the caves, we could avoid the storm entirely, because Alette would only pray to block your path to the next checkpoint.”

  He opens his mouth to answer—and closes it.

  Thinking.

  “True,” he says.

  “‘True,’ I’m right? Or ‘true,’ we’re not headed for the caves anymore?”

  “The Crossing isn’t over because of this, Zahru.”

  “But you can change how it ends. Take me to safety, then win your race and tell the Mestrah you chose mercy.”

  More silence.

  “Your way hasn’t been working,” I say, and finally his eyes shift to me. “Try mine.”

  He still doesn’t answer, but he touches a hand to Maia’s neck.

  Maia swings her head and changes course.

  * * *

  We run until Numet pulls her lantern below the horizon and the stars stretch above us. We stay far from the roads. Distant campfires and caravan lights flicker around us, well out of shouting distance. It’s clear Kasta won’t risk meeting any more of Sakira’s supporters. I only hope he doesn’t take us so far out that I lose track of the roads entirely.

  Maia doesn’t once falter in stride. As a Shifter, her cursed magic doesn’t tire her body as it’s supposed to, nor will her abilities fade the more she uses them. Her only limitation will be the stamina she has for running. In this form, with more than twice the lung and heart capacity she’s used to, she’ll be able to sprint for hours. Or maybe she no longer cares if she runs herself to death. I’ve been listening for her thoughts beneath the sound of hoof and wind, desperate for a hint of forgiveness or understanding. But she knows I can hear her, and each time her thoughts drift to Kasta or the city, she rearranges them to focus on the desert. I’ve heard little more from her than Never free, too late, traitor. Senseless girl. Now what?

  I close my eyes against the accusations, wishing I could send her my thoughts as easily as I can hear hers. I can’t change what happened in the tavern, but I still have every intention of getting that rune necklace. We’ll have to stop now that the Healer’s gone. I can take it while Kasta’s distracted or sleeping. Or I’ll get him to break it himself. If saving his life wasn’t enough to get through to him, nothing will be.

  I will fix this.

  Hold on, Maia.

  When my legs ache from balancing and my stomach groans a reminder of its emptiness, I decide I’ve waited long enough. Kasta has to agree we’ve gone as far as we can. I sit up against him, tensing.

  “We should stop for the night.”

  I expect a protest, and have already worked out my counterargument, when he simply sits back. Maia slows and then stops, her great sides heaving as she turns her head away. Kasta slips off behind me. I start to move as well, but he turns like he might offer to help, and I freeze, hardly daring to breathe, until I remember it’s poor Maia I’m on and slide off without waiting.

  We raise the tent in silence. Again Kasta surprises me by helping me do it instead of making Maia keep working. He slings the jackal skin at her instead, and as soon as she’s changed she curls into a ball to sleep. Kasta’s beside me as we stake the tent, driving the sticks deep into the sand. But his mind is far away. He hardly looks at me and never at Maia. The first time he meets my gaze is when he pulls open the tent flap and gestures inside.

  I crawl onto the horse pelt—it’s an awful thing to use as bedding, but it’s better than the sand—my body begging for just an hour’s rest, a moment’s quiet. But I owe Maia more than that. I owe myself more.

  I’m not sleeping until I have that necklace.

  I sigh as I move to the back of the small tent, fretting over how I’ll do it. A light potion hangs from the poles supporting the ceiling, the liquid illuminating the space like a tiny star, and I sit toward the head of the horse and unclasp my cloak, balling it as if for a pillow. Melia’s tunic, with its mercifully reinforced linen, has held up for the most part. I can’t say as much for the rest of me. My arms are stained orange from sand and horse sweat, and I doubt I smell much better. I grunt to think what would happen if I attempted this Maia’s way. I’m lucky Kasta can look at me without grimacing, let alone as anything desirable.

  Actually, I wish he would grimace, if only to reassure me he’s still capable of emotion. His expression hasn’t changed in hours. He sits opposite, just past my feet, his eyes far away as he pulls his cloak over his head. A fine stubble of hair blackens his jaw, and in the dim light he looks so exhausted I feel I know what he’ll look like as an old man. Sand dusts his olive skin, and his trader’s tunic is as filthy as mine.

  He doesn’t lie down. He watches me in a way that makes me increasingly aware of how alone we are, and I scrub some of the sand from my arm.

  “We should bring Maia in,” I say.

  “No.”

  He folds his cooling cloak and sets it to the side, as carefully as he would a bowl of glass.

  “The storm—” I say.

  “Stayed to the south. It will miss us.” He looks at his hands, at the blood dried across his chest and crusted on his bicep. The cut on his arm isn’t healing well. It bled while we rode, and even now the red beneath the cut is bright. He pulls the tunic off, a prince once more with his bare chest and tergus, and pulls a small bottle from his belt that turns the air sour when he opens it. He soaks a clean section of the tunic and presses it to his arm with a wince.

  I consider helping him, but the same eerie, deliberate calm surrounds him that did after we spoke with the Mestrah, and it feels wiser to give him space.

  “You remind me of Maia,” he says, nodding outside. “Before.”

  Or maybe it’s not the same. His tone is quiet. Sad.

  Broken.

  “She wasn’t as thoughtful as you. But she followed the rules. Even if the outcome wasn’t what she wanted, she believed in something. I could always count on that. I underestimated . . .” He exhales. “I underestimated how much it’s changed her.”

  It, as in her being condemned to a life as a demon. For a moment I can only stare, wondering how on earth he could think that wouldn’t change her.

  “You had to suspect she might never forgive you,” I say. “The fate you left her to is hardly better.”

  He looks over. “The fate I left her to?”

  “Yes, as you’ve been hinting at this whole time? And threatening me with? Have you lost that much blood?”

  The prince shakes his head. “I didn’t do anything to her.”

  “Then what, she woke up one day feeling suspiciously damned, and because she can’t talk, you go around telling people you’re the reason to scare them?”

  “She had a choice.” His eyes flash with the reflection of the potion, and he returns his attention to the wound. “She made the wrong one.”

  “There wasn’t a right one. She either had to let a monster kill her, or kill it to save her own life.”

  “That isn’t what happened.” His fingers tighten. “She was supposed to stay home.”

  He doesn’t elaborate, and I try to work out what that means. She wasn’t supposed to be in harm’s way . . . but he was? “Please don’t tell me hunting a Shifter is some kind of royal rite.”

  He shakes his head. “No. Hunting one is against the law for royalty, too.” He swallows, his gaze never leaving the cloth. “Which is why she was the only person I told about it.”

  A chill snakes through my veins as I realize what he means. This was no grave accident—he went looking for one. What had happened that would make him go after a Shifter? I think immediately of his destroyed laboratory; of the formulas he lost. Was h
e trying to prove his father wrong? Did he think he could catch one and unlock some secret in its magic?

  “But . . . I don’t understand,” I say. “You needed it alive, and she decided she wanted its power?”

  “No.”

  “Then—” I let out a frustrated growl. “You’re not making sense. Obviously things went wrong, or she wouldn’t have killed it. What happened that night?”

  A muscle twitches in Kasta’s jaw. His fingers flex around the cloth and the shadows shift in his face, warring against the light. “That’s not a story I share with anyone.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I can’t stop myself. Anger bursts through me, and I’m normally not a violent person, but I almost shove him. “After everything I’ve told you, after I saved your life, you still don’t trust me? Gods, what’s it going to take? Do I need to throw myself between you and the sword next time? Or maybe I need to be more patient. Maybe I just need to wait for the moment when you stick a knife through my chest.”

  He blinks, and as aggravated as I am, the shock on his face is very satisfying.

  “Don’t you ever get tired of being miserable? You can’t go on like this, Kasta. Not as a king, not as a person. Have you really trusted no one since that night?”

  He only looks at me, his face tormented, and I sigh and rub my palms into my eyes. I don’t know why I thought getting through to him might work. Maia even told me I’d be foolish to try, and now it’s looking like I’m going to have to wait for him to sleep, which I hate almost as much as Maia’s plan to seduce him, because I feel so close to breaking through. I wanted this to end better, but I can’t wait weeks for him to change his mind.

  The tonic dips again; he lifts a new corner of the tunic to the wound.

  “What age did you come into your magic?” he asks quietly.

  I fluff my cloakpillow to lie on it. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Do you want the story or not?” he snaps.

  I look over, hardly believing my ears. “I was six.”

  “The same for Jet. Sakira was five.” His voice is softer now, but something curls its edges, like the ripples of a crocodile under the water. “They used to practice together, when they got older. Sakira would transform fruit into birds, and Jet would give them voices. I could see them from my windows. Sakira would make them attack me if she caught me watching.” I expect him to tense at this, but he goes on as if there’s nothing strange about that at all. “As we got older, and my abilities still hadn’t shown, they started stealing my food and ordering me around like a servant. They were preparing me, they said, for my future in the streets.”

  He folds the soiled cloth, streaking his hands in new blood. Things are clicking into place one by one, and a new sadness stirs in my chest.

  “At that time, I still believed my father loved me. I sought his reassurance that he’d never cast me out like that. Do you know what he said?”

  He’s still speaking as though none of this affects him. I wonder how many times he’s thought about this; how many times someone has to feel the pain of something before they feel nothing at all.

  “That such a thing would be unbearable, and that he’d change the law?” I whisper.

  Kasta grunts. “He told me I’d come into my magic, or I wouldn’t. That the gods would show their favor”—he swallows—“or he’d send me to the orphanages with all the other eleventh years who failed to show.”

  Everything he refuses to feel is seeking me instead, needling my heart like a hundred scorpions. I know the old families—the nobles—place an unreasonable amount of importance on magic, but their blood is so saturated with it that to have a child without magic is as rare as having a child born blind. I never thought about what happened to those children. I suppose I assumed, naïvely, that all of them simply grew up and found new lives outside of Orkena.

  “Gods, please tell me you didn’t,” I say. “You went after the Shifter for its power? Knowing what would happen to you?”

  He shrugs. “Nothing would, if no one found out. I would never have used the Shifter’s obvious abilities. I only needed its strength, its endurance, and the priests would have thought I was a Dominator.”

  “But the curse—”

  “The gods had already abandoned me.” His eyes flash, shifting to mine. “You’ve seen the Forsaken. That would have been my life, now and for an eternity in the afterlife. Do you really believe I had anything to lose?”

  My heart jerks in sudden comprehension. Maia’s “sentence”; her betrayal.

  I close my eyes. “Maia tried to stop you.”

  “Yes.”

  “She knew the only way to do so would be to kill it herself.”

  To take the curse before he could, because as a priest, she feared Kasta’s desperation would ruin so much more than his mortal life. But for Kasta, she took away what he thought was his last chance at having magic. She’d as good as sentenced him to exile.

  I grimace. “You told the priests what she’d done.”

  “No.”

  I choke on my surprise. “No?”

  “I wanted to.” He closes his eyes, fresh blood dripping beneath the cloth. “I almost did. But in the end . . . I couldn’t. Maia confessed to it herself.”

  “Then everything you said about being responsible—”

  “I could have defended her.” There’s an old ache in his voice, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. Another pain he no longers feels. “I could have confessed.”

  The silence after that is horrible. I can picture him in the throne room with Maia all those years ago, the priests holding her arms, Kasta standing at the Mestrah’s side. Her future, and his, held in Kasta’s mouth. But there was no happy ending. If he admitted to hunting a Shifter, she might have gone free—and he would have met his fate as Forsaken immediately.

  I press my fingers into my temples. “All right, I understand now why that seemed like a betrayal, but . . . can’t you see now that she was only trying to protect you? She stopped you from making an irreversible mistake. She thought she was saving your soul. How can you still fault her for that? Especially since you came into your magic soon after?”

  Kasta watches me, something between torment and amusement on his face. He’s quiet so long I wonder if he’ll pull away again, and this is where the story will end, but after a moment he exhales, coming to a decision. He places the tunic to the side, as careful as ever, and reaches into the pouch at his waist. When he opens his hand, tiny needled bulbs clink in his palm.

  “I don’t know what those are,” I say.

  “They’re scorpion stingers,” he says, watching me. “Poisons.”

  A black feeling opens in my chest. As does the realization that Maia said she met her fate four years ago, when Kasta would have been thirteen.

  “This one can make someone ill for a day.” He touches a stinger colored a vivid green. “This one can render a person unconscious for hours.” An amber stinger. “And this one . . .” He rolls a white bulb between two fingers, careful not to touch its tip. “Can kill a man in ten seconds.”

  The sting on the back of my neck. The man screaming in the tavern. The real reason he stopped for the blonde girl.

  “You never came into your magic,” I whisper.

  And everything slides into place. His feverish need to believe a Whisperer—someone considered nearly as weak as the Forsaken—could be a powerful First. His jealousy of his Soundbending brother that went so much further than their father’s attention. His fear he’d always be second to someone because of something he couldn’t control.

  His desperate need to prove them all wrong.

  The laboratory. His research on magic. I remember Jet saying he couldn’t imagine the Mestrah destroying Kasta’s work, but I wonder if it wasn’t him at all. If instead it was Kasta tearing up his own research, devastated by the realizatio
n that the subject he’d made his passion . . . would be something he’d never possess.

  I hear the beaker shattering again beside Jet’s head, and my heart cracks with it.

  “But how is that possible?” I say. “The priests would have tested you. You’d have to demonstrate your magic to a panel.”

  “I warned the tester he couldn’t draw my magic to sample it because I feared it would kill him. Then it was just a matter of diversion. If they’re watching my target, they’re not watching my hands.”

  “That’s . . .” I can’t stop a small smile. “That’s brilliant.”

  “Brilliant?” He snickers. “Don’t you mean disgusting? Unnatural? Sacrilegious?”

  “No,” I say, realizing I actually mean it. “I mean, I wish you’d chosen something that didn’t hurt people, but you made up for a shortcoming with different skills. Your power is one of the most feared in Orkena, but you made it yourself.” I search his eyes, a new thought breaking over me. “Can’t you see? That’s exactly what your father’s wanted you to do all along. That’s who you are when you let go of your bitterness. Resourceful. Ingenious.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s not enough. For the Mestrah, it’s never enough.”

  “Stop worrying about a man who was going to abandon you,” I say, sitting forward. For the first time I feel like I understand him, like the good prince he could be is right there on the surface, the other side of a card waiting to be turned. “Look forward. Think of what you could change! A magicless king. You could redefine our entire system. Elevate the Forsaken and give everyone a chance at a good life, based on hard work rather than birth. No one would ever have to fear being cast out again.” I’m getting lost in my own ideas, but I can’t help grinning at the possibility. It’s a sad beginning with a happy ending, as all good stories are. “You could save people from your fate.”

  “They’d never accept it.” The shadows are taking over again. He lifts the cloth back to his arm, and the wound bleeds anew. “If they found out I was powerless—”