Page 8 of The Poisoned King (Impossible Creatures #2)

A Castle Education

What had been “done about it,” despite Anya’s furious fight, was that she and her father had been forced to leave the forest and move to the castle.

“It might not be that bad,” her father had said.

It was worse. Here she was trained in the things that they said a princess must be trained in: diplomacy, dance, deportment, etiquette, historiography, cartography, geography. She grew to loathe anything that ended in -ography .

At first she fought. When the mistress came for her etiquette classes, she found that her young charge had climbed out of the window. When Anya was required to talk to heads of state, she flushed violently up to her forehead and stared at the floor. But eventually, they won.

“They’ll never let us go back to the forest,” Gallia said, “until you prove that you can do it.”

So Anya became, gradually, a perfect princess.

She walked so that it looked like she was gliding.

She danced waltzes, and spent an hour a day sitting at her backboard to perfect her posture, her feet pointed and crossed at the ankle.

She was drilled in charm by a professor from Lithia.

She learned the twenty-one official smiles and the five approved laughs: delighted, amused, polite, warning, and repressive.

She was taught sentences to repeat— How kind of you to come.

Have you traveled far? Isn’t it beautiful weather?

The king was pleased—but he did not let her return to the forest. “She’s an asset to us now,” he said. “She must stay.”

When Anya thought ahead to her life as an adult, she saw a long tunnel of processions and handshaking and waving. Then she would turn away, and kiss Gallia particularly violently. There had to be a way out, but she could not see it.

Everywhere she went, she was watched—by governesses, advisors, councilors, waiting staff.

She was not a person here; she was the future, to be molded, surveilled.

She met almost no other children; the cooks’ boys and the scribes’ girls were forbidden to play with her.

The castle was vast, but the eyes on her made it feel small.

She missed her father like a daily ache; he was here in the castle, but kept so busy he could barely escape to find her for half an hour a day.

When he could, he brought her gifts: a phoenix feather, biscuits to share with the gaganas, and once, three precious stalks of their rascovnic. “Keep them safe, Anya.”

There were only two parts she did not hate.

One was the clothes, exquisitely made from sea-silk.

She’d never cared about clothes before, but in the old stone castle, in which everyone seemed to wear gray and black, the colors felt like oxygen.

After the gaganas’ claws had shredded the shoulders of two dresses to pieces, she had persuaded the seamstresses to reinforce the shoulders with leather, hidden under the silk.

And second, she discovered a series of secret passages.

So far she had found seven doors behind tapestries.

There was one behind a bookshelf in the North Wing that came out in the laundry room, and one behind a painting of a simpering mermaid in the East Wing that came out round the corner from the Amber Hall.

The air in the passageways was stuffy and dusty underfoot.

There were tiny jorogumos: spiders that glowed silver in the dark, and cast light.

Some could grow to be the size of a house: but the small ones were harmless—at least, if you didn’t touch them.

She did not tell anyone about the passages—not even her father, in case he forbade her to use them. So she kept her counsel and became more silent, more alert, more sharply noticing: a child made of love and anger and waiting, waiting, waiting for something to change.