Poison (2 page)

“Oh, for crying out loud,” a voice came from just outside the half-open door. “What is the holdu—”

Hal’s voice stopped suddenly. Kyra ignored the pang she felt, spun around, and blew into his handsome face.

His exquisite features went from surprised to blank. His bright blue eyes closed, and his black hair fell across his forehead as he slowly crumpled.

“Sorry, Hal,” Kyra said as she eased him to the floor. “We always hurt the ones we don’t quite love.”

Hal and Ned were two of the best poisonous weapons users in the kingdom.

But Kyra was better.

She stepped over gorgeous Hal and into the hall. In less than an hour they’d both be awake and after her. The sleeping draft she favored in her weapons, Doze, was extremely effective, but short-lived.

Kyra hurtled down the stairs toward the front door. The magic wards wouldn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know.

She’d been here.

Out the door and into the forest she ran. She found her satchel where she had hidden it in the weeds, and slung it over her shoulder. At the edge of the forest she couldn’t help but look back one last time at the home of the Master Trio of Potioners. It was run-down and seedy, yes, but it
had
been her home—where she’d made a name for herself, fallen in love with the wrong man, and betrayed everyone she’d ever known.

Back before she’d tried to murder the princess.

I
T WASN’T THAT
K
YRA
didn’t like the princess.

She did. Immensely.

She and Princess Ariana had been best friends since way back before Kyra had become one of the Master Trio of Potioners, back when she was just a first-year apprentice who’d been paired with Ariana as part of the princess’s education. Princess Ariana had been born sickly, and the queen had hidden her away from the court to be nurtured and kept safe. Few people had ever met her, and most had only just caught brief glimpses of the girl at court functions. The princess was, after all, the heir to the entire Kingdom of Mohr, and her health couldn’t be risked for anything.

But after twelve years, the queen’s sister, the Duchess Genria, had put her foot down. The princess was going to be the ruling monarch one day, and she couldn’t be hidden away forever.

The queen reluctantly agreed.

Kyra had a skillful hand at cosmetic potions and charms, and it was decided that she would instruct the princess in the simple arts of makeup. If the two twelve-year-old girls became friends in the process—well, all the better. The princess needed all of the socializing she could get.

Kyra hadn’t looked forward to these “lessons” at all—she despised cosmetics potions and charms—but even at twelve, she knew better than to refuse the queen.

And so one summer morning, in the enormous palace overlooking the capital city of Wexford, the queen and her sister had pushed Kyra into the princess’s high-ceilinged bedroom.

To one side was a canopy bed with voluptuous ivory curtains tied back with tight, crisp ribbons at each corner, a large closet filled with stiff dresses, and a mirrored dressing table crowded in perfume bottles with unbroken wax seals. To the other side was a sitting area with stuffed chairs in front of a huge fireplace—complete with steaming tea and snacks on a little round table.

The princess sat on the floor by the table, shoving a torn bit of bun into her mouth.

“Ariana,” the queen announced, “you have company. Do you feel well enough for a visit?”

Princess Ariana industriously plucked currants out of the remaining bun.

She looked perfectly healthy to Kyra. Bored, maybe—but that had certainly never killed anyone.

The duchess gave the queen a sister-to-sister
come on, you
can do it
look, and the queen visibly steeled herself. “Ariana. Come here.” Her tone had changed to the one she used to issue decrees.

Ariana got up and made her way over, a crumb stuck to the side of her cheek.

“This is Kyra,” the duchess said. “She knows makeup and more. You two are going to learn so
much
from each other.” She took the queen’s elbow, her green eyes sparkling. “Let’s leave them alone, Your Highness. They certainly don’t need us.”

With one last look at her daughter, the queen let the duchess lead her out of the room.

The door whispered shut and Kyra was alone with the princess.

The two girls stared defiantly at each other across the middle of the spacious room.

“I’m not interested in being beautiful,” Princess Ariana said, pressing her lips together so tightly they grew as white as her skin. Her hideous robin’s-egg-blue dress poufed out around her legs and arms, but the bodice was so tight it was a wonder she could breathe. Even her hair had been bound into tight gold ringlets around her head. She looked extremely uncomfortable.

“Great. Because I’m not interested in making you beautiful.” Kyra set her potions trunk on the floor.

She was thankful for her practical potions-apprentice garb—the dark cloth was loose and flexible and would withstand just about anything she could do to it in the course of her studies. But over her protests, the dark waves of her hair had been brushed smooth—the duchess had insisted Kyra at least
try
to look presentable for the young heir to the throne.

The duchess had a bewitching way of looking at you that made you feel grubby-faced and wanting, followed by an immediate desire to please. Kyra had fought the urge to obey her—she had a mind of her own, thank you very much—and yet…she
had
scrubbed herself to within an inch of her life.

The princess turned her back on Kyra in a loud swish of skirts and walked to one of the tall arched windows that lit the room in skinny patches of sunlight.

Kyra shrugged. It wasn’t like she didn’t have enough unfinished homework for her apprenticeship. She had plenty she could be doing.

And she wasn’t one to waste time.

Kyra snapped open the brass clasps of her leather trunk and pulled out her recording notebook. She had a potion due the following morning. Donning her protective gloves, goggles, and apron, she spread a plush black fabric across the parquet floor and set her trunk on top of it. The potion she was working on was completely inert, but hours of Safe Practice lessons had been drilled into her.

A glass tube contained her homework—a clear liquid with tiny rectangular flecks of gold floating in it.

Carefully, she uncorked it and set it in her work rack.

Levity 062, the final ingredient, was a wispy substance. She used long skinny pincers to pull out a tuft from a vial and dropped it into the gold-flecked liquid. Swirling her potion around with her left hand, she put the bottle of Levity away with her right, then held the test tube up to the sunlight streaming through the windows. The rectangular flecks were beginning to bow up at the ends into shimmering gold smiles.

Kyra’s own mouth turned up in response.

Perfect.
She scribbled down her final notes, the muslin-wrapped stick of writing graphite smudging across the page in her haste. Then she began adding up all of the components to get the final number for her potion.

“What’s that?” a loud voice said in her left ear.

Kyra nearly dropped the potion, but caught herself just in time and said casually, “Nothing you’d be interested in, I’m sure.” She didn’t look at the princess but continued with her calculations, at last transferring the final potion number onto the tube’s label with an ink-dipped pen.

“How is anyone going to read
that
?” the princess demanded, eying Kyra’s tiny, cramped writing.

Kyra turned abruptly toward her. “Would you like to try it out?”

The princess’s eyes widened.

“It won’t hurt.” Kyra put the bottle of ink and her pen back inside the box. What was she doing? The last thing she needed was to get into a mess if the princess reacted badly. Not that Kyra doubted her work; she was sure the potion was fine. But if it got back to the duchess that she’d experimented on the princess with a homework lesson…well, she would be in huge trouble.

Princess Ariana defiantly crossed her arms and said, “I’m not afraid of some silly potion.”

Kyra caught a little wobble in her voice.

“I’ve met
lots
of potioners,” the princess went on. “A bunch of toady old men in smelly robes who claimed to be healers. But their potions never did much of anything for me.”

“Maybe that’s because you aren’t really sick.” Kyra was shocked at her own words, and immediately wished she could take them back. It was the sort of thing that was whispered by court gossips. But never to the princess herself.

Princess Ariana’s mouth hung open, but she didn’t say anything, so Kyra forged ahead. “Anyway, I’m not going to become a healing potioner. I’m interested in
much
more exciting things.” She picked a small dropper out of her trunk. “Put out your hand.”

Apparently, Kyra had shocked Ariana beyond resistance. She obeyed, her fingers trembling only slightly. “I met a witch once too,” Ariana said in a rush of nerves. “Stupid old hag tied string around my hands, dumped powder on me, and told a bunch of silly stories about curses and spells and make-believe monsters like obeekas, who change shapes and suck out souls—”

“I’ve never heard of those and I’m studying magical creatures.”

“—and about witches in the south who can stop a person in their tracks with the evil eye, and how birds called grecks suck out people’s brains, and about the gortha mice who run over their prey like water and eat ’em alive, and—”

“Be quiet,” Kyra said, lowering the head of the dropper into the potion tube. “I’m trying to concentrate.”

The princess was silent for a moment. “You know,” she went on in a whisper, “witches are different from other people. Some say they aren’t even human.”

Kyra’s stomach tightened. This was the kind of talk that led to houses being burnt down and all manner of atrocities. It wasn’t that Kyra was fond of witches—they hadn’t earned their nasty reputations for nothing—but she couldn’t stand violence against people because of something that they had no control over. Witches never had a choice: they were born the way they were, just as people didn’t get to choose which family they were born into. “They’re human, all right,” she said.

“That’s not what Nurse told me,” the princess said defiantly. “She wasn’t happy about them bringing the witch in at all—what would people say?”

“I’d be less worried about what people said and more worried about the witch’s magic going wrong,” Kyra responded. “Witchcraft is completely unscientific.”

She filled the dropper with her potion, maneuvered it over the princess’s hand, and squeezed out one single bead of liquid. It fell with a plop on Ariana’s pale white skin.

The two girls waited, their conversation forgotten.

And then a small giggle erupted from the princess. She looked surprised at the sound coming out of her own mouth.

Kyra had the horrible impression that giggling was probably an unusual occurrence in the princess’s life.

“What is it?” Ariana asked, chortling freely now. “I’ve never felt anything like it.”

“A laughing potion,” Kyra said. “I gave you enough for about five minutes.”

Ariana grabbed her belly, rolled around on the floor, and hooted.

Kyra couldn’t help but smile.

After the laughter had settled down to hiccups, Ariana grabbed Kyra’s arm. “I had no idea. I never dreamed potions could work so well.” She swallowed a hiccup and started laughing again. “Or be so much fun.”

Her eyes flitted to the window. The bright blue day beckoned from beyond the glass.

“I don’t suppose…” she began, grabbing a fistful of skirt and twisting it around her fist. “I don’t suppose you could make something to get us out of here?”

“Definitely.” Kyra’s mind ran through her options. She could do this. It was just a matter of putting her knowledge to work. But she had to do it with what was available in her trunk.

She got out a piece of chalk and drew a circle around herself and her potions trunk. “You have to stay on that side of the line,” she said, pointing to the far side.

“Okay.” The princess eyed the chalk line suspiciously. “I’m not scared.”

“Ariana, you should be.” Kyra realized the second after she said it that she probably should have asked to use the princess’s name first, but it was too late now. “The laughing potion was completely safe, but if we’re going to sneak out of here, we’re going to need something a little more dangerous. I’m a trained potions apprentice, but
you
need to stay outside the circle, where it’s safe.” She didn’t mention that the potion she’d be creating was way above her level of training.

Ariana nodded reluctantly but stayed put.

Kyra lifted out the top tray of the trunk—all lower-numbered potions used for cosmetics and charms—and went straight to the bottom layer, where she had higher-numbered potions. The 05 series through the 07.

The poisons.

Poisons were fatal at full strength, but diluted correctly, they were usually completely safe. Or almost always. And you could do amazing things with them that you couldn’t do with the lower-numbered benign potions.

Kyra needed to dilute the poisons by just the right amount. If the solution was too weak, the mixture wouldn’t do what she wanted; but if it wasn’t diluted enough, it would kill her and the princess pretty much on the spot.

She filled a vial three-quarters of the way up with dilution elixir, then squeezed in one drop of a confusion poison and two drops of a concealment poison. Next she sprinkled in a pinch of a lower-numbered glamour dust, screwed on the cap, and shook the whole thing.

Taking a deep breath, she dampened a cloth with the solution and dabbed herself and her clothes all over while
the princess watched, her pale blue eyes intense.

This was it. Either Kyra would die from extreme confusion, die from disappearing into nothingness…or live and be extremely difficult to see.

“Kyra?” Ariana’s voice was filled with wonder. “I think it worked.”

Kyra looked down at herself.

She most certainly was difficult to see. She sort of blended into the background.

Perfect.

Kyra quickly packed up her kit, but not quick enough to keep Ariana from bouncing foot to foot and babbling, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

“Okay, okay!” Kyra laughed at her. “You’re sure you’re ready?”

Ariana stopped bouncing and shot her an evil look.

“Ouch. I guess you’re ready.” She stepped out of the chalk circle. “You know, you really shouldn’t give such a hard time to the hardworking potioner who’s going to break you out of jail.”