Poison Read online

  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.” Ky
ra’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.”

  “You’re right,” Princess Ariana said, and swept a huge curtsy. “You are my champion.”

  Kyra rolled her eyes and started dabbing the princess all over with the handkerchief.

  In a meadow full of sunshine, the girls fell into a giggling heap on the ground. They were outside the castle, an hour’s walk from the city. The cloaking potion was wearing off.

  Princess Ariana’s face split into a beatific smile as she held out her arms to the sun. “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me in my whole entire life,” she said. “I don’t even know where to start. We can do anything.”

  “Well, not anything,” Kyra said. “We don’t want to get caught.”

  “But that still leaves so many options.” Princess Ariana rolled over on one elbow and looked serious. “Have you ever tipped a cow?”

  “What?” Kyra brushed a leaf out of her hair.

  “My nanny says she used to do it a million years ago when she was a kid. When the cows are napping you push them and they fall right over. It doesn’t hurt or anything, just confuses them, I think.”

  “Why in the world would anyone want to tip a cow?”

  “I don’t know, but there’s only one way to find out.” Princess Ariana jumped up and started running in the direction of a barn in the next field over.

  “You can’t be serious. Right? Right, Ariana?”

  Kyra ran after her.

  Kyra and Ariana’s weekly “lessons” turned into secret adventures in the countryside, the two girls stealing out of the castle using Kyra’s potion. Their friendship blossomed, and over the next five years, Ariana became the best friend Kyra would probably ever have.

  Which was why it had been such a shock to everyone when, three months ago, Kyra had tried to kill her.

  And failed, Kyra reminded herself now as she tramped through the woods.

  Thinking about Ariana made her heart ache. And Kyra had resolved not to let that happen. She’d spent the last several months diligently hardening her heart. She couldn’t allow one tiny crack.

  Or she would fall apart.

  The princess had to die. It was either her or the rest of the kingdom.

  But first Kyra had to find the princess.

  Her satchel slung over her shoulder, the necklace she’d accidentally stolen bouncing around her neck, Kyra made her way quickly through the woods. To either side of her, the bright spring buds of leafing trees stood out against the long dark skirts of pines.

  She wended her way into the overgrown hollow to the gigantic oak tree that marked her hideaway. Kyra sprinkled the antidote concoction on the ground in front of her until a section of concealment faded away and the entrance to her hut became visible.

  Kyra stepped inside. The hut smelled of earth, iron, oils, and cleaning solutions. Light from the one perfectly square window lit up the tiny room.

  On the far wall hung weapons of every size and shape—a half dozen swords whose edges glowed with deadly potions; sharp curving machetes; dirks and bodkins and all manner of small knives in holsters; and maces and morning stars prickly with wicked-looking spikes. A sizable wooden chest on one side of the room doubled as a table.

  Shortly after the Master Trio of Potioners had moved into the apartment at Newman House, Kyra realized she was going to need a place of her own, a secret place to get away from the very maleness of Hal and Ned.

  She’d learned carpentry from a woodworker at the castle, and she’d built the hut all by herself with the skills she’d picked up. Not a single crack of light came in through the tightly fitted boards. No one but Kyra and her best friend, Ariana, knew of the hut’s existence.

  She would be sorry to leave it but knew it was time to say good-bye.

  Kyra added a brace of throwing quills and two small daggers to her pack, grabbed her bedroll and the last of her food—a stale half loaf of bread and a hard wedge of cheese—then shut the door firmly behind her. She closed the opening she’d made in the concealment charm and set out over the slippery pine needles that covered the forest floor.

  Ned and Hal would be awake soon. They’d be hunting for Kyra now that they knew she wasn’t very far away.

  But they’d never expect her to seek help from the most villainous character in the kingdom. No one in their right mind purposely sought out Arlo Abbaduto.

  He and Kyra went way back. She had crossed him previously on two different occasions, and sincerely wished she hadn’t. Both times before, the King of Criminals had come to her, not the other way around. She’d had the upper hand those times. But now she’d be on his territory. In his power.

  And there was nowhere else to turn for help.

  By the time the sun began to sink below the treetops and the spring air turned cool, Kyra had put several good miles between herself and her old home. She didn’t know these woods and didn’t want to fend for herself after dark. She had to find Arlo’s lair soon.

  She knew it was in the forest east of Tippolow. That was all. But she hadn’t come across anything even remotely resembling a crook’s hideout. It didn’t help that she had no idea what she was looking
for. What sort of residence would the monstrously vain King of Criminals go for? Something enormous and shiny would fit his giant ego, but something hidden, dank, and dark would probably be more likely.

  And harder to find.

  Pink fingers of sunset lit the sky as she watched the lights of Tippolow appear in the distance. Skirting the forest’s edge, she went still farther north until she could no longer see any sign of the town. No luck.

  She turned to head back and almost tripped over a boy and a girl who’d been following close on her heels.

  “Hey!” she said, startled. “You should watch where you’re going!”

  They stared up at her with black midnight eyes.

  Unblinking.

  “HI,” KYRA SAID, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment. Looking at the children made her skin crawl.

  She didn’t like children at the best of times, and now was certainly nowhere near the best of times. It was even possibly the worst of times, though Kyra kept thinking she’d hit bottom only to discover that things could still get worse. She opened her eyes.

  The children silently continued to stare up at her.

  They had freaky eyes and were unnaturally alike—much more so than any normal twins she’d ever seen. The only thing distinguishing one from the other was that the girl’s hair was in pigtails. “Here’s the thing. I know you’re probably lost and need help, but I really don’t have time to go hunting for your mummy and daddy, sorry. Tippolow is back that way just a bit.” Kyra gestured in the direction of town. “I’m sure someone there will help you.” She turned away only to find that one of them was again in front her. The boy.

  Where there had been no child before.

  Creepy.

  Kyra sidestepped him. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

  The girl came up beside her and took her arm.

  Kyra tried to politely brush her off. “No, really.”

  The girl’s fingers tightened.

  Soon the boy was on her other arm.

  Their grip was absurdly strong for children.