Poison

by Chris Wooding

  Poison struggled to raise her head. There was noise all around her now, a terrible clamour, a roaring in her ears and a crashing from outside. She saw Pariasa kneel down before her, almost a skeleton now, crystal tears falling from her alien eyes. She laid her hands on Poison’s side, and on her stomach. Then the trolls were there, Grugaroth looming into the room like a thunderhead. He was saying something, but she could not understand, and she felt lighter than a feather as she floated up into blackness.

  Lantern light filtered through her lashes in dim polygons.

  Other sensations followed, like colour washes on a painting. Awareness, memory, pain. But the pain was more of an ache now. She could feel the heavy folds of a thick blanket on the skin of her arm. She was too weary to open her eyes fully, though she could tell that there were others in the room with her. She was alive. That was enough for now. At some point, she slept again.

  This time, when she woke, her eyes flickered open involuntarily. She was in a small room, dark and close, the black stone walls leaning in. Lanterns stirred in their brackets. A distant storm pounded the castle. Someone was next to her; she could tell by his breathing that it was Bram. She moved her head, wincing as her bandaged ribs twinged. He was sitting there, still wearing the same hide clothes he had been when she first saw him in Gull, the same wide-brimmed hat and thick gloves. He was leaning slightly forward in his chair, his head bowed, asleep.

  She smiled fondly, watching him for a while. The cantankerous old bear had dozed off at his post. Feeling safer than she had in a long time, she decided to join him in oblivion.

  The third time she woke, there was the weight of a cat on her chest. She opened her eyes and saw Andersen there, curled into a black muff on top of the blankets. He raised his head, sensing she was awake, and blinked green eyes at her; then he gave her a miaow of welcome. Peppercorn was there in an instant, crying with joy and typically working herself into a fluster. Poison endured it indulgently. It was just her way.

  She gathered strength rapidly under the ministrations of her friends and those Antiquarians that were well versed in the healing lore. They told her that her survival was due to Pariasa more than anyone; she had used her phaerie magick to undo much of the damage that Scriddle had done. But it was a close call, nonetheless. It was easy to guess that none of them remembered the way their world had begun to fall apart as Scriddle stabbed her; like the first time, it had fled their minds in the way of all things that a person wishes not to know. She was content to let it be.

  Despite the aches and pains and weakness, it was a happy time. Poison enjoyed the company of Fleet, Peppercorn, Andersen and Bram as she recovered. Never before had they been together simply for the fact of being together; there had always been a purpose, a quest, something urgent pushing them on or a danger to be avoided. Now, it was just them, and Poison felt again that sensation of belonging that had always eluded her in her childhood, this time unsullied by complications. Sleep sometimes brought nightmares of Scriddle, stabbing her again and again; but wakefulness was a better time than she had ever remembered, and she felt it was precious.

  Fleet told her the whole story when she was strong enough to sit up in bed and drink soup; but there was not much to tell that she had not already learned. He recounted how Grugaroth and the trolls had heard Pariasa’s scream and overwhelmed the elven guards, arriving in time to raise the alarm. Pariasa herself had disappeared in the clamour, and had not been seen since. Melcheron’s book had been found in Scriddle’s chambers by the Antiquarians, though it was a hard search, and if they had not known it was there then they never would have managed to dig it from concealment. Its contents were a closely guarded secret, but Fleet knew; she could tell by the new look in his eyes. Admiration. Expectation. Hope. She didn’t want to deal with those things right now. She didn’t even know how to be Hierophant, let alone whether she wanted to be. It was the one dark cloud over her.

  No, that was not strictly true. There was another. Azalea.

  Her sister was lost to her.

  Poison had sent one of the Antiquarians to Gull to determine what had become of her father and stepmother, and to find her sister. When the report came back, it was much as she had expected and dreaded, for she was learning to accommodate the irregular flow of time between the worlds. The Realm of Man had moved on without her. The Antiquarian made his subtle enquiries and returned. He never did tell Hew or Snapdragon about their daughter Poison, that she was still alive and well. Poison had asked him not to. Better that the old wounds stayed closed.

  Azalea did indeed come back to Gull, arriving there almost exactly two weeks after she had disappeared and Poison had gone after her. There was no question made of accepting her, even though she had been snatched as a toddler and returned as an adolescent. Who knew the ways of phaeries? All they knew was that she was back, and the changeling was gone. The whole village celebrated. They thanked fortune for the mercy of returning this child to them, never once thinking to curse it for taking her away in the first place and stealing so many years of her life. They looked on the bright side of tragedy. That was the way in the Black Marshes.

  Hew had grieved for his daughter Poison for many years, cherishing the hope that she might one day come back to him as his youngest daughter had, treasuring the last message that she had given Azalea, who now realized who it was that she had met on that day in Shieldtown. But Poison never came home, and the years went by, and sorrow can only last for so long before it must be shed or it will consume the sorrower.

  All the time Snapdragon was there to support him. With Poison gone, theirs was a harmonious home once again, and she made him a good spouse. Hew’s love for his wife deepened, overcoming that which he had felt for Poison and Azalea’s mother Faraway, and in time she bore him two boy-children. Hew and Snapdragon never left Gull, and they were old now, having lived a long and happy life together.

  Azalea, though: she could never forget that moment when she and her elder sister had come face to face. She could not stop thinking how Poison had gone out into the world looking for her, and how she might still be looking now, fruitlessly, never knowing that the object of her search was back at the place where she had started. And she, like Poison, had some of the Old Blood in her, as Fleet would say. So she left Gull on her twentieth birthday, and set off in search of her sister, who had set off in search of her in the same way, many years before. That was the last anyone had seen of her. She could be wandering still.

  Time passed, though whether days or weeks Poison could not tell. Fleet kept her busy by teaching her some of the responsibilities of the post she had been appointed to. Poison was reluctant at first. She had not even considered whether she wanted to be Hierophant yet. But the pain of loss was unbearable, and she needed something to take her mind from Azalea.

  She threw herself into her studies. If this whole tale had been some convoluted test of her worthiness, then she had passed it with flying colours; but the Hierophant had not counted on his own murder, and so she was still unprepared in the academic arts. Now that she responded to Fleet’s lessons, he found her an incredibly adept pupil.

  “For that is why only humans can become Hierophants,” he told her. “We may seem the weakest and most insignificant of all the Realms, but our strength comes in other ways. We have what no other race has: imagination. Any one of us, even the lowliest, can create worlds within ourselves; we can people them with the most extraordinary creatures, the most amazing inventions, the most incredible things. We can live in those worlds ourselves, if we choose; and in our own worlds, we can be as we want to be. Imagination is as close as we will ever be to godhead, Poison; for in imagination, we can create wonders.”

  He was right. All those stories, all the tests that she had been through on her way here – Lamprey, the Bone Witch, Asinastra, Aelthar and Scriddle – they had shown that she had the mettle to be what she was appointed to be. Imagination was in her blood; but she
needed to learn how to craft it.

  The days and weeks that followed were good ones. Poison divided her time between her schooling and spending time with her friends. The storm-lashed castle was hers, at least in the eyes of its occupants, and though she resisted, she found herself thinking of it more and more as home. The black stone corridors became familiar to her; the labyrinth of books that was the Great Library grew comforting; the rugs and hearth of her chambers (for she was given Melcheron’s rooms, as was the tradition) were a welcome sanctuary. She dressed now in robes of purple and white, for there was no more need for the tough, practical clothes of the marsh. As she mastered her studies, she became more and more confident; and with that confidence came a lessening of the fear she had felt at becoming Hierophant. Though she knew that there was nobody else to take her place, that if she refused the appointment then a free-for-all would ensue between the other Lords and Ladies, she had always told herself that she could say no whenever she chose. She put off the decision as long as possible. Though there might be no guarantee that the new Hierophant would not be as bad as Scriddle if she turned down the post, she would not allow herself to be forced unwillingly into something she did not want to do, whatever the consequences.

  But time has a way of stealthily deciding a person’s mind without their conscious knowledge, and as she studied and procrastinated, she found one day that she had come to know her choice. She had allowed everyone to assume she would become Hierophant while secretly reserving her right to refuse; now, suddenly, she realized that she, too, assumed she would become Hierophant. The role had settled on her shoulders like a cloak, and it fitted perfectly. The decision was made.

  Bram left them soon after. Poison begged him to stay with her, to live in the castle, and he harumphed and blushed and muttered his apologies, but he was adamant.

  “Wouldn’t be anything for me to do here,” he said. “I’m a simple man, Poison. I’ve no place around all these books. I earned myself three silver sovereigns – a long time ago, it seems – and I’m going to spend them. A house in the mountains, with nobody else around, where I can keep myself to myself. I’ve done my bit, I think; time to claim my reward.”

  Poison forced a sad smile. “Four sovereigns,” she said. “I offered you another if you came into Maeb’s house after me, remember? You refused then, but you still came. I owe you that one.”

  “Four sovereigns,” Bram said proudly, twirling the end of his moustache. “I’ll not need to do a day’s work again.”

  “I wish you weren’t going, Bram,” Poison said, hugging him.

  He hugged her back, and for the first time he did not seem awkward doing so. “The time has come,” he said. “You don’t need an old man like me around any more.”

  “There’ll be such a tale about you, Bram,” she promised. “I’ll write it myself.”

  Bram’s eyes misted then, and he looked almost on the verge of tears. “You take care, girl,” he said, and he left her then, never to return.

  Peppercorn was inconsolable for a time after Bram departed, but as was her habit, her mood switched overnight on the third day and she shed her grief and was once again happy and flighty. She and Andersen had elected to stay with Poison, there in the castle. Poison was glad of it. She would rather have Peppercorn where she could see her.

  It was Peppercorn who was her true solace in all of this. For though Poison’s sister was gone, lost in the wilds of the world, Poison was not entirely alone. She remembered with shame how she had been willing to leave Peppercorn in the Bone Witch’s house, and how it was only Bram’s sense of honour and good-heartedness that had persuaded her to let Peppercorn come. Poison had gradually been becoming Peppercorn’s surrogate older sister ever since. Peppercorn was as close to her as her family . . . closer, in fact, since she had always been somewhat alienated from her parents, and she had never really known Azalea. Peppercorn needed someone to look after her, and Poison needed someone to look after; unwittingly, the two of them had formed a bond, and in the days after Poison discovered Azalea was lost, it strengthened further. In the search for one sister, Poison had accidentally found another: for she thought of Peppercorn as a sister in all but blood now. In losing Azalea, she had gained Peppercorn. Perhaps, in the eyes of some, it was a fair trade.

  There was joy and sadness, but all too soon Poison found herself in the place that she had so long dreaded to go. Melcheron’s chambers had become hers, but she had never set foot in the largest of them until now. That one held too many bad memories. It was the one in which she had first met him, in which he had shattered her illusions of life in a few short sentences, and in which he had been murdered by Pariasa.

  She went to his desk, where they had found the last Hierophant slumped with Asinastra’s knife in his back. She took a seat, and she looked down at the blank tome lying open before her. It had not been moved; nobody had dared touch it. Rain pounded the circular windows behind her. A fire crackled in the hearth. She held the quill pen in one hand, having dipped it in the waterlike, transparent liquid that Melcheron had been using for ink.

  She sat there for hours. Where should she start? What should she do? How could she begin to finish what Melcheron had begun, when she did not know how he had begun it, or where he had got to when he died?

  But he was writing my tale, she said. And who knows my tale better than me?

  She turned the pages of the tome, each one blank and empty, until she reached the very first page.

  No tale can be read until it is finished, she remembered. The Hierophant thought that he was writing the tale of how his new apprentice had been plucked from the obscurity of the Black Marshes, how she had fought her way through adversity to reach him at the castle. Perhaps, in his mind, the rest of the story had been her training and finally her succession to the post of Hierophant. But the story had changed. He had been murdered. And while the point of the tale was essentially the same, it was now going to be told in her way. For it had always been her tale, after all, and now it was ended, it had to be recorded.

  She began to write.

  Once upon a time there was a young lady who lived in a marsh, and her name was Poison.

  Though she could not see the words, she knew they were there as clearly as if she could read them off the page. It seemed as good a beginning as any. She put the quill to the paper again, and the words came to her, flooding in almost as fast as she could transfer them to the page. It was as if the book had already been written, and she was merely tracing over sentences that were already there. It felt so natural, so easy, that a fierce grin spread across her face, and she hunched over the page, writing with a steadily growing fever.

  She wrote, and wrote, and wrote. She remembered Fleet bringing her food and drink, which she took with one hand so that she did not have to slow down the torrent of words that gushed from her mind to the nib of the quill and on to the paper. Fleet never said anything, unwilling to disturb her. Though she learned later that she had been writing for the equivalent of two days and nights without a break, it felt like only moments to her. What Melcheron had started, she had restarted; and when she turned the last leaf of the book, she realized with a shock that she was on her final few sentences. The amount of pages in the tome fitted her words exactly.

  And so her tale came to an end. With its completion, it would be made legible for all. But it was only her first tale; that much she knew. What had Fleet said, back in the Great Library? Some people have many tales. Finishing this story was only the beginning. With the completion of this work, she would truly become the new Hierophant, and there was much to be done. The Realm of Man was still overrun by phaeries; humans still skulked in the low places and high peaks of the world, fearing to tread in their own land. All that would change. She would write them the tale of a leader, someone to take back what was theirs. Someone to make her race proud again. This was what Aelthar had feared; this was what she would do.

&
nbsp; When the last words of the tale were written, she finished with a flourish, and as the final stroke was made, the words on the page emerged into being. The invisible lines of her quill turned black, and the story showed itself. She looked over what she had done, and sighed. So much had passed, and it had come to this. In the sentences and paragraphs of that tome were her sorrow, her triumph, her heart. She had trapped them all inside those bindings. Was she, too, trapped inside some greater bindings, written by another, greater Hierophant? And were they trapped also in that way, and so on, into infinity?

  Perhaps. Perhaps not. All she could do was deal with the reality that was presented to her. And she had much to do.

  Slowly, she closed the tome, and looked down at its embossed cover. There was a title there, where there had not been one before. She felt a smile tug her lips. A single word: Poison.

  It would suffice.

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  First published in the UK by Scholastic Ltd, 2003

  This electronic edition published by Scholastic Ltd, 2014

  Text copyright © Chris Wooding, 2003

  The right of Chris Wooding to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him.

  eISBN 978 1407 14388 0

  A CIP catalogue record for this work is available from the British Library.

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