Page 35 of The Poisoned King (Impossible Creatures #2)

A Discovery: Oysters Both Look and Taste Like Snot

Anya ran down to the water’s edge, through the rose garden where the unicorn was eating rose petals, to where the lagoon lapped at the grass. Gallia and Koo flew overhead.

“It’s going to work!” she said to Gallia. “I can feel it!”

Anya pulled off her dress and boots. She waded in among the rocks, held her breath, and dived. The water was clear blue, and a shoal of fish darted past her.

Then Anya cried out underwater and shot to the surface, choking and spitting. A figure—taller than her, sinewy and lithe—had appeared in the water, as if from nowhere. It laughed, a laugh that sounded of rivers.

She recognized it, of course, from pictures.

A naiad: a freshwater sprite. Its skin was silver-blue, and it wore not clothes, exactly, for they covered nothing, but ornaments made from shells strung on reeds.

It was impossible to tell, from the face or body, whether it was male or female; merely that it was wild, and itself.

Instantly it was joined by others—six, seven, they came swimming down the river to where it met the lagoon, to look at her.

They swam around her. The littlest overbubbled in excitable yips, like a lion cub, but those of Anya’s age and over were silent, and a kind of radiant she’d never seen.

“I’m hunting for pearls,” said Anya. “To work a loquillan. Can you help?”

They didn’t speak, but she had no doubt at all that they understood. They turned and dived down into the depths. She hesitated barely a second, then glanced at Gallia, who jerked her head upward. “Yes.”

Anya plunged down after them, kicking through the blue. Already, though, they were deep under the waves, twisting and spinning with pleasure, and she had no chance of keeping pace with them.

They came up with great armfuls of oysters. They dropped them, dripping, on the bank, and looked at her, heads cocked.

“Thank you! What can I give you in return?”

“Nothing.” The oldest spoke. “Water. Land. Sky. Star. We trust only in things that cannot be owned.”

Anya did not wish to be rude, but—“People can own land,” she said.

“No. They only think they can.”

Anya did not say, “I will own a whole island when I become queen.” But perhaps they saw the thought, for one said, “How could you own the world’s earth: soil and green and sod?”

They left as suddenly as they had come, unclothed and untrammeled, and Anya watched them go. She dressed, still wet, and then turned to the oysters they had left her.

Gallia set her metallic claw along the lip of one and neatly cracked it open with her beak.

Anya took it in her hands. There was a sticky pillow of oyster flesh, but no pearl.

“Eat it,” said Gallia. “It is the finest taste in the ocean.”

Anya fished it out with her fingers. “It looks like snot.”

“Eat it.”

Anya ate it. She pulled a face.

“Mine!” said Koo.

“You’re welcome to them,” said Anya. “They’re not not like snot.”

She opened the next, which Koo ate, and the next—and there, shining off-white, was a small pearl. She seized it with a cry, washed it, and set it aside on a leaf.

Quickly she and Gallia opened the rest: perhaps half had pearls, in white or pink or black. She selected the twelve loveliest; the loquillan looked like the kind of object that might care about beauty.

She unhooked the loquillan from her neck and placed the pearls one by one on its silver surface. Her heart was beating.

The ocean lapped against the rocks. The sun shone. But nothing changed.

She rubbed the pearls against the surface: again, nothing.

“Perhaps they need to be a powder?” she said to Gallia. “Rubbed into the surface somehow?”

She looked around for a stone and found a large one. “Like a cleaning paste, maybe.”

The pearls resisted grinding. Anya ground a large portion of her thumb.

Nighthand came across the grass. “Child,” he said. “I have come to see that you are not drowning.” His face lit up when he saw Anya surrounded by tiny piles of sea-washed pearls. Anya explained.

“I can do it.” He tried to grind one in his teeth. There was a horrible crunching noise, and he swallowed the pearl whole. “That will be unpleasant,” he said, “in the evacuation.”

Anya laughed.

“We need some flint,” Nighthand said. He dug a lump of it from among the tree roots, and, as easily as if they were peppercorns, he used it to grind the pearls into beautiful, glinting, multicolored dust.

“Thank you!” Eagerly Anya scattered the dust on the obsidian. Nothing happened.

Gallia and Nighthand exchanged looks.

“I think it should be wet,” Anya said. She wet the dust with spit and rubbed it across the surface, grinding it with her fingers, faster and faster, pushing so hard she rubbed the skin off her forefinger.

She concentrated her mind on her request, as clear and bright as she could, filling her whole soul with it: Show me how to rescue my father. Show me my revenge.

Nothing happened.

“It won’t work!” She looked up. Nighthand stood over her. A hope rose in her: the man had traveled the whole Glimouria Archipelago. “Have you ever used one, Nighthand? Or sold one, when you were trading?”

“I was more in the whiskey and gold lines. But I know they are strange. I would have nothing to do with a loquillan, myself. It is unwise to meddle with the future. And I speak as someone who once headbutted a full-grown roc, so I have strong reference points on unwise.”

“No! It’s my only chance!”

Without it, what was she to do?

“I remember when I first understood that evil exists,” said Nighthand reminiscently. “I was twelve. I didn’t take it well. I seem to remember I went out and tried to fight a number of walls. I broke several fingers.

“Do not,” Nighthand said, and his voice, now, was softer than it had been, “let Claude Argen decide how you feel about the world. Fight him, yes. But keep the fight outside your body, not inside it. I can see you vibrating with rage from halfway across a room, girl. Do not let men who are not fit to touch the corner of your shoe decide how you feel about being alive. That way lies misery and broken bones.” He hauled Anya up, lifting her three feet off the ground.

“Will you leave off with the loquillan?”

Anya didn’t want to lie to the Berserker; he was himself so honest. But she couldn’t say that she would abandon the loquillan. She would keep trying every possible variation of pearl. But she was saved from lying by Jacques, who came flying over the lawn toward them.

“Anya!” he called. “Christopher has need of you!” Then he sniffed deeply. “Why do you smell like an explosion of dead fish?”