Page 51 of The Poisoned King (Impossible Creatures #2)

Revenge

Her uncle had a sword, yes, but Anya had both a sword and a chorus of furious and loving birds.

He lunged at her; Anya raised her blade to meet his, holding it in both hands. He stabbed, and Gallia screamed, “Now!” and through the broken window came a great sweep of gaganas.

They flew at him: he stabbed, jabbed, but they were a great avenging cloud of wings and claws.

Old Vrano gave a shriek of wrath and flew at his eyes.

Koo landed on Claude’s back, hacking at the man’s neck with his beak.

Claude parried with his sword, but the birds kept coming, scratching at his eyes and face.

Gallia tipped in the air. She dived and fastened her beak on Claude’s wrist, digging into the flesh.

Anya darted forward, swinging the sword with all her strength, and he stumbled back and fell.

Coren and Koo and Gallia swooped to the ground, together picked up his sword in their beaks, and heaved it out of the window.

Anya walked to where her uncle was scrambling to his feet.

“Don’t move,” she said. He stopped, frozen in a kneeling crouch. “You would have hanged my father. My father, who loved you.”

“Argus would have been a weak king,” said Claude. His words came in gasps. “It was humiliating to be his brother!”

“Shut up! Don’t you dare talk about him! Don’t you even say his name!” said Anya.

“I knew what was necessary. I was born to be king. I was born knowing what power is, how gold can make it move. Your father never understood. With the dragons’ gold we would have been the richest island in the Archipelago.”

“Stolen gold! Gold you murdered for.”

“Who will miss a few dead dragons? Nobody would have been more powerful than I—do you understand that, Anya, or are you too naive and simpering to know what that means?” His voice rose, and turned mocking.

“Did your father bring his blushing little girl up to believe gold doesn’t matter?

That’s a lie that only the poor or the vain tell themselves.

There is nothing you cannot do with enough gold and enough fear behind you. ”

“I told you to shut up.” Anya raised her sword and held it at his throat. The tip was touching his skin. “You should be begging me not to kill you.”

His disgust covered his face. “Go on,” he said. “Go on, little girl.”

The sword was heavy in her hand; it shook.

“You don’t dare,” he said. “You don’t have it in you.”

“I would have said the same,” she said.

She swept the sword upward, cutting across the top of his ear. Blood ran down his neck. He froze.

“It was in me, but deep. You unleashed it.”

He tried to rise, and she sliced down and sideways, and blood leaped to the cloth at his arm.

“Move again,” she said, “and I will do it. I will kill you.”

He bent, gasping in pain, to clutch at his arm, and she swung the sword again. It nicked the tip of his chin. “I said don’t move. ” There was a roaring in her ears. “Put your hands behind your head.”

Claude did as she said. His face had transformed. For the first time, he was terrified of her. He saw it in her face. He saw, in the girl in front of him, the capacity to kill.

Anya knew, at that same moment, that she could do it. She hadn’t been certain, in her deepest heart. But now, here, she could feel it in her blood. She was capable of killing. Tears began to run down her face, but she held the sword at his neck.

Tears ran into her mouth. But she did not let herself sob; no motion shook her. She held the sword steady.

Kill him, said her heart. He murdered your grandfather. He would have killed your father. And he murdered you.

Kill him.

Her tears ran down her chin. A tear landed on the loquillan: one, two, three, four. Eight, ten. Twelve.

Her whole body was shaken by a spasm, and she nearly dropped the sword.

It was the loquillan. From its mirrored surface burst a fan of light, spreading like a screen across the room; and in the sheet of light, as clear as a mirror, she saw herself.

The mirror-Anya stood over her uncle. She held the sword at his throat. And then she said, “This is for my father.” She closed her eyes, and thrust the sword deep into his neck.

Anya felt the flesh yield, and the bone grate against the blade of the sword. She saw the blood gush in a great sweep toward her.

Then the scene was pure blinding white, and her vision burned. When her eyes cleared, she saw herself again, but now as an adult.

She was ferociously beautiful. She wore a white silk dress; on her head was her grandfather’s crown. Her face had lengthened and sharpened into something staggering, cut from marble. The lines around her face told her that she did not smile often.

Anya felt something pass through her like an arrow. She was inside this Anya: her own older self.

Anya sat on her grandfather’s throne. People clustered around her.

They were afraid of her, she could see; they were terrified.

Some admired her in their fear, some resented her.

She did not care. Some wished to beguile and charm her, so that she would help them.

Some wished to frighten her, or harm her, or conquer her.

This was the Anya who had killed Claude Argen. The act of killing her uncle had entered her blood. It had entered her heart. Anya could feel it: the presence of death, and its power over her. It was pitiless. It was inside her body forever.

Her hatred for Claude had not been healed by his death. Her revenge had yoked them together forever. She hated him still. It had seeped into her soul. Hatred was a poison. It had poisoned him, and it would poison her.

Anya—the real, young, living Anya; the Anya whose heart was still whole, and beating wildly as a bird’s—let out a cry. She reeled backward, back to herself, away from the light of the loquillan.

Her uncle still knelt at her feet; the sword was still in her hand, but she was breathing like she’d run a mile. Sweat mingled with the tears on her face.

Anya looked into Claude’s eyes. She could bring death into the room. Would he not deserve it?

It came to Anya in that moment with a total crystalline certainty: she wanted nothing to do with death.

She wanted nothing to do with endings. She wanted beginnings—new ideas, new plans, new joys, new truths, new futures. These things would not reach her across the gulf of killing.

Anya said: “I won’t kill you. I won’t give up my own heart just to see you dead.”

She looked at the throne. “And I won’t rule from that throne: not ever. Nobody should. We will find a better way.”

Anya dropped the sword on the ground. She nodded to the general of the guards. She stepped off the dais.

“He’ll need Dr. Ferrara,” she said. “He’s injured.”

She turned to walk down the aisle, past the stunned and staring faces. Nobody was surprised to see that the dragon followed her, pacing in her wake.

As she passed, every man bowed low, and every woman sank to the ground in a curtsy; a salute not to birth, now, but to bravery.

The gaganas flocked around her as she walked—dozens of them, coursing about her head, a glittering gold-and-silver procession for the queen she had chosen never to become.