Poison (3 page)

“Come on, Poison,” he said. “All is not lost yet. Let's see what we have here.”

Fleet moved around the table and unwrapped the bundle. Inside was Azalea, dressed in roughly embroidered woollen pyjamas, lying still with her eyes closed. She looked as if she were asleep, a little pale but chubby-faced as always, with a crop of blonde hair.

“Is it dead?” Fleet asked, tugging one leg.

The changeling's eyes flickered open, and they were pupil-less orbs of black. The temperature seemed to drop a little under their cold regard. Though it did not move a muscle from where it lay on its side, it glared at Fleet balefully.

“Oh my,” said Fleet. “It really is a changeling.”

“I told you it was,” Poison said truculently. She was not yet too grief-stricken to snap at him.

Fleet scratched his stubbled cheek with his knuckle. “Better come in by the fire,” he said. He picked up the changeling and carried it with him into the next room, his reading room, where a pair of battered old chairs sat in front of the embers of last night's hearth. The room was dim, with thin, threadbare curtains pulled across the window, and it was stiflingly warm. A bookcase that put Poison's to shame dominated the shadowy back wall.

“Sit down, sit down,” he said, laying the changeling aside like it was a parcel. Poison settled herself, only now realizing that her feet were freezing inside her boots, as she had no socks on. She watched Fleet potter about behind her. He was a tall, rangy thing, without much flesh on his bones, with a large, solid nose and whiskery ears. His hair was a mix of grey and white, and still surprisingly thick for an old man, flopping about this way and that as he moved. He wore a faded old waistcoat and trousers; in fact, Poison had never seen him in anything else. A thought occurred to her suddenly.

“Did I wake you?” she asked.

“Hmm?” Fleet said over his shoulder as he ran his fingers over the spines of his books, searching for something.

“Just now? Did I wake you when I knocked?”

“I should say so,” Fleet replied with mock grumpiness. “You'd have raised the dead.”

“Do you
sleep
in those clothes as well?”

Fleet paused in his rummaging, for a beat too long. “I was asleep in that chair, if you must know. I'm an old man; I can sleep anywhere.” He sighed and turned away from the bookshelf. “I can't find it.”

“Find what?”

“
Machmus's Bestiary
,” he replied. “I was sure I had it.”

A sudden, chilling flash; the Scarecrow's fingers curling over the edge of the page, touching the skin of her wrist.

“It's at my house,” Poison replied. “And I'm not going near it again.”

“Ah,” said Fleet, seeming to understand. It was not quite the reaction Poison had expected.

“What do you mean, ‘
Ah
'?” she said, her voice rising.

“Books are dangerous things sometimes, Poison,” he replied. “They feed your imagination. Soup?”

“Soup?” Poison cried incredulously.

“Soup. Do you want some? You haven't had breakfast yet, I'd guess.”

“Fleet, what am I going to do about
this
?” she demanded, flinging a hand out at the changeling, which lay silently and immobile where Fleet had put it.

“Let me get you some soup,” said Fleet. “And I'll tell you.”

*

Fleet stoked up the fire and threw on some wood while the soup heated in the kitchen. As he did so, Poison explained to him all that had happened that morning. When the soup was ready he gave a bowl to Poison and took one for himself, furnishing them both with a pair of crusty rolls – real
wheat
bread, and not the tasteless mush made from the local marsh reeds. Then he sat in his usual chair, and Poison sat cross-legged before the fire in her thick hemp nightdress, and the old man began to talk.

“Phaeries are evil things, Poison,” he said. “Evil and magickal. The changeling and the Scarecrow; they are creatures of phaerie. They leave strangeness and illusion in their wake. They lie with their tongues and deceive your senses. What you saw in my book was an after-effect of the Scarecrow's sleep-dust. A trick of the mind.” He smiled grimly. “Most often their kind stay out of our affairs, for they already have enough of our Realm to roam without having to bother finding us in the marshes and the mountains; but the phaeries can't resist their mischief now and again.”

Poison glanced at where the changeling lay in the shadows on a low table at the back of the room, watching them with its black eyes. It had not moved a muscle from where it was put, and its stillness was as unsettling as its gaze.

“What have they done with her?” she asked quietly.

“They have taken her back to the Realm of Phaerie,” Fleet said, biting into a hunk of soup-soaked bread.

“But why?” Poison asked, her violet eyes tearing again. She forced her sorrow away. Now was not the time.

“That, I can't say,” Fleet replied. “Sometimes, the baby is returned. It could be a day, a week, a year, twenty years. Sometimes they come back the same age as when they were taken, when their parents are old and grey; sometimes they come back fully grown. None of them remember anything.”

“How many . . . how many times has this happened?” Poison asked, staring furiously into the mounting flames to dry her eyes.

“More than you know, Poison,” he said. “And it's happened in this very village more than once. But you did the right thing, you know. I see you learned from those books I gave you. If Snapdragon had killed it, the phaeries would never swap it back. Azalea would be gone for good.”

“Does. . . Can't anyone
do
anything?” she cried helplessly.

“It's like the mud-spiders and the murksnakes, like the goatfish and swamp lung and everything else here,” Fleet said, chewing. “It's part of life. You were unlucky, Poison, and they came for your sister.”

“Unlucky. . .” Poison repeated softly.

“You couldn't have stopped the Scarecrow, you know,” Fleet said. “Don't blame yourself. It puts that dust on you to keep you asleep. Then it takes the infant and puts a changeling in its place. You have to keep it fed – oh, they eat a
lot
, and many a back's been broken by working hard to try and keep a changeling – but if you ever want to see that child again, you'll do it. Some folks believe that the changeling is still their child, that it's just sick. I suppose it's easier if you let yourself believe that. Then one day, if you're one of the lucky ones, you'll find your child back in its crib and the changeling gone for ever. But some people never do.” He shrugged. “It's the way of things.”

But as he spoke, Poison felt a burning inside her, that grew with every word he said. Her tears had dried now, and in their place was something darker. Anger.

“I refuse to believe I'm hearing this!” she shouted suddenly, standing up and knocking her soup aside, untouched. “Not from you!”

“Ah, now you've spilled your—” Fleet began.

“Fleet!” she barked. “Listen! This is not part of the
way of things
, it is not part of
life
. Someone came and kidnapped my sister! Do you understand? Day after day I watch everyone around me put up with misery and death and squalor, and all of them justify it by those same words. It's only part of life because we
let
it be!” She was shouting now, red-faced in her anger, but Fleet seemed uncowed. “I'll not wait until the phaeries decide to return my sister; I'll not work myself to death to feed that black-eyed monster over there!”

“Then what will you do, Poison?” Fleet asked softly.

“I'll go and get her back!”

The words fell into silence. She glared at Fleet, and Fleet met her gaze unwaveringly. The fire snapped behind her in the dim room, sending shadows jumping across the old man's face.

“You do not know what you are saying, Poison,” he warned, his voice gone suddenly cold. “The world is much bigger than Gull, and far crueller.”

“Then I'll be crueller still,” she replied.

“Where will you go? And what will you do when you get there?”

“I'll go to the Phaerie Lord,” she said, deadly serious. “And I'll ask him for my sister back.”

“You don't even know he exists!”

“The Scarecrow exists,” she replied. “That changeling exists. Why not him?”

“And what about your father and Snapdragon?”

“I don't care about Snapdragon,” Poison replied. “And my father will grieve, I know; but better that than I give up as you'd have me do.”

“And the changeling?”

Poison was silent, glaring at him.

“You know your father will have to be told,” Fleet said. “This is not something that can be swept under the rug. You can't hide it from them. He and Snapdragon will have to look after that thing. And if you go, your father will be losing two daughters instead of one.”

“Can't you look after it? Keep it secret?” Poison begged.

“Oh, no,” said Fleet, warding off the suggestion. “I have other obligations outside Gull. I can't tend to that phaerie monster.”

Poison went silent again, her jaw set stubbornly.

“You have not thought about this in the slightest, have you?” Fleet prompted.

“No.”

“And you're going anyway.”

“I am.”

For a time, Fleet searched her face. She was always wilful, but
this . . .
he had never seen her so determined upon anything. A slow grin spread across his face.

“You really do have the Old Blood in you,” he said.

“Fleet, time is short. I want to be gone before my father wakes. Are you going to help me or not?”

“Of course I'll help you, Poison,” he said. “You only had to ask.”

 

The wraith-catcher returned to his cart in the afternoon, his morning's business done. He came labouring through the trees, clanking and clattering as the metal pots that hung from a webbing over his heavy coat bashed against each other. Not a bad Soulswatch Eve, and not a good one. There were plenty of better spots to catch marshwraiths, but Gull was his territory, and he liked the way the villagers threw themselves into their work. Some wraith-catchers had to go out and hang the traps personally, work from dusk till dawn. All he had to do was set the villagers to it and give them a pittance in the morning for their trouble, one copper mark for each marshwraith they brought him. They were too ignorant to know that copper marks were not even used in currency any more beyond the Black Marshes. Not that it mattered, he supposed; none of them was ever liable to go far enough to find out.

His cart had wide wheels with studded rims, and chains wrapped around them for better purchase in the mud. It was a low, flat thing, dirty but sturdy, and pulled by a grint. Grints were the only beasts of burden who were adapted well enough to get around the Black Marshes; with their spatulate, webbed feet and flat, beaver-like tails, they never sank into the mud even when the cart did, and they had the muscle to pull it out when it got mired. They were lizardine things with dark green scales, five feet at the shoulder with blunt muzzles and incurious yellow eyes on either side of their head. Granted, they were stubborn and slow, but they were also strong and docile, and they needed very little looking after. Unlike the lizards they resembled, they were vegetarian, and they could digest almost anything that grew in the swamp, poisonous or not.

Huffing, he pulled back the tarpaulin on the cart and dumped the metal jars with their bright prisoners inside, crashing them against the jars that were already there. He had almost a full load now, as he had expected; it was time to go and sell them. He wrinkled his nose as he clambered around to the front of the cart and up on to the driver's bench there. It would be a relief to get out of this stinking place.

It was then that he noticed the girl standing in the trees nearby. She had an odd face, a strange sullen intensity about her, and she was watching him with her large, violet eyes. He brushed his thick white moustache with the back of his hand and looked her over. She was wearing a ragged dress, a simple, long-sleeved thing made of thin hide and scabbed with dirt at the hem. There were sturdy boots on her feet, a heavy pack on her back.

“You can't come with me, girl,” he said, guessing her intention. Nobody from the village had need of a pack like that unless they were going far.

“I can pay,” she replied.

“Ha! And what can you pay with?”

She walked up to the side of the cart and held up a shiny silver sovereign. “This.”

“That?” the wraith-catcher harumphed. “I'll need more.”

Poison's gaze did not flicker. “This is more than enough,” she said.

The wraith-catcher's shaggy white brows came together in a frown. “And where did you get a silver sovereign, girl? Stole it, did you?”

“None of your concern. Do you want it or not?”

He weighed it up for a moment, then reached out to take it from her. She snatched it away. “After we get there.”

“Where are you going?” he replied, indignant. For a girl one-third his age, she certainly possessed an uncanny amount of front.

“Shieldtown,” she replied, testing out the unfamiliar name. Just the act of speaking it aloud seemed to her breathlessly exotic.

“I see,” he replied, studying her. “And what if someone comes after you, hmm? A boy, perhaps? Or your parents?”

“Nobody will come,” she said levelly.

The wraith-catcher sucked on his lower lip and looked at the grint, thinking it over. Eventually he looked back at her and nodded. “Come on then, girl. But don't you try to cheat me, or so help me I'll show you what sorrow is.”

“I know what sorrow is,” she assured him, clambering up on to the driver's bench with him. “My name is Poison.”

“Choose it yourself, did you?”

It was supposed to be a joke, but Poison replied earnestly. “Yes.”

The wraith-catcher frowned again, already wondering if he had made a mistake in agreeing to take her with him. “Bram,” he said by way of introduction.

“That's not a marsh name,” she observed.

“I'm not a marsh person,” he replied. “Shieldtown, you said? You're in luck. I'm on my way there now.”

Poison nodded. Of course he was.

 

There was a certain tree that grew in the marshes called the clubroot tree, whose leaves were famed for their elastic quality. Poison had got hold of some as a child, nailed one end to the planking of a platform and pulled it out to see how far it would go. She was fascinated by how the leaf thinned as it became longer and longer, and finally, when she had pulled it too far, it snapped and sent her tumbling.

It was as good an analogy as any for the sensation that had been growing in her all afternoon. Within an hour, the wraith-catcher's slow-moving cart had carried her as far away from her home as she had ever been; by the time evening set in, the world had become unfamiliar. She felt her connection with Gull like that leaf of the clubroot tree, stretching thinner and thinner, straining harder and harder to pull her back as she got further away. She began to think of never seeing Fleet again, or her father, or even Snapdragon. She became acutely aware that she was utterly, totally alone now. If the wraith-catcher chose to throw her off his cart here, she had no bearing or direction. Home was behind her, and in her heart was a sudden and terrible ache, a longing that she had never imagined she could feel.

Then, as dusk fell, the link snapped. Her grief and sorrow upended and became excitement. With the realization that there was no way back came the knowledge that the only way was forward. Wasn't she free now? Hadn't she begun what she had always dreamed of beginning? Wasn't this the first step on the road out of Gull, and into the world of Fleet's legends?

“What are you grinning about?” Bram asked her. It was the first thing he had said for hours.

Poison, who had not realized that she
was
grinning, shrugged. “Why shouldn't I grin?”

“People that grin usually have something to hide,” Bram grumped.

“Oh, I most definitely have
that
,” she replied, widening her grin just to annoy him.

As night came on, Bram brought them to a low hill where the soil was rocky and miraculously dry. The trees held back from the bald top of the hill, straggling round it in a circle, enough to obscure their view of the marshes but not enough to crowd them in.

“Here's where we stop for the night,” Bram said, drawing on the reins to bring the grint to a halt. It murmured some kind of purring chuckle low in its throat, obviously unhappy about the lack of greenery for it to crop.

Bram made a fire from the wood that he had in his cart. Poison waited about nervously. She had never slept outside before. There were too many things that crawled and slithered, too many dangers in the marsh. Bram cast a glance at her from under his bushy white brows, then motioned with the stick he was prodding the fire with.

“Sit down, girl, and stop acting like a squirrel. There's nothing to be afraid of. The fire keeps them away.”

Her fears were little eased, but she felt piqued that her nerves had shown through. She slung her pack before the fire and sat on it, wondering what a squirrel was but unwilling to admit her ignorance. The warmth on her face and hands seemed to have a new edge out here, in contrast to the fire in the hearth at home. Here, without walls to keep them safe, it was the only source of comfort against the night, and all the more precious for it.

“I found this spot a while back,” Bram said, making a vague gesture with one gloved hand at the bare hilltop. “Something in the soil, don't know what. Keeps it dry, keeps some of the slimier things away. I always stop here on my way from Gull. It's one of the only habitable places in this disgusting marsh.”

Poison didn't know what to say to that.

“Why is it that people live here?” he asked. She could not tell if he was talking to her or to himself.

“I was born here,” Poison said simply. She reached into her pack and brought out a string of sausages, from which she snapped off four and then stuffed the others back.

“Are they
pork
sausages?” Bram asked, peering across the fire at her.

Poison shrugged. “Could be,” she replied. “I don't know.”

“Where did you get them?”

“A friend gave them to me,” she replied. The same friend who had supplied her with everything in her pack: food, blankets, a knife, even a battered old map. The same friend who had told her that the wraith-catcher's next port of call would be Shieldtown, and given her the name of a man who could help her there. The same friend who had promised to shoulder the burden of taking the changeling back to her grieving father, of explaining what had happened and where Poison had gone; because Poison knew that if she had to break Hew's heart that way, to tell him that he had lost one daughter and was now losing another, then she would never have had the courage to leave. If ever she had doubts about Fleet's stories before, she had shed them now. He was a genuine adventurer, and a true friend. The only one she had.

“I have an eyefish that I caught only the day before yesterday,” Bram said. “I'd be happy to trade you the whole thing for those four sausages.”

Poison gave him a look. “I've never tried pork.”

“But you like eyefish, hmm? Everyone in the marsh likes eyefish.”

“But I've never
tried
pork,” Poison said, more emphatically this time. Bram's obvious hunger for the sausages only made her more determined to keep them.

“I am taking you all the way to Shieldtown, you know,” he reminded her.

“And I'm paying you more than the trip is worth,” she replied implacably. At least, that was what Fleet had assured her when he gave her the coin, and many more besides.

Bram grumped for a while as they cooked their food. He had produced a blackened metal grill that stood on thin legs over the flames, and cut strips of eyefish to put on it. Poison put her sausages on as well. She had no idea how long to cook them for, but she had a reasonably keen instinct for that sort of thing and was not overly worried.

“Is it a good life, being a wraith-catcher?” she asked suddenly.

“Good as any, I suppose,” he replied. He shifted his bulk in the firelight, and was silent for a time before deciding to continue. “Lonely, though. Always going from one place to the next, never staying long. I see other wraith-catchers from time to time . . . we cross paths . . . but we're a pretty solitary breed. You have to be.”

Poison nodded. She understood that. She glanced over at the cart, where the grint was asleep, still tethered to his load of metal jars.

“Do you suppose they're alive? The marshwraiths?”

“Hmm?”

“Do they think and feel like we do?”

Bram peeled a strip of eyefish off the grill and laid it down on its uncooked side. “You ask a lot of questions, girl.”

“Only about things I don't know,” she replied.

Bram barked a laugh. “I've never thought about it,” he mused. “Maybe they're just mindless flashes of light. Maybe they're like fireflies. Or maybe they're phaerie things. It's all the same to me.”

“You think they might be phaeries?” Poison asked.

“Here, you'll burn them,” Bram said, rolling her sausages over with the end of a stick to expose the browning undersides. “If they're phaeries, then so much the better. I'd feel less guilt about caging a phaerie than I ever would an insect. You know, of all the things crawling around in the Realms, they're the worst.”

“What's it like? Out there?”

“You mean beyond the marsh?” Bram asked. “Better than here, anyway.”

Poison felt a strange thrill. She had never heard anyone say that about the world beyond the marsh. Not even Fleet, who spoke of all kinds of wonders and dangers, ever said that the world outside was
better
.

“There are places you don't go, of course,” he said. “The old cities. . . The phaeries are all over them. And there's ghoblin tribes here and there, up in the mountains, and trolls and dwarrow in the deep places. You know, this used to be
Man
'
s
Realm, so they say. The other things kept to their own Realms. Not been that way for a long time, though. One thing you can say about us humans, we never did know how to stick together.” He looked out at the dark wall of the marsh, which was alive with insect noises. “But we weren't meant to live in places like this. Man was meant to rule the plains and the hills and the valleys, not skulk in the forests and marshes and hide in the mountains.” His eyes returned to the fire. “That's the way it is, I suppose.”