Poison

by Chris Wooding

  “Here, here, do this,” Poison said, her impatient tone masking real concern. She pulled Snapdragon’s sleeve over her hand and put it to her stepmother’s mouth. “Hold that.”

  Snapdragon did so with her free hand while Poison pulled the sleeve tight at her elbow, cutting off the air and making a reasonable cloth bag for Snapdragon to breathe into. She gasped a little more, but soon she was breathing normally again, and finally Poison let her go.

  “You shouldn’t get so excited,” Poison advised.

  Snapdragon sagged, her eyes falling to the bundle on the ground before her. “It’s so heavy,” she said.

  Poison looked at where it lay, eerily still. She had wrapped it up like a loaf of bread. She wondered whether it was breathing or not. Then she wondered if it needed to.

  “You were going to put it in the well?” she asked.

  “I can’t let Hew see it! It would kill him!”

  “Don’t be an idiot!” Poison snapped back. “For one thing, you’d pollute the water supply if you left it rotting down there; hadn’t you thought of that? Besides, you can’t drown it. Don’t you know what that thing is?”

  Snapdragon gave her a furious glare. She hated being made to feel ignorant. “I suppose you do?”

  “It’s a changeling,” Poison said. “A changeling. And if you’d put it down that well, we’d never get Azalea back.”

  Snapdragon looked at her in disbelief. “How do you know? How do you know, you little witch? Did you do it to her? Did you?”

  Poison did not bother to answer that. Instead, she scooped up the bundle – and it was heavy, like carrying stone rather than flesh – and looked down on where Snapdragon had begun to sob in the mud, her dress slimed and ruined.

  “Say nothing of this. I will deal with it.”

  “Where has Azalea gone? What are you going to do?” Snapdragon called after her as she walked away.

  “Say nothing of this,” Poison called back, partly because she wanted Snapdragon to understand how important that was, partly because she did not know the answer to either of her questions.

  But one man would.

  “All right, all right, just hold your knocking there!” Fleet griped as he pulled the door to his hut open. It was early in the morning and he liked to sleep in; but his annoyance dissipated as he saw the expression on Poison’s face.

  “The Scarecrow came last night,” she said, with a tremor in her voice. “It took Azalea. It left us this.”

  Fleet took a moment to process this; it was too large a thing to face him with so soon after getting out of bed. Then his brows raised in surprise and alarm, and he quickly ushered her inside. He paused a moment at the door, glancing about to see if Poison’s presence had been witnessed; but the village was asleep. His hut resided with two others on a platform braced between two towering corkscrew trees, and his neighbours were worse slugabeds than he was. With a final, suspicious grimace, he shut the door.

  “Does anyone else know?” Fleet asked Poison as she laid the bundle on the kitchen table with a grunt. Fleet was a man of mysterious wealth, and he could afford a hut big enough for several rooms, including a separate space for eating and cooking, and a room for his bath too.

  “Snapdragon knows,” Poison replied. “She won’t say anything.”

  “Are you sure? It’s important,” Fleet said.

  “She won’t. . .” Poison said, and she was suddenly ashamed to find tears rushing up inside her. She tried to swallow them down, but they were relentless. “Better she was just gone. . . She. . .” She gave up trying to speak, for her voice betrayed her. She felt Fleet’s leathery hand on her shoulder, his voice a comforting rumble.

  “Come on, Poison,” he said. “All is not lost yet. Let’s see what we have here.”

  Fleet moved around the table and unwrapped the bundle. Inside was Azalea, dressed in roughly embroidered woollen pyjamas, lying still with her eyes closed. She looked as if she were asleep, a little pale but chubby-faced as always, with a crop of blonde hair.

  “Is it dead?” Fleet asked, tugging one leg.

  The changeling’s eyes flickered open, and they were pupil-less orbs of black. The temperature seemed to drop a little under their cold regard. Though it did not move a muscle from where it lay on its side, it glared at Fleet balefully.

  “Oh my,” said Fleet. “It really is a changeling.”

  “I told you it was,” Poison said truculently. She was not yet too grief-stricken to snap at him.

  Fleet scratched his stubbled cheek with his knuckle. “Better come in by the fire,” he said. He picked up the changeling and carried it with him into the next room, his reading room, where a pair of battered old chairs sat in front of the embers of last night’s hearth. The room was dim, with thin, threadbare curtains pulled across the window, and it was stiflingly warm. A bookcase that put Poison’s to shame dominated the shadowy back wall.

  “Sit down, sit down,” he said, laying the changeling aside like it was a parcel. Poison settled herself, only now realizing that her feet were freezing inside her boots, as she had no socks on. She watched Fleet potter about behind her. He was a tall, rangy thing, without much flesh on his bones, with a large, solid nose and whiskery ears. His hair was a mix of grey and white, and still surprisingly thick for an old man, flopping about this way and that as he moved. He wore a faded old waistcoat and trousers; in fact, Poison had never seen him in anything else. A thought occurred to her suddenly.

  “Did I wake you?” she asked.

  “Hmm?” Fleet said over his shoulder as he ran his fingers over the spines of his books, searching for something.

  “Just now? Did I wake you when I knocked?”

  “I should say so,” Fleet replied with mock grumpiness. “You’d have raised the dead.”

  “Do you sleep in those clothes as well?”

  Fleet paused in his rummaging, for a beat too long. “I was asleep in that chair, if you must know. I’m an old man; I can sleep anywhere.” He sighed and turned away from the bookshelf. “I can’t find it.”

  “Find what?”

  “Machmus’s Bestiary,” he replied. “I was sure I had it.”

  A sudden, chilling flash; the Scarecrow’s fingers curling over the edge of the page, touching the skin of her wrist.

  “It’s at my house,” Poison replied. “And I’m not going near it again.”

  “Ah,” said Fleet, seeming to understand. It was not quite the reaction Poison had expected.

  “What do you mean, ‘Ah’?” she said, her voice rising.

  “Books are dangerous things sometimes, Poison,” he replied. “They feed your imagination. Soup?”

  “Soup?” Poison cried incredulously.

  “Soup. Do you want some? You haven’t had breakfast yet, I’d guess.”

  “Fleet, what am I going to do about this?” she demanded, flinging a hand out at the changeling, which lay silently and immobile where Fleet had put it.

  “Let me get you some soup,” said Fleet. “And I’ll tell you.”

  *

  Fleet stoked up the fire and threw on some wood while the soup heated in the kitchen. As he did so, Poison explained to him all that had happened that morning. When the soup was ready he gave a bowl to Poison and took one for himself, furnishing them both with a pair of crusty rolls – real wheat bread, and not the tasteless mush made from the local marsh reeds. Then he sat in his usual chair, and Poison sat cross-legged before the fire in her thick hemp nightdress, and the old man began to talk.

  “Phaeries are evil things, Poison,” he said. “Evil and magickal. The changeling and the Scarecrow; they are creatures of phaerie. They leave strangeness and illusion in their wake. They lie with their tongues and deceive your senses. What you saw in my book was an after-effect of the Scarecrow’s sleep-dust. A trick of the mind.” He smiled grimly. “Most often their k
ind stay out of our affairs, for they already have enough of our Realm to roam without having to bother finding us in the marshes and the mountains; but the phaeries can’t resist their mischief now and again.”

  Poison glanced at where the changeling lay in the shadows on a low table at the back of the room, watching them with its black eyes. It had not moved a muscle from where it was put, and its stillness was as unsettling as its gaze.

  “What have they done with her?” she asked quietly.

  “They have taken her back to the Realm of Phaerie,” Fleet said, biting into a hunk of soup-soaked bread.

  “But why?” Poison asked, her violet eyes tearing again. She forced her sorrow away. Now was not the time.

  “That, I can’t say,” Fleet replied. “Sometimes, the baby is returned. It could be a day, a week, a year, twenty years. Sometimes they come back the same age as when they were taken, when their parents are old and grey; sometimes they come back fully grown. None of them remember anything.”

  “How many . . . how many times has this happened?” Poison asked, staring furiously into the mounting flames to dry her eyes.

  “More than you know, Poison,” he said. “And it’s happened in this very village more than once. But you did the right thing, you know. I see you learned from those books I gave you. If Snapdragon had killed it, the phaeries would never swap it back. Azalea would be gone for good.”

  “Does. . . Can’t anyone do anything?” she cried helplessly.

  “It’s like the mud-spiders and the murksnakes, like the goatfish and swamp lung and everything else here,” Fleet said, chewing. “It’s part of life. You were unlucky, Poison, and they came for your sister.”

  “Unlucky. . .” Poison repeated softly.

  “You couldn’t have stopped the Scarecrow, you know,” Fleet said. “Don’t blame yourself. It puts that dust on you to keep you asleep. Then it takes the infant and puts a changeling in its place. You have to keep it fed – oh, they eat a lot, and many a back’s been broken by working hard to try and keep a changeling – but if you ever want to see that child again, you’ll do it. Some folks believe that the changeling is still their child, that it’s just sick. I suppose it’s easier if you let yourself believe that. Then one day, if you’re one of the lucky ones, you’ll find your child back in its crib and the changeling gone for ever. But some people never do.” He shrugged. “It’s the way of things.”

  But as he spoke, Poison felt a burning inside her, that grew with every word he said. Her tears had dried now, and in their place was something darker. Anger.

  “I refuse to believe I’m hearing this!” she shouted suddenly, standing up and knocking her soup aside, untouched. “Not from you!”

  “Ah, now you’ve spilled your—” Fleet began.

  “Fleet!” she barked. “Listen! This is not part of the way of things, it is not part of life. Someone came and kidnapped my sister! Do you understand? Day after day I watch everyone around me put up with misery and death and squalor, and all of them justify it by those same words. It’s only part of life because we let it be!” She was shouting now, red-faced in her anger, but Fleet seemed uncowed. “I’ll not wait until the phaeries decide to return my sister; I’ll not work myself to death to feed that black-eyed monster over there!”

  “Then what will you do, Poison?” Fleet asked softly.

  “I’ll go and get her back!”

  The words fell into silence. She glared at Fleet, and Fleet met her gaze unwaveringly. The fire snapped behind her in the dim room, sending shadows jumping across the old man’s face.

  “You do not know what you are saying, Poison,” he warned, his voice gone suddenly cold. “The world is much bigger than Gull, and far crueller.”

  “Then I’ll be crueller still,” she replied.

  “Where will you go? And what will you do when you get there?”

  “I’ll go to the Phaerie Lord,” she said, deadly serious. “And I’ll ask him for my sister back.”

  “You don’t even know he exists!”

  “The Scarecrow exists,” she replied. “That changeling exists. Why not him?”

  “And what about your father and Snapdragon?”

  “I don’t care about Snapdragon,” Poison replied. “And my father will grieve, I know; but better that than I give up as you’d have me do.”

  “And the changeling?”

  Poison was silent, glaring at him.

  “You know your father will have to be told,” Fleet said. “This is not something that can be swept under the rug. You can’t hide it from them. He and Snapdragon will have to look after that thing. And if you go, your father will be losing two daughters instead of one.”

  “Can’t you look after it? Keep it secret?” Poison begged.

  “Oh, no,” said Fleet, warding off the suggestion. “I have other obligations outside Gull. I can’t tend to that phaerie monster.”

  Poison went silent again, her jaw set stubbornly.

  “You have not thought about this in the slightest, have you?” Fleet prompted.

  “No.”

  “And you’re going anyway.”

  “I am.”

  For a time, Fleet searched her face. She was always wilful, but this . . . he had never seen her so determined upon anything. A slow grin spread across his face.

  “You really do have the Old Blood in you,” he said.

  “Fleet, time is short. I want to be gone before my father wakes. Are you going to help me or not?”

  “Of course I’ll help you, Poison,” he said. “You only had to ask.”

  The wraith-catcher returned to his cart in the afternoon, his morning’s business done. He came labouring through the trees, clanking and clattering as the metal pots that hung from a webbing over his heavy coat bashed against each other. Not a bad Soulswatch Eve, and not a good one. There were plenty of better spots to catch marshwraiths, but Gull was his territory, and he liked the way the villagers threw themselves into their work. Some wraith-catchers had to go out and hang the traps personally, work from dusk till dawn. All he had to do was set the villagers to it and give them a pittance in the morning for their trouble, one copper mark for each marshwraith they brought him. They were too ignorant to know that copper marks were not even used in currency any more beyond the Black Marshes. Not that it mattered, he supposed; none of them was ever liable to go far enough to find out.

  His cart had wide wheels with studded rims, and chains wrapped around them for better purchase in the mud. It was a low, flat thing, dirty but sturdy, and pulled by a grint. Grints were the only beasts of burden who were adapted well enough to get around the Black Marshes; with their spatulate, webbed feet and flat, beaver-like tails, they never sank into the mud even when the cart did, and they had the muscle to pull it out when it got mired. They were lizardine things with dark green scales, five feet at the shoulder with blunt muzzles and incurious yellow eyes on either side of their head. Granted, they were stubborn and slow, but they were also strong and docile, and they needed very little looking after. Unlike the lizards they resembled, they were vegetarian, and they could digest almost anything that grew in the swamp, poisonous or not.

  Huffing, he pulled back the tarpaulin on the cart and dumped the metal jars with their bright prisoners inside, crashing them against the jars that were already there. He had almost a full load now, as he had expected; it was time to go and sell them. He wrinkled his nose as he clambered around to the front of the cart and up on to the driver’s bench there. It would be a relief to get out of this stinking place.

  It was then that he noticed the girl standing in the trees nearby. She had an odd face, a strange sullen intensity about her, and she was watching him with her large, violet eyes. He brushed his thick white moustache with the back of his hand and looked her over. She was wearing a ragged dress, a simple, long-sleeved thing made of thin hide and sc
abbed with dirt at the hem. There were sturdy boots on her feet, a heavy pack on her back.

  “You can’t come with me, girl,” he said, guessing her intention. Nobody from the village had need of a pack like that unless they were going far.

  “I can pay,” she replied.

  “Ha! And what can you pay with?”

  She walked up to the side of the cart and held up a shiny silver sovereign. “This.”

  “That?” the wraith-catcher harumphed. “I’ll need more.”

  Poison’s gaze did not flicker. “This is more than enough,” she said.

  The wraith-catcher’s shaggy white brows came together in a frown. “And where did you get a silver sovereign, girl? Stole it, did you?”

  “None of your concern. Do you want it or not?”

  He weighed it up for a moment, then reached out to take it from her. She snatched it away. “After we get there.”

  “Where are you going?” he replied, indignant. For a girl one-third his age, she certainly possessed an uncanny amount of front.

  “Shieldtown,” she replied, testing out the unfamiliar name. Just the act of speaking it aloud seemed to her breathlessly exotic.

  “I see,” he replied, studying her. “And what if someone comes after you, hmm? A boy, perhaps? Or your parents?”

  “Nobody will come,” she said levelly.

  The wraith-catcher sucked on his lower lip and looked at the grint, thinking it over. Eventually he looked back at her and nodded. “Come on then, girl. But don’t you try to cheat me, or so help me I’ll show you what sorrow is.”

  “I know what sorrow is,” she assured him, clambering up on to the driver’s bench with him. “My name is Poison.”

  “Choose it yourself, did you?”

  It was supposed to be a joke, but Poison replied earnestly. “Yes.”

  The wraith-catcher frowned again, already wondering if he had made a mistake in agreeing to take her with him. “Bram,” he said by way of introduction.

  “That’s not a marsh name,” she observed.

  “I’m not a marsh person,” he replied. “Shieldtown, you said? You’re in luck. I’m on my way there now.”