Page 38 of The Poisoned King (Impossible Creatures #2)

The Immense and Insoluble Problem of Love

In the hall, on her way back to her bedroom, Anya heard voices. It was Nighthand and Ratwin. Nighthand carried a sack; he had been feeding the nocturnal creatures.

She was about to call out when she heard Nighthand speak, and the intensity of his voice stopped her. “I don’t know what to do, Ratwin. I think I will go mad.”

Fearful of embarrassing them, Anya ducked behind a low chest.

“These last months,” said Nighthand, “I come back for a single night, and then I leave. Every time, I spend my journey home planning to stay longer, and every time, I see her and my stomach turns to molten iron and my lungs catch fire. And so off I go again. Searching.”

“Is that a problems?”

“My face goes a terrible purplish-red around her.”

“That’s what humanses calls blushing, Nighthand.”

“All I want to do is look at her. Every time I close my eyes I see only her face.”

“And-what-so? That seems entirely reasonable. Many peoples feels that way, I woulds think, about Irian Guinne,” said Ratwin.

“What is this? I feel—sick.”

“What sick?”

“I cannot breathe,” he said. “My heart feels like some creature has bitten into it, torn it from my chest cavity, and left it bleeding on the floor. Is it—cholera?”

“It’s love, Nighthand,” said Ratwin.

“Love?” He did not need to ask, Love of whom?

“Love. You have heards of it, I presumes.”

“Berserkers do not love!”

“I knows. And yet. Heres we are, no-yes?”

“What do I do?” he asked.

“I suppose you could try to crushes it. Kills it off, bit by bit, inside. Knife knife knife, each ounce of love.”

“Right. Yes. I will do that.”

“It will take time. It cannots be done swiftly. If it can be done at all. Half the startlement of love is not that it fades, but that it lasts.”

“What do I do until it is dead? This love?”

“You have courage.”

“I have never had to have courage. I simply was courage.”

He did not know what to do, he told Ratwin, with the pain and doubt and longing: the desire to be near the woman, with her long limbs and thick dark hair and double-speed mind, and her calm good sense that made disasters look like just another day to be risen to.

“I might die of it,” said Nighthand.

“Don’t be so melodramatical. Mens have dieds and grubbly-worms have eatens them, but not for love.”

“Can I tell you something about her? About Irian? She dislikes crowds. They feel dangerous to her. She goes into them anyway.”

“I knows.”

“And her work—she works for her creatures, her science, her study of the living world, long into the night: long after she’s exhausted. She refuses to let her mind pause or rest. She puts pepper on her tongue, or up her nose, to stay awake. There are forms of bravery I had not understood.”

Anya edged further behind the chest as they drew nearer. She was astonished. She thought of Irian, and the way she had looked at the Berserker, and the way the Berserker had looked at Irian.

“Tell her,” Ratwin said. They were almost close enough for her to touch them now. “For loves to meet loves: it is one of the momentations for which the wide-bold-world was mades.”

“I cannot,” said Nighthand. “A Berserker cannot love. Love is allied to fear, and I must not allow myself to fear.”

—

Anya, tiptoeing back to her room, could not shake what Nighthand had said.

It was true, she knew that. Love and fear were closely bound.

But she would take the fear in exchange for the love she bore her father.

She carried it with her under her skin; it was food and drink and warmth and shelter in the vastness of the world.