Page 45 of The Poisoned King (Impossible Creatures #2)

Crossbow

It was the guard Roegan. Three soldiers—one sharp-chinned and weasel-faced, two large and brutal in the eyes and mouth—stood beside him. The fishing boat was anchored in the shadows beneath the sea cliff.

“Spies,” breathed the goat head.

The moonlight shone on the silver braid of Roegan’s blue uniform; and on the metal of the crossbow that was pointed at Anya’s chest.

“Princess,” said Roegan. “Anya Argen, caught like a fish.”

“We were patrolling the coast. Saw your boat,” said the hard-eyed soldier. “You should have been more careful.”

“The regent will be pleased,” said Roegan. “He’s a dangerous man to disappoint, your uncle. But he knows how to reward.”

“What about the boy?” said the weasel.

“He can be disposed of,” said Roegan. His hand was heavily bandaged, and he was missing the top of his thumb. “Argen won’t want witnesses. Kill the boy, take the girl.”

It happened before Anya had time to think. Christopher stepped in front of her, putting his body between her and the soldiers. He let out a call, the sphinx tooth still in his cheek. The unicorns turned and charged.

Unicorns have glorious precision. When the stampede had passed by, Anya and Christopher were untouched, but the guards lay groaning, curled into balls on the ground. The two largest were unconscious.

“Quick,” said Christopher. “There’s rope in the boat.”

Anya sprinted to get it. They moved toward Roegan.

“You’re fools,” grunted Roegan. He wiped blood from his lip and hauled himself painfully to his hands and knees. “Whatever you’re planning, Princess,” he said, “give it up now. You have no idea what terrible things Claude Argen is capable of.”

“I do. What he doesn’t know,” said Anya, “is what terrible things I’m capable of.”

Roegan made a sudden lunge across the sand for the crossbow.

Christopher snatched it up. The man shrank back—“Please! No! I have children! They look up to me, I’m all they have!

”—but Christopher only rolled his lip at the guard in disgust, swung the weapon around his head, and hurled it into the sea.

He pulled out his sword, and Roegan dropped again to the sand. The weasel cowered next to him.

Gallia flew to land on Roegan’s boot. She jerked her head twice down to the right.

“I have an idea,” said Christopher. “Anya, you hold the sword.”

Christopher made Roegan hand over his jacket, trousers, cap, papers. He tied all four guards at the feet and hands and pulled them with effort above the tidemark. Roegan, clad in vest and underwear, was last.

“Tell your kids,” Christopher said to him, “to get a better role model.”

Swiftly, he dressed in the guard’s clothes. “This will help,” he said. “It won’t matter, now, if anybody sees me.”

Anya gave him her last stem of rascovnic. “For the castle door,” she said.

Then Christopher called out, and two unicorns returned.

He lifted his face to the nose of the unicorn bearing the chimaera, and it breathed on him; a blast of glimourie.

“Thank you,” he said. He mounted, and looked long and hard at Anya, and smiled half a smile.

He jerked his head twice up, twice down.

“Either ‘I admire you very much’ or ‘You are at risk of being attacked by a herd of marauding sheep,’?” he said.

And then he was gone.

Anya clambered onto the second unicorn’s back, trembling a little; she felt the sinewy strength of it, and it thrilled her.

Her plan pulsed in her chest like a living thing.

She thought of her father—of how he would shout out when she came for him.

She conjured up his face—and the imagined glow of his look pushed her onward.

It was snowing as they took off, but the shiver she gave was not one of cold but of wonder. She had never touched the unicorns before.

They flew. The ground peeled away. They rose higher, up toward the moon, and Anya could see the castle. There her father waited.

The now-familiar fear and the now-familiar fury swept over her again, and this time Anya was ready for it, and she ate it whole. Good. Let them come.

She could see the ornamental lawn, with its soldiers and with all the familiar faces: scribes from the library, a pair of old duchesses walking in the evening. Witnesses. They had to see her come; it was crucial to her plan.

The unicorn came to land gently on the lawn. In front of Anya, standing in front of the castle’s oaken doors, waiting for her, was a man.

He had been summoned, precisely as they had planned, by Jacques’s call. The dragon had flown through the entire castle, evading snatching hands and bellowing his message, “Anya Argen is come! The princess is returned! She has returned home! Fetch the regent!”

Claude Argen smiled at his niece, and for the first time in many years, the smile was real.