Page 46 of The Poisoned King (Impossible Creatures #2)

The Taste of Poison

Anya sat in her uncle’s study under the chandelier, which burned softly: the only light in the steadily darkening room.

Claude had embraced her on the lawn. He had cried actual tears.

“We have been frantic, Anya! By the Immortal, this is a miracle!”

A feeling of absolute calm had come upon her; the same leonine calm she had known in the woods.

Anya had allowed him to embrace her; she had allowed him to weep.

He wore, she had seen, her grandfather’s golden medallion upon his chest: the sign of governance.

She had taken note of it; her eyes had never felt so sharp.

“My niece, my child, my own one—what happened? We were told that rogue guards made an attempt on your life? A barbaric thing! We believe it was an attempt to overthrow our state. They have been dealt with. Were you hurt, sweet child?”

“Yes,” she had said. “I was hurt. And I was afraid. I ran away and hid in the woods.” It was important to seem soft, easy, no threat at all. She had tried to remember how she might have sounded before everything had changed. Earnest, eager. “But I realized I needed to come home.”

“We’ll go somewhere warm,” he had said. “You need to eat. We will take care of you.”

And now she waited, sitting at his table. Her hands were out of sight. Hands reveal a great deal. Anya put her left hand in her pocket, and closed her fist around its contents.

Her uncle was at the far end of the room, mixing a drink at the side table. Now he came to her, his eyes alight, and gave her a plate of almond sweets and a silver goblet.

She could smell it. The strawberry cordial—the drink she loved most—and beneath it the whiff of something alien and metallic. Soft, she told herself, soft as a dove.

“Thank you,” she said. She took the goblet in her hand. Anya drew breath. Then she gave the signal—a cough, and even her cough was soft, and sweet, and innocent.

With a great flapping of wings, Jacques burst through the window. He carried a cup of water in his jaws.

He cannoned straight into the chandelier and sent it swinging on its chains.

Exhaling great billows of black smoke, he looped in a circle, spilling water over the flames.

Despite her terror, Anya felt her heart lift: it was thus that Coren had flown into the chandelier in the hallway, five days and a different world ago.

The room was suddenly dark; the air was full of liquid and candle wax and thick with Jacques’s smoke, black and choking.

“What was that?” Anya cried out. “Uncle Claude!” Only the sharpest eyes would have noticed the flick of her right hand as she spoke.

And then the dragon was gone, and the smoke was clearing, and Claude was at Anya’s side. “Don’t worry, child. A creature of some kind, blundering in through the window.” He had liquid and hot wax on his hands and hair; he wiped them on his jacket. “Whatever it was, it’s gone.”

Claude hunted in the dark, looking for matches to relight the candles. He did not see her raise her left hand to her mouth, nor the movement of her throat as she swallowed.

Swiftly, Claude Argen found what he searched for, and light was restored.

Anya sat where he had left her, her eyes wide, her face bland. She did not appear to have moved at all. He glanced at the silver goblet; the liquid was unchanged, its faint metallic smell just barely at the edges of his senses.

“Drink, my child. Eat, drink. You are tired.”

She lifted the cup to her lips. She could smell the death in it. She began to shake, now, at this final moment. Courage, Anya.

The clock chimed the hour. “To my father,” she said. “To Argus Argen.” And she drank.

Was she imagining it—the flicker of sudden horror in his eyes? A twitching of doubt in his face? She thought for a moment he was about to speak, and her heart contracted—but he gripped the edge of the table, and said nothing.

She set the cup on the table. Then she choked. She grabbed at her throat.

She had not expected it to hurt at all, but it was agony.

It was the worst pain she had ever known.

It tore through her lungs, her chest, her stomach.

True terror rose in her, and her vision began to blur.

Her throat was closing. Anya fought for breath.

She pushed her chair back, trying to rise, and it clattered backward. She started to shake, then to spasm.

Anya fell to her knees. She looked up at her uncle. For one terrible moment their eyes met. And then she dropped face first onto the floor.

Claude let out a long, low hiss. He felt her wrist. The child had no pulse. He held his fingers against her nose. She was not breathing. He touched her neck, feeling for the beat of blood. There was none; only cool skin. He pulled back her eyelid. There was no flicker of movement. He stood back.

The girl lay motionless on the ground at his feet. Claude Argen turned away.

There was nothing now between him and the throne. First there would be a funeral, then a coronation.

“Long live the king,” he said.