Poison

“ARE YOU SURE THIS is the right way, Rosie? Absolutely sure?”

Rosie grunted good-naturedly and kept going. So much for solidarity.

“Because you seem to be taking us toward Wexford, and I’d really rather go pretty much anywhere else but there.”

Wexford. The capital city with the beautiful and impregnable palace on the hill. Where Kyra had served the princess. And from which Kyra had moved away as soon as she’d graduated from her apprenticeship—both to start the Master Trio and to get away from the prying eyes of people like the Duchess Genria. And to which Kyra had returned in order to kill the princess.

The sun had only just cleared the tops of the trees when Kyra heard the long-legged lope and shuffling sound that could only be one person. And his dog.

She should have walked faster.

Kyra waited until they turned up on the path. “Why are you following me?”

“And I would want to follow you because…?” Fred’s lips were tight and one eyebrow was arched. “I wanted to hang out in a ‘friendly sort of way’? To get ditched again? Hmmm… No, I don’t think so.” His cheeks were flushed with anger. “You know, Kitty, it may not have occurred to you, but there are plenty of women who’d enjoy spending time with me. I appreciate your saving my life and all—”

“I didn’t—”

“Of course you didn’t.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Why would you save someone you wouldn’t even bother saying good-bye to?”

Kyra shrugged and looked at her feet.

“As it happens, Langley and I are going to Wexford for supplies. It seems as though you’re heading in the same direction.”

For a second, there seemed to be genuine hurt in his eyes. Then it disappeared and he reached into one of his jacket pockets.

“And this…” Fred picked up her hand and turned it palm up. One by one, he dropped her coins into it. The coins made a steady cling, cling, cling as they fell. “I don’t even know where to start. You don’t know the first thing about people or friendship.” He held her hand for a moment, staring her down with his green-gold eyes. “Believe me, I’m not following you.”

And then he left her there.

Tears—something she hadn’t experienced in a long time—pricked her eyes. How had she’d managed to smash the good nature out of the happiest person she’d ever met?

Suddenly Kyra was running after him. “Fred!”

Rosie kept pace, and they both skidded to a halt when they caught up to him. “I’m sorry. I’ve been a jerk. Can we start over?”

“Why?”

“Because…” Kyra realized she had little to nothing to recommend herself. “I know a great song about a man who falls in love with a songbird?”

“Really?”

“No.”

Fred ducked his head, but Kyra thought she saw the ghost of a grin, and he didn’t move away when she started walking by his side.

“But I do know some dirty jokes,” she said. She had no idea why she wanted him to like her. It was insane. She had more important things to worry about. But she never wanted him to look at her again the way he had earlier. It made her…uncomfortable.

Gods, was she really that lonely?

It wasn’t just Fred’s stunning features, or the tight muscles across his stomach she glimpsed when his shirt rode up. She knew better than to get mixed up with good-looking men, and Fred was undeniably that. But he was so much more. When he wasn’t being completely infuriating (and sometimes even when he was), he radiated joy like a beam of light. She caught just a tiny bit of that warmth when she was with him.

She wasn’t sure she deserved to feel that warmth. But she craved it all the same.

“Well, then,” he said, smiling again, “I suppose you can keep us company a while longer. Langley likes dirty jokes, don’t you, boy?”

And just like that she was forgiven.

They walked, and Kyra tried to suppress the knowledge that she would have to abandon Fred again. Sometime very soon. As soon as he met anyone else in the kingdom, he’d hear about the Princess Killer. She hoped somehow that he wouldn’t make the connection to her.

“Okay, that one’s pretty good,” Fred acknowledged, after she’d told him a particularly filthy joke. “But have you heard the one about the baker’s wife?”

“No,” Kyra said.

“Rumor has it, she married him for his buns.” Fred burst out laughing.

Kyra groaned. “Okay, that was just bad.”

Up ahead, Rosie was happily snuffling along the forest floor, pausing every now and then to make moony eyes at Langley. Kyra might have been suspicious of the pig’s duty to the job at hand, but Rosie’s nose was still at work between glances at the big dog.

“So,” Kyra said, trying to sound casual, “does your dad work with potioners in his perfume business?”

Fred shook his head. “Where I come from, perfume is strictly to make things smell nice. The Perfumers Guild doesn’t allow any potioners.”

“What business is it of the guild’s? Why do they care?”

“That’s just the rule.”

“That’s exactly what’s wrong with guilds. They think they can control everything. I don’t know how it is where you come from, but here the king isn’t just head of the army, he’s also the head of all the guilds. If he doesn’t like something, then he bans it for everyone. But the king isn’t trained in everything, so how can he know what’s best?”

“Whoa,” Fred said, glancing around nervously, “you might want to keep the anti-royalist sentiment down. People can lose their heads for criticizing the king.”

“I’m not criticizing the king. I was just commenting on the guilds. They really just want to control everything you produce and bully everyone. I would never join the guild!”

“Dairymaids have a guild?” Fred was looking at her curiously.

Kyra opened her mouth to argue that of course there was a Dairymaid Guild, even though really she had no idea, but realized that she couldn’t move.

She was frozen in her tracks, her mouth stuck open with her retort.

And by the unusual silence coming from Fred’s direction, he must have been, too.

A cackling laugh came from behind them.

“What do we have here?” an old lady said in a rubbing-her-hands-together-with-glee tone of voice. “Never know what my sticky traps are going to bring me.”

A witch.

It had to be. The freeze wasn’t any kind of potion magic that Kyra knew.

Kyra really, really didn’t like witches.

The witch moved closer, her footsteps slow.

“Now, this one is really quite handsome,” the old lady said. “I’m going to free up your legs, and you’re going to follow me. I wouldn’t suggest making a run for it.” She chortled. “Or do—it’s always such fun to have a challenge.”

A sound of footsteps walking away. Kyra had the urge to shudder, but the spell kept her frozen in place. It was like she had a solid wood veneer over the surface of her skin.

At least she was still breathing. A breeze pushed Kyra’s hair across her face and into her eyes. Mosquitoes buzzed by her ears. She felt them land on her and bite.

What was taking so long?

She could feel Rosie’s leash in her hand but couldn’t see her. She hoped the pig wasn’t panicking. Yes, she was just a pig, but Kyra figured it had to be scary to not understand why suddenly you couldn’t move.

When Kyra thought she couldn’t stand it for one more minute, she heard the puttering footsteps come back. An extremely old woman with the look of an ancient bird of prey came into view and yanked the leash out of her frozen fingers. Then she reached down to pick up Rosie.

“The same goes for you. I’ll free your legs, but only so you can follow me.”

A pressure disappeared on Kyra’s lower half.

“This way.”

Kyra followed, considering her options. She had no idea how to unfreeze her upper body. She didn’t know that much about witches’ magic—only that it was bound up with the witch’s will. Possibly the witch would either have to lose interest or die before the spell would evaporate.

They approached an old tumbledown cottage, weeds growing up all around it and multicolored glass baubles spinning from the trees. It smelled like…herbs, fresh-picked, but with an undertone of something else, something powerful and scary.

She spied Fred as the witch led her into the small dark house. He was sitting at a rough-hewn table, a kitchen fire behind him casting him in silhouette. As Kyra drew closer, the dim light from the one small kitchen window revealed that Fred’s face was stuck in a skeptical reaction to what she had been saying.

The witch pushed down on Kyra’s shoulders until she was seated just around the table from Fred. “I have need of workers…but first we’ll have to run some tests.”

She set a battered leather toolbox on the table. Opening the lid, the witch pulled out a long thin piece of metal with a wicked-looking point, which she proceeded to poke into each of their index fingers. She scooped the bubbles of blood onto a small glass tray and studied them.

“Healthy, anyway.”

This was ridiculous. Just unfreeze us so we can kick your butt and go, Kyra thought. There was no future in which Kyra was going to be this woman’s slave.

Another silver instrument appeared in the witch’s hands, this one a glass tube with a colored bead inside, which changed hue as she tapped Fred’s and Kyra’s temples with it. She grunted. “Troublemakers, though.

“And finally…” Out came a flat glass disk.

Kyra’s stomach would have clenched if she’d had control over that part of her body. She knew what this was, and she sincerely wished she were anywhere but here.

She watched the witch peer through the disk somewhere in the direction of Fred’s midsection. “Completely clean. Still, you might do as a woodcutter or something. And you are awfully nice to look at.” Her smile sent a chill through the unfrozen parts of Kyra.

Then it was Kyra’s turn. The witch squinted at Kyra’s midsection. “Well…what a nice surprise: a spark.”

The woman’s beaky nose thrust into Kyra’s face, her penetrating gray eyes staring into Kyra’s own. “You’ve got the witch’s spark…but you haven’t kindled it at all. Tried to stomp it out, more like. Used your magic, what, once? Twice, maybe? Why would you ignore a gift like that?”

Abruptly, Kyra was freed from the neck up. Her open mouth closed, and she squinted her eyes shut as hard as she could. If only she could open them and find something other than a nasty old witch.

No such luck.

“I’m waiting for an answer.” The witch was only inches away.

“I’m not going to become a witch.”

“Witches are born, not made. And it’s too late for you. You are what you are.”

Kyra winced. She was NOT a witch. She’d never asked to be born with the stupid spark of witchcraft inside her, and she’d never encouraged it. The few times her gift had unwillingly come to her had been complete and total disasters. Kyra was a potioner—practitioner of a logical science, one with rules and structure. When you followed the recipe, things turned out right.

“Are you going to tell me what your specialty is, or am I going to have to force it out of you?” The witch eyed her grimly.

“Generalist.” No way was Kyra going to tell this witch that she had the Sight.

“Oh, I don’t believe that. Generalists don’t get scared off and ignore their gifts.”

Kyra would have shrugged if she could, but all she could move was her head. She turned and saw that Rosie and Langley were unfrozen, but sat huddled and terrified near the door.

Why don’t I start with slicing off this boy’s ear here?” The witch looked at Fred. “He certainly doesn’t need both of them to take orders from me.”

She picked a knife out of her toolbox.

“I’m a Seer,” Kyra said quickly; and added a lie. “But I’ve only had one vision.”

“Such a useful skill!” The witch lowered her knife. “Why hide from it?”

Kyra looked back defiantly, saying nothing. She’d been five years old when she’d had her first vision: a murdered woman and child being set on fire in their kitchen. Horrifying. Even at five she’d known it was a true vision, and knew there was no way she could help them.

“You could do so much.” The witch narrowed her eyes. “Will do so much now that you belong to me. Though”—she raised the glass disk again, her eyes boring into Kyra—“you’ve been touched by an obeeka.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“You wouldn’t. Obeekas are extremely rare.” The old crone pursed her lips. “Anyone or anything around you make you feel unsettled lately? Weak, clumsy, or dimmer than usual?”

Kyra couldn’t help but think of Fred. Supernatural powers would explain a lot about why she was so flustered around him. Then she thought back further to Arlo and his creepy black-eyed minions. And further back still to the vision that had set her on this path: a creative lording over a destroyed kingdom. “Everything has me unsettled lately,” she answered at last.

“No matter,” the witch said. “If there’s an obeeka after you, we’ll deal with it when the time comes. Now, let’s get the matter of ownership settled and make your slave status official.”

The witch pointed at Fred and said a small charm. “You, go get me a piece of paper and a quill from my writing desk.”

Fred mechanically rose and fetched the paper and pen. The witch took both, sat beside Kyra, and started writing up a document. Sweat trickled down Kyra’s back.

Over the old woman’s shoulder, Kyra glared at Fred. He shrugged and raised his eyebrows.

Kyra carefully mouthed, stressing each syllable, Do. Some. Thing.

Fred looked at a complete loss. He mouthed back, Like what? and put his hands up questioningly.

Hit. Her. Kyra nodded her head forcefully at the witch’s head, in case he didn’t get it.

The witch looked up, directly at Kyra. “Having a twitch, dear?”

“Stiff neck.”

“That’ll happen with a freeze spell. Speaking of which…” She pointed over her shoulder at Fred and muttered, and his body immediately refroze, leaving only his face mobile.

The witch went back to work.

Kyra rolled her eyes in frustration.

The old woman leaned back. “Done! Now, you just need to put your mark here and we’ll be all set. I’m going to release you so you can use your hands.” She spoke the words to undo the spell, and Kyra prepared to slap the poison cells on her pants.

But before she could act, Fred said, “You can’t bind her.”

“Oh, I most certainly can. That’s what we do here, dear. I’ll be doing you next.”

“We’re married.”

“What?” The witch hissed and spat on the floor.

Kyra had to admit, it was a smart move on Fred’s part. Marriages involved complicated magic so that the groom and bride belonged not only to each other but to the land as well. There was no more powerful spell than a Nuptial Bond.

“A fully binding marriage agreement?” The look of shock on the witch’s face was replaced by suspicion. “Neither of you wear rings.”

“We were too poor,” Kyra said. “I got this.” She pulled out her necklace. It glowed in the dim light of the cottage.

“And I got a pocket watch.” Fred looked at the witch hopefully, and when she released him, he pulled a shiny pocket watch out of his pants. “To remind me to come home to dinner on time,” he said, grinning.

Only Fred would feel that now was the time to joke. Kyra prayed the witch would let them go and they wouldn’t have to fight her. She was a bit too quick with the spell-casting for Kyra’s liking.

“Was your Nuptial Bond created by a registered witch?” the old woman asked.

“The witchiest,” Fred said.

The witch was breathing hard now. “Married.” She looked like she was going to explode. “I don’t do married.” The witch thrust out her hand. “Give them to me.” When they didn’t move fast enough, she muttered a spell. “The necklace and the watch. Now!”

Kyra’s hand moved of its own accord and dropped the necklace into the witch’s palm, right atop Fred’s watch. The witch shoved them into the outer pocket of her patchwork dress as she muttered angrily, “Ridiculous marriage binding charms, keeping an honest witch from her work, stupid fertility witches, think they know everything, most worthless career I ever heard…”

Kyra and Fred edged toward the door.

“We should probably get going,” Fred said. “We wouldn’t want to keep you from your busy schedule; no doubt you’ve got newts to skin and rats to de-eyeball.” He wrenched open the door, and cool spring air hit their faces.

But before they could step one foot outside, ropes slithered across the floor and coiled themselves around Kyra and Fred.

“I can’t enslave you, but there’s nothing in a marriage spell that says I can’t eat you.” A malicious grin spread across the witch’s face.

She grabbed a cauldron off the counter behind her and draped the handle over the hook in the fireplace. “I do fancy myself a bit of tasty stew every now and then,” she muttered. “But a knife won’t do.…”

While the witch’s back was turned, Kyra reached up into her shirtsleeve and slid out a swab from one of the hidden pockets in the hem. She tucked the swab under her finger, potion-damp-side out.

The witch came back with a small saw. “This should do the trick.”

She raised Kyra’s hand to get a good angle and then dropped it immediately after Kyra dabbed her with the swab. The saw clattered to the floor.

The witch looked between Kyra and Fred, disoriented and confused.

Kyra picked up the confusion swab, shoved it back into her sleeve, and grabbed the knife off the table. While the witch mumbled incoherently, Kyra cut the ropes holding her, and got to work on Fred.

“What’s wrong with her?” he asked.

“Confusion potion—I got it from a friend.” Kyra glanced at Fred to see if he bought this. “I wouldn’t go wandering through the forest by myself without a little bit of protection.”

“Huh,” he said, but didn’t say anything else as he came free. He was just in time to catch the witch as she stumbled forward. He gently lowered her to the floor.

“Stubborn thing,” Kyra said, and dabbed the witch one more time with the swab to buy them a few extra minutes. Then she shooed the animals and Fred out the door.