Page 37 of The Poisoned King (Impossible Creatures #2)
A Chimaera at Midnight
Anya’s burning throat and chest—that same burning, burning—kept her awake, which she was glad of. She had volunteered to pick the somulent leaf at midnight, down by the potting sheds and greenhouses.
“It should be me,” she said. “I won’t sleep anyway.” And though she didn’t say it, she wanted to prove that she cared: about the antidote, not just about the loquillan. Jacques had rewarded her with a bow.
Gallia was determinedly asleep. Anya looked at the clock on the mantelpiece—she had ten minutes. She pulled on her boots while Koo fluttered to her shoulder, as light as fluff, as eager as the sun. “Yup!” he cawed. “Yup, yup, up. Mine.”
She snatched a phoenix feather for light and ran.
There it was: marked with a neatly labeled wooden stake—the somulent tree, its trunk as thin as the handle of a broomstick. Its leaves were just beginning to unfurl from the bud, and there were very few.
She stopped Koo from eating one.
“Mine!”
“No, those are precious,” said Anya. “And they’d make you sick, probably. Here.” She plucked him a small curled flower from the honeyleaf bush and gave him that instead. She ate one herself, and it tasted optimistic.
She did not know how precisely “midnight” was meant—but just in case, she waited for the great clock on the tower to strike, then pulled off a single leaf and put it in her pocket.
But she did not want to return to bed. She had so rarely been able to roam, in her year of castle life; this felt, now, like being back home in the forest. Her feet felt eager on the grass.
Hoping to see the unicorn, she moved toward the roses—but it was elsewhere.
Perhaps, she thought, it went inside to sleep; perhaps it had taken one of the bedrooms as a stable.
She came to a walled garden and pushed open the door.
And then her stomach fell down a flight of stairs as the creature inside turned its heads. It was, at first look, a young lion: but a lion with the second head of a goat. And as her vision, briefly blurred by shock, sharpened again, she saw it had a tail ending in the head of a snake.
It had seen her. Anya froze. The creature came closer.
“Eat her,” hissed the snake. “Let me suck her blood.”
The creature stopped ten paces from her.
“No,” said the lion head. His voice was rich and silky, like an actor’s. “She has the smell of some great purpose on her. The smell of destiny.”
“That is not destiny,” said the snake. “That is poor personal hygiene.”
“If you eat her,” said the goat—he spoke in a low drawl—“ I get covered in blood. So I’d rather we didn’t.”
“You can’t stop me!” said the snake.
“We absolutely can,” said the goat. “We have been over this: I still don’t think you fully comprehend. We all have to agree—or rather, the lion head and I do—or our feet won’t move forward.”
“So you can’t eat the girl,” said the lion.
“Unless she walks close enough to us,” said the snake.
“Which realistically I don’t think she’s going to do, all things considered,” said the goat.
“No,” said Anya. “I’m not going to do that. What are you?”
“A chimaera,” said the lion head. “Nighthand brought us here. Our mother is the guardian of the waybetween on Paraspara. She ceased coming to visit us. We tried to go to her and injured ourselves in the journey.”
Anya could see a bandage on the chimaera’s hind leg.
“Come closer, little child,” said the snake. “Clossser.”
“The girl is not so little,” said the lion. “She has lived a great deal in the last days. I smell it on her.”
“Smell, smell! Always ssssmell!”
“You’re just jealous because you have no sense of smell,” said the lion. “Mine is acute. I smell fear on the girl. And I smell, too, its converse. I smell bravery on her. I smell her hope.”
“Ridiculous—hope cannot be smelled, ” said the snake.
“It can,” said the lion. His voice became lower. “It smells like a sunrise—like a newborn bird in flight—”
“Leave, girl. You are provoking him to metaphor! Lion, I warn you, I will bite you.”
Anya began to back away.
“Are you afraid of us, child?” said the snake.
Anya had passed beyond the point of shock, and far beyond the point of politeness. “At first, yes. Of course. You’re a lion and a snake.”
The goat gave an outraged bleat. “I can bite too.”
“But now,” said Anya, “no, sir. Or—madam? Are you he or she?”
“Both,” said the lion head. “The snake is female.”
“You should be afraid,” said the snake. Her voice was petulant. “It’s impolite. We are magnificently frightening and magnificently wise.”
A thought occurred to Anya. “If your sense of smell is so good,” she said, “do you know what these are?” And she pulled from her pocket the two scraps of poisoned cloth—one from her grandfather, and one from the dragon’s lake—and held them out to the creature.
The snake head reared back; the four legs of the chimaera entangled in horror. “Whatever those are, keep them from us! They have the eye of a chimaera in them, both!”
Which was confirmation, Anya thought, that it was the same poison: the poison in the book, the poison in her palace, the poison in the cave. Poison, across the whole island, seeping into the magic-drenched life of the Archipelago.