Poison

by Chris Wooding

  Poison nodded. Of course he was.

  There was a certain tree that grew in the marshes called the clubroot tree, whose leaves were famed for their elastic quality. Poison had got hold of some as a child, nailed one end to the planking of a platform and pulled it out to see how far it would go. She was fascinated by how the leaf thinned as it became longer and longer, and finally, when she had pulled it too far, it snapped and sent her tumbling.

  It was as good an analogy as any for the sensation that had been growing in her all afternoon. Within an hour, the wraith-catcher’s slow-moving cart had carried her as far away from her home as she had ever been; by the time evening set in, the world had become unfamiliar. She felt her connection with Gull like that leaf of the clubroot tree, stretching thinner and thinner, straining harder and harder to pull her back as she got further away. She began to think of never seeing Fleet again, or her father, or even Snapdragon. She became acutely aware that she was utterly, totally alone now. If the wraith-catcher chose to throw her off his cart here, she had no bearing or direction. Home was behind her, and in her heart was a sudden and terrible ache, a longing that she had never imagined she could feel.

  Then, as dusk fell, the link snapped. Her grief and sorrow upended and became excitement. With the realization that there was no way back came the knowledge that the only way was forward. Wasn’t she free now? Hadn’t she begun what she had always dreamed of beginning? Wasn’t this the first step on the road out of Gull, and into the world of Fleet’s legends?

  “What are you grinning about?” Bram asked her. It was the first thing he had said for hours.

  Poison, who had not realized that she was grinning, shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I grin?”

  “People that grin usually have something to hide,” Bram grumped.

  “Oh, I most definitely have that,” she replied, widening her grin just to annoy him.

  As night came on, Bram brought them to a low hill where the soil was rocky and miraculously dry. The trees held back from the bald top of the hill, straggling round it in a circle, enough to obscure their view of the marshes but not enough to crowd them in.

  “Here’s where we stop for the night,” Bram said, drawing on the reins to bring the grint to a halt. It murmured some kind of purring chuckle low in its throat, obviously unhappy about the lack of greenery for it to crop.

  Bram made a fire from the wood that he had in his cart. Poison waited about nervously. She had never slept outside before. There were too many things that crawled and slithered, too many dangers in the marsh. Bram cast a glance at her from under his bushy white brows, then motioned with the stick he was prodding the fire with.

  “Sit down, girl, and stop acting like a squirrel. There’s nothing to be afraid of. The fire keeps them away.”

  Her fears were little eased, but she felt piqued that her nerves had shown through. She slung her pack before the fire and sat on it, wondering what a squirrel was but unwilling to admit her ignorance. The warmth on her face and hands seemed to have a new edge out here, in contrast to the fire in the hearth at home. Here, without walls to keep them safe, it was the only source of comfort against the night, and all the more precious for it.

  “I found this spot a while back,” Bram said, making a vague gesture with one gloved hand at the bare hilltop. “Something in the soil, don’t know what. Keeps it dry, keeps some of the slimier things away. I always stop here on my way from Gull. It’s one of the only habitable places in this disgusting marsh.”

  Poison didn’t know what to say to that.

  “Why is it that people live here?” he asked. She could not tell if he was talking to her or to himself.

  “I was born here,” Poison said simply. She reached into her pack and brought out a string of sausages, from which she snapped off four and then stuffed the others back.

  “Are they pork sausages?” Bram asked, peering across the fire at her.

  Poison shrugged. “Could be,” she replied. “I don’t know.”

  “Where did you get them?”

  “A friend gave them to me,” she replied. The same friend who had supplied her with everything in her pack: food, blankets, a knife, even a battered old map. The same friend who had told her that the wraith-catcher’s next port of call would be Shieldtown, and given her the name of a man who could help her there. The same friend who had promised to shoulder the burden of taking the changeling back to her grieving father, of explaining what had happened and where Poison had gone; because Poison knew that if she had to break Hew’s heart that way, to tell him that he had lost one daughter and was now losing another, then she would never have had the courage to leave. If ever she had doubts about Fleet’s stories before, she had shed them now. He was a genuine adventurer, and a true friend. The only one she had.

  “I have an eyefish that I caught only the day before yesterday,” Bram said. “I’d be happy to trade you the whole thing for those four sausages.”

  Poison gave him a look. “I’ve never tried pork.”

  “But you like eyefish, hmm? Everyone in the marsh likes eyefish.”

  “But I’ve never tried pork,” Poison said, more emphatically this time. Bram’s obvious hunger for the sausages only made her more determined to keep them.

  “I am taking you all the way to Shieldtown, you know,” he reminded her.

  “And I’m paying you more than the trip is worth,” she replied implacably. At least, that was what Fleet had assured her when he gave her the coin, and many more besides.

  Bram grumped for a while as they cooked their food. He had produced a blackened metal grill that stood on thin legs over the flames, and cut strips of eyefish to put on it. Poison put her sausages on as well. She had no idea how long to cook them for, but she had a reasonably keen instinct for that sort of thing and was not overly worried.

  “Is it a good life, being a wraith-catcher?” she asked suddenly.

  “Good as any, I suppose,” he replied. He shifted his bulk in the firelight, and was silent for a time before deciding to continue. “Lonely, though. Always going from one place to the next, never staying long. I see other wraith-catchers from time to time . . . we cross paths . . . but we’re a pretty solitary breed. You have to be.”

  Poison nodded. She understood that. She glanced over at the cart, where the grint was asleep, still tethered to his load of metal jars.

  “Do you suppose they’re alive? The marshwraiths?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Do they think and feel like we do?”

  Bram peeled a strip of eyefish off the grill and laid it down on its uncooked side. “You ask a lot of questions, girl.”

  “Only about things I don’t know,” she replied.

  Bram barked a laugh. “I’ve never thought about it,” he mused. “Maybe they’re just mindless flashes of light. Maybe they’re like fireflies. Or maybe they’re phaerie things. It’s all the same to me.”

  “You think they might be phaeries?” Poison asked.

  “Here, you’ll burn them,” Bram said, rolling her sausages over with the end of a stick to expose the browning undersides. “If they’re phaeries, then so much the better. I’d feel less guilt about caging a phaerie than I ever would an insect. You know, of all the things crawling around in the Realms, they’re the worst.”

  “What’s it like? Out there?”

  “You mean beyond the marsh?” Bram asked. “Better than here, anyway.”

  Poison felt a strange thrill. She had never heard anyone say that about the world beyond the marsh. Not even Fleet, who spoke of all kinds of wonders and dangers, ever said that the world outside was better.

  “There are places you don’t go, of course,” he said. “The old cities. . . The phaeries are all over them. And there’s ghoblin tribes here and there, up in the mountains, and trolls and dwarrow in the deep places. You know, this used to be Man’s Realm, so
they say. The other things kept to their own Realms. Not been that way for a long time, though. One thing you can say about us humans, we never did know how to stick together.” He looked out at the dark wall of the marsh, which was alive with insect noises. “But we weren’t meant to live in places like this. Man was meant to rule the plains and the hills and the valleys, not skulk in the forests and marshes and hide in the mountains.” His eyes returned to the fire. “That’s the way it is, I suppose.”

  Poison did not reply to that. Instead, she said: “Do you want a sausage? I think four is too many for me anyway.”

  She lay awake for a long time by the fire, listening to Bram snore inside his blankets and jumping at every sound in the night. Small insects flitted around the glow of the blaze, and things shuffled and cracked twigs in the trees that surrounded the bare clearing. The discomfort of the floor did not bother her; it was the fear of the small, venomous things that infested the marsh that kept her awake. She marvelled at how Bram could be so careless.

  She cried a little, after she was sure Bram was asleep. She could not help imagining her father’s face as Fleet broke the tragic news to him. He had not been up when she returned from Fleet’s hut to gather her belongings, nor had she seen Snapdragon. She suspected, knowing her stepmother, that she had slipped back into bed with him and would pretend she had slept soundly all night. Hew was always a deep sleeper; if he had slept through Snapdragon’s hysterical scream on discovering the changeling, he would not have woken when she slid under the blanket with him.

  More than anything, she regretted not leaving him a note or a message. The guilt she felt at the cowardly way she had slipped out of the village was bad enough; even though she was afraid that seeing him might change her mind and make her stay, he deserved better than to hear about his daughters’ fate from a virtual stranger. But if only she had thought to leave him some words of comfort, something to let him know she was not deserting him, only leaving him for a time.

  Too late now. She could see him weeping, trying to find meaning in what had happened as Fleet stood glumly by. Taken why? Gone where? Coming back when? She pictured Snapdragon trying to comfort him, all the while knowing that she could not tell him the truth just as Poison could not, secretly glad that the violet-eyed girl was out of their lives. Hew had lost two of his daughters at a stroke; but worse was the knowledge that the phaeries had one of them, that they had left a monstrosity in her place, and now he and his wife would have to care for it if they wanted to keep alive any hope of seeing their daughters again.

  But that was the way of things in the Black Marshes.

  Eventually, Poison got up from the fire and went to the cart. Beneath the tarpaulin was a space where Bram kept travelling supplies and food. She lifted them out and dumped them by the fire, then crawled with her blanket into the gap where they had been and pulled the tarpaulin over her. The metal jars clanked about as she wrapped herself up, but soon she had fashioned herself a warm, cramped cocoon, and she fell asleep to the soughing of the grint’s breath and the faint whispering of the marshwraiths as they darted about inside their prisons.

  Poison lost count of the days remarkably fast as she travelled with Bram. It was only by the most intense calculation that she worked out that it had been a week since Azalea had been taken by the Scarecrow. A week that had passed at the plodding tempo of the grint’s webbed feet slapping in the mud, broken only occasionally by stops to camp or when the cart became stuck and they had to lever it out. She thought about Azalea, what she must be going through, but she found that she could not even speculate. She knew nothing of the ways of the phaeries. All the legends and stories of changelings made no mention of what happened to the children that were taken.

  And though it gave her a guilty feeling to think it, she was enjoying herself.

  Oh, it was hard and uncomfortable, that was for sure. The midges and flies bit them during the day, and every morning she woke up stiff from another cramped night curled up in the cart. Bram never made any mention of the way he found his travelling gear in a neat pile on the ground every day, but he never stopped putting it back in the same place, and Poison never stopped unpacking it to make space for herself under the tarpaulin. Last night it had rained hard, and she had heard him cursing as he flailed around the campsite, trying to find shelter for the packs and blankets she had displaced; he had pulled back the tarp that she lay under and glowered down on her, water drooling from the brim of his hat.

  “My supplies are getting wet!” he blustered.

  “So am I, now,” she said sleepily. “How’s the floor, by the way?”

  He huffed indignantly and threw the tarp back over her. She never did find out how he kept them dry, but she heard him rummaging around at the other end of the cart and presumed he’d taken out his tent and replaced it with the supplies. She didn’t care; at least she was dry. One for the marsh folk, she thought mischievously as she fell asleep.

  And yet all the discomfort could not sour the pride and excitement in her breast, for she was really away: away from Gull, away from Snapdragon and the villagers who disdained her; and soon, away from the Black Marshes. She tried to keep her feet on the ground, but she could not resist spinning off into heady fantasies of witches and trolls, strong heroes and quick-witted heroines.

  Silly girl, she told herself. They’re just stories. But somehow, she never quite believed it.

  And Bram was good company for her as well. He was a taciturn fellow, but he was perfectly willing to answer questions that Poison asked him. Her interest in what she called the “outside world” was insatiable, and she listened attentively to even his most mundane anecdotes. But while he talked long about places he’d been and people he’d met, he never asked questions of her – perhaps because he wasn’t interested, perhaps because he was being polite – and that suited her fine. And he was good man, she decided. Gruff and solitary, but honest and decent. She was not so naïve that she had never thought what might happen between a man of his size and a young girl, in the depths of the marshes where nobody could help her. Bram had never made her feel threatened that way.

  It was midday, and uncharacteristically sunny, when Bram announced they would be coming into sight of Shieldtown any moment. Poison felt her heart leap and craned forward in the seat, peering at the trees ahead. They had been thinning out all day, and the ground was firm enough to be almost called a road now. She waited eagerly, with Bram stealing amused glances at her out of the corner of his eye. The cart wheels creaked on.

  Finally Bram could stand it no longer. “You’ll fall off your seat if you lean any more, girl.”

  “Where is it?” she demanded, still staring furiously at the unyielding trees ahead.

  He tapped her shoulder and she glared at him irritably. He gave her a wink and then pointed with a stubby, gloved finger.

  “You didn’t look up,” he said.

  She did so, raising her gaze to the canopy where the trees meshed their branches overhead, and she took a sharp breath in amazement as she laid eyes for the first time on Shieldtown.

  It was at that moment, more than any, that Poison realized the true scale of things.

  Her entire life had been spent below the canopy of the Black Marshes, her vision hemmed in by the dank leaves overhead so that she never got to witness the full expanse of the sky. The marshes were flat, too, and hills such as the one that she and Bram had camped on that first night were rare. There were few vantage points from which an observer could gaze out over the tops of the trees and see the sprawling immensity of their surroundings, and Poison had not been to any of them.

  And now, suddenly, she saw this.

  The trees peeled back, cut away in a wide semicircular clearing, and towering above them was the most immense wall that Poison had ever seen. It stretched up so high that Poison had to tip her head back to the point of dizziness just to see the top. To either side it seemed to go on for
ever until it was lost behind a curve or a fold in its vast length. Its surface was dark rock, jagged and pleated by the ravages of millenia of weathering, pocked and scabbed with bumps and ruts. This was no man-made wall, but the implacable strength of nature. The land – all the land – rose by a thousand feet or more. It was as if she had lived her whole life on one stair of a stairway, and had just come to the base of the next one up.

  To say that she was staggered was an under-statement.

  “Something of a wake-up, eh, girl?” Bram grinned, unable to conceal the relish in his voice at the sight of his precocious companion stunned to silence.

  She could see very little of Shieldtown itself, for the angle was too steep. What she could see were the enormous elevators that winched up and down the wall, disappearing into steaming buildings of metal as they reached the ground before emerging again to ascend up to the dizzying heights. There, she could see a fringe of exotic buildings crowding over the edge of the precipice, some of them leaning dangerously or projecting cranes out into the air: tantalizing glimpses of the wonders of the town to come.

  Bram nudged her. “Put your jaw back together,” he said. “You look like a snake trying to swallow an egg.”

  She cast him an irritated glance, embarrassed at being caught gawping. They were heading across the clearing now, towards the cluster of buildings at the base of the wall. Other carts were there, as well as foot-travellers in all kinds of attire, watched over by helmeted guards with long, hooked swords hanging from their belts.

  Poison gathered herself a little, annoyed that she had betrayed her naïvety by her reaction. If the world was as frightening and cruel as Fleet had warned her, then she could not afford to let anyone know how little she knew of it. She suddenly felt like a small child again, consumed by wonder and frightened of the unknown.

  Bram brushed his bushy moustache with one gloved finger and harumphed. “They call it Shieldtown because of that great big wall there. It’s called a shield wall, when the land rises sheer like that. You know, the Black Marshes are completely surrounded by this wall. It’s like a great big section of the world, hundreds of miles wide, just suddenly dropped a thousand feet. The marshes are below sea level now; that’s why they’re always wet.”