Page 6 of The Poisoned King (Impossible Creatures #2)
The Grammar of Birds
Anya had not always lived in the castle. Indeed, she would gladly, if given the option and the matches, have burned it to the ground.
Until last year, Anya had lived her whole life with her father in a sandstone house in the vast forest that stretched out behind Argen Castle.
Winged unicorns flew over the treetops to drink in the great lake.
As a toddler, Anya had tried, once, to stroke them, but just once: only Gallia pulling her away by the hair had stopped her from being politely and graciously gored to death.
You never saw Anya without the royal gaganas, their golden beaks, silver claws, and iridescent black feathers.
Sometimes it was just old Gallia, her constant companion; sometimes a half dozen young birds of her own age, still fluffy in the neck and head.
Coren had once, in a fit of high-spirited delight, bitten off the tip of Anya’s ear.
He had refused to apologize. “I’m entitled, surely, to a tiny amount of your ear, in exchange for my friendship.
It was a very small piece.” At night, the entire flock of thirty came to roost along her bed and curtain rail.
The gaganas were not easy. They needed the windows open at all times, even in the snow.
And they had, Anya couldn’t deny, an odor to them.
But they were the greatest glories of her life.
Few children came by the forest, so Anya grew up with the birds as her most cherished friends.
They were the living creatures she adored most, second only to her father.
And they loved her, ferociously, birdwise adoring, in return.
Coren’s beak was her alarm clock, and Gallia carefully pecked off the ends of her hair so she never needed a hairdresser.
Best of all, the birds were her professors.
“I want,” her father had said to them, “for Anya to have a different education from mine; one far, far away from the money hunger of the royal court. Will you tutor her?”
And so they taught her history, philosophy, and mathematics and the ancient gagana songs, gleeful and wild, about castles and dragons and revenge.
They taught her sword-craft, using whittled sticks clutched in their beaks, three birds against Anya.
“I don’t need school,” she would say. “I’ve got the birds.
” Anya’s voice—though the recent elocution tutors had tried—could not be rid of some of the intonation of the gaganas.
Nor did she look un-birdlike herself; long and supple in the hands and feet, quick in the eyes.
Her father, Argus Argen, was the king’s elder son and heir.
Argus’s dream, though, was to be a plant scientist. He was tall and swift-smiling, and when he talked, he seemed to spark.
All her life Anya had helped him graft and nurture new hybrids; a rose-nettle, with beautiful stinging petals, and a snapdragon that could take the tip off your finger.
They bred nasthairtiums that made your hair grow an inch a day, and honeysuckle you could spread straight onto your toast. As soon as Anya could toddle, her father let her help—really help, not just watch but real pruning and cutting and planting.
Together they crossbred thirty-seven plants to make frogweed, which allowed you to breathe underwater for ten glorious minutes—but if you ate it more than once a day, she painfully discovered, it had the disagreeable effect of covering your bottom in pustules.
Argus protected every living thing that passed through the garden. He refused to kill even the snails. “We’re entangled in life,” he said. “All that lives is sacred.”
Anya and her father were attempting to cultivate the rascovnic, a wild herb that could open any lock or door.
It was shaped like a five-leaved clover and grew only on the island of Dousha.
“If we could find a way to extract seeds, Anya, and grow it across the whole Archipelago! What if the unlocking would work for more than doors? For blocked arteries or hearts?”
His younger brother, Claude, had rolled his eyes. “The locksmiths of the island wouldn’t thank you, Argus.”
Argus had only laughed; he loved his younger brother but could not quite be persuaded that he was a grown adult. Claude was three years younger, and generally reckoned the handsome one. Anya, who revered her father’s large eyebrows and crooked nose and big gentle hands, fervently disagreed.
But neither the king nor Claude came often to the forest, and so Argus had been free to experiment, and Anya had been free to leap and whistle and swim.
They were splendors, those times—with the exception of one month a year.
Anya always spent April in the castle: the king insisted on it.
“She mustn’t grow up a hoyden,” he said, “without a sense of what is due to her position.”
The visits were grim for Anya. The year she was seven, she had been forbidden to walk down the castle stairs by herself without someone coming to hold her hand, lest she slip.
Seven! Anya Argen could, at seven, climb to the top of the highest tree in the forest, with twenty gaganas guiding her way, perched on her hair, her back, her hands.
Anya knew that eventually, of course, her father would have to return to the castle, when her grandfather died and her father was crowned king. But King Halam was only seventy. They might have lived another ten years at least in the forest, had it not been for Anya’s mistake.