The Poison Eaters_ And Other Stories Part 17

Corny nodded, helpless to do anything else. He took a deep breath and let himself be guided to the door.

"Leave him alone," Luis said. Corny turned to find that Luis was holding Roiben's wrist. The welts in Luis's brown skin where the Night Court had ripped out his iron piercings, loop by loop, had healed to scars, but Luis's single cloudy eye, put out by a faerie because Luis had the Sight, would never get better.

Roiben raised one pale brow. He looked more amused than worried. Maybe he was angry enough to hope for an excuse to hurt someone.

"Don't worry about me," Corny told Luis stiffly. "I'll be right back. Go back to your friends."

Luis frowned and Corny silently willed him to go away. There was no point in both of them getting in trouble.

"You're not getting him without a fight," Luis said quietly.

"I mislike your tone," said Roiben, pulling his wrist free with a sudden twist of his arm. "Cornelius and I have some things to discuss. It's naught to do with you."

Luis turned to Corny. "You told him about the ad? Are you an idiot?"

"He figured it out for himself," Corny said.

"Is that all, Luis? Have we your permission to go outside?" Roiben asked.

"I'm going with you," Luis said.

"No you're not." Corny shoved at Luis' shoulder, harder than he'd intended. "You're never around for anything else, why be around for this? Go back to your friends. Why don't you go study with them or whatever you do? Go back and admit you're sick of me already. I bet you never even told them you had a boyfriend."

Luis blanched.

"That's what I thought," Corny said. "Just break up with me already."

"What's wrong with you?" asked Luis. "Are you really going to be p.i.s.sed off at people who you've never met-just because I go to school with them? You hate them, that's why I don't tell them about you."

"I hate them because they're what you want me to be," Corny said. "Nagging me to register for cla.s.ses. Wanting me to stay clear of faeries even though my best friend is one. Wanting me to be someone I'm never going to be."

Luis looked shocked, like each word was a slap. "All I want is for you not to get yourself killed."

"I don't need your pity," Corny said and pushed through the door, leaving Roiben to follow him. It felt good, the adrenaline rushing through his veins. It felt like setting the whole world on fire.

"Wait," Luis called from behind him. "Don't go."

But it was too late to turn back. Corny walked out of the warm coffee shop, onto the sidewalk and then turned into the mouth of the dark, stinking alley that ran next to Moon in a Cup. He heard Roiben's relentless footsteps approaching.

Corny leaned his forehead against the cold brick wall and closed his eyes. "I really screwed that up, didn't I?"

"You said that you envied what you feared and hated what you envied." Roiben rested his long fingers on Corny's shoulder. "But it is as easy to hate what you love as to hate what you fear."

Roiben leaned against the wall of the alley, unsure of what else to say. His own rage at himself and his memories had dulled in the face of Corny's obvious misery. He had already come up with a vague idea for a fitting punishment, but it seemed cruel to do it now. Of course, perhaps cruelty should be the point.

"I don't know what's wrong with me," Corny said, head bent so that Roiben could see the nape of his neck, already covered in gooseflesh. Corny had left Moon in a Cup without his jacket and his thin T-shirt was no protection against the wind.

"You were only trying to keep him safe," Roiben said. "I think even he knows it."

Corny shook his head. "No, I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to hurt him before he got a chance to hurt me. I'm ruining our relationship and I just don't know how to stop myself."

"I'm hardly the person to advise you," Roiben said stiffly. "Recall Silarial. I have more than once mistaken hate for love. I have no wisdom here."

"Oh, come on," Corny said. "You're my best friend's boyfriend. You must talk to her sometimes-you must talk to her like this."

"Not like this," Roiben said, not without irony. But in truth the way that Corny was speaking felt dangerous, as though one's feelings might only continue to work if they remained undisturbed.

"Look, you seem grim and miserable most of the time, but I know you love her."

"Of course I love her," Roiben snapped.

" How can you?" Corny asked. He took a deep breath and spoke again, so quickly that the words tumbled over one another. "How can you trust trust someone that much? I mean, she's just going to hurt you, right? What if someday she just stops liking you? What if she finds someone else-" Corny stopped abruptly, and Roiben realized he was frowning ominously. His fingers had dug into the pads of his own palms. someone that much? I mean, she's just going to hurt you, right? What if someday she just stops liking you? What if she finds someone else-" Corny stopped abruptly, and Roiben realized he was frowning ominously. His fingers had dug into the pads of his own palms.

"Go on," Roiben said, deliberately relaxing his body.

Corny ran a hand through his dyed black hair. "She's going to eventually get tired of putting up with you never being around when the important stuff is going on, never changing while she's figuring out her own life. Eventually, you'll just be a shadow."

Roiben found that he'd been clenching his jaw so tightly that his teeth ached. It was everything he was afraid of, laid before him like a feast of ashes.

"That's what I feel like I'm like. Going nowhere while Luis has gone from living on the street to some fancy university. He's going to be a doctor someday-a real one-and what am I going to be?"

Roiben nodded slowly. He'd forgotten they were talking about Corny and Luis.

"So how do you do it?" Corny demanded. "How do you love someone when you don't know if it's forever or not? When he might just leave you?"

"Kaye is the only thing that saves me from myself," Roiben said.

Corny turned at that and narrowed his eyes. "What do you mean?"

Roiben shook his head, unsure of how to express any of his tangled thoughts. "I hadn't recalled her in a long time-Clara. When I was a child, I had a human nurse enchanted to serve me. She couldn't love me." Roiben hesitated. "She couldn't love me, because she had no choices. She wasn't free to love me. She never had a chance. I too have been enchanted to serve. I understand her better now."

He felt a familiar revulsion thinking of his past, thinking of captivity with Nicnevin, but he pushed past it to speak. "After all the humiliations I have suffered, all the things I have done for my mistresses at their commands, here I am in a dirty human restaurant, serving coffee to fools. For Kaye. Because I am free to. Because I think it would please her. Because I think it would make her laugh."

"It's definitely going to make her laugh," Corny said.

"Thus I am saved from my own grim self," Roiben said, shrugging his shoulders, a small smile lifting his mouth.

Corny laughed. "So you're saying the world is cold and bleak, but infinitesimally less bleak with Kaye around? Could you be be any more depressing?" any more depressing?"

Roiben tilted his head. "And yet, here you are, more miserable than I."

"Funny." Corny made a face.

"Look, you can make someone appear to love you," Roiben said as carefully as he had put the jagged piece of broken china on the counter. "By enchantment or more subtle cruelties. You could cripple him such that he would forget that he had other choices."

"That's not what I want," Corny said.

Roiben smiled. "Are you sure?"

" Are you you? Yes, I'm sure," Corny said hotly. "I just don't want to keep antic.i.p.ating the worst. If it's going to be over tomorrow, then let it be over right now so I can get on with the pain and disappointment."

"If there is nothing but this," Roiben said. "If we are to be shadows, changeless and forgotten, we will have to dine on these memories for the rest of our days. Don't you want a few more moments to chew over?"

Corny shivered. "That's horrible. You're supposed to say that I'm wrong."

"I'm only repeating your words." Roiben brushed silver hair back from his face.

"But you believe them," said Corny. "You actually think that's what's going to happen with you and Kaye."

Roiben smiled gently. "And you're not the fatalist you pretend. What was it you said? More afraid equals more of a jerk More afraid equals more of a jerk. You're afraid, nothing more."

Corny snorted a little when Roiben said jerk jerk.

" Yeah, I guess," he said, looking down at the asphalt and the strewn garbage. "But I can't stop stop being afraid." being afraid."

"Perhaps, then, you could address the jerk part," Roiben said. "Or perhaps you could tell Luis, so he could at least try to rea.s.sure you."

Corny tilted his head, as if he was seeing Roiben for the first time. "You're afraid, too."

"Am I?" Roiben asked, but there was something in Cornelius's face that he found unnerving. He wondered what Corny thought he was looking at.

"I bet you're afraid you'll start hoping, despite your best intentions," Corny said. "You're okay with doom and gloom, but I bet it's really scary to think things might work out. I bet it's f.u.c.king terrifying to think she might love you the way you love her."

"Mayhaps." Roiben tried not to let anything show on his face. "Either way, before we go back inside I have a geas to place on you. Something to remind you of why you ought keep secrets secret."

"Oh come on," said Corny with a groan. "What about our meaningful talk? Aren't we friends now? Don't we get to do each other's nails and overlook each other's small, amusing betrayals?"

Roiben reached out one cold hand. "Afraid not."

Kaye was sitting on the counter of Moon in a Cup, looking annoyed, when Corny and Roiben walked back through the doors. Catching sight of them, her expression went slack with astonishment.

Luis, beside her, choked on a mouthful of hot chocolate and needed to be slapped several times on the back by Val before he recovered himself.

Cornelius's punishment was simple. Roiben had glamoured him to have small bone-pale horns jutting from his temples and had given his skin a light blue sheen. His ears tapered to delicate points. The glamour would last a single month-from one fat, full moon to the next. And when he made coffee, he would have to face all those hopeful faerie seekers.

"I guess I deserve this," Corny said to no one in particular.

"Why did I even try to save you?" Luis said. Though his friends had gone, he was still there, still patiently waiting. Roiben hoped that Corny noticed that before all else.

Kaye walked toward Roiben. "I bet I know what you've been thinking," she said, shaking her head. "Bad things."

"Never when you're here," he told her, but he wasn't sure she heard as her arm wrapped around his waist so she could smother her helpless giggling against his chest. He drank in the warmth of her and tried, for once, to believe this could all last.

The Poison Eaters

I trust that your bonds are not too tight, my son. Please don't struggle. Don't bother. You're soft. All princes are soft, and these cells are built for hardened men.

It is a shame that you never met your grandmother. You are very like with your tempers and your rages. I imagine she would have doted on you. How ironic that Father tried her for being a poisoner. Right now, especially, Paul, I imagine irony is much on your mind.

The morning of her execution she had her attendants dress her all in red and braid her hair with fresh roses. Wine-colored stones cluttered her fingers. There are several paintings of it; she died opulently. It was drizzling. I was to walk her to her tomb. It was something like a wedding processional as she took my arm and we went together, down the steep steps. The place was dark and stank of incense. My mother leaned close to me and whispered that I looked splendid in black. I remember not being able to say anything, only taking her hand and pressing it. Outside, the rain began to fall hard. We heard the shrieks of the a.s.semblage; aristocrats don't like to be wet.

My mother smiled and said, "I bet they wish they were down here where it's dry."

I forced a smile and made myself kiss her cheek and bid her farewell. The masons were waiting at the top of the stairs.

My mother and I were not close, but she was still my mother. I was a dutiful son. I had commanded the cooks to put the sharpest of my hunting knives beneath the food they had prepared for her. I wonder if you would do that for me, Paul. Perhaps you would. After all, it cost me nothing to be kind.

See this cup? A beautiful thing, solid gold, one of the few treasures of our family that remains. It was my father's. He had a cupbearer bring him his wine in it, even as his other guests drank from silver. I have it here beside me, just as you filled it-half with poison and half with cider, so that it will go down easy.

I have a story to tell you. You've always been restless, too busy to hear stories of people long dead and secrets that no longer matter. But now, Paul, bound and gagged as you are, you can hardly object to my telling you a tale: * * * *

Sometimes at night the three sisters would sleep in one bed, limbs tangling together. Despite that, they would never get warm. Their lips would stay blue and sometimes one of them would shake or cramp, but they were used to that. Sometimes, in the mornings, when women would bring them their breakfasts, one might touch them by accident and the next day she would be missing. But they were used to that, too. Not that they did not grieve. They often wept. They wept over the mice they would find, stiff and cold, on the stone floor of their chamber; over the hunting dogs that would run to them when they were out walking on the hills, jumping up and then falling down; over the b.u.t.terfly that once landed on Mirabelle's cheek for a moment, before spiraling to the ground like a bit of paper.

One winter, their father gave them lockets. Each locket had the painting of a boy inside of it. They took turns making up stories about the boys. In one story, Alice's picture, who they'd taken to calling Nicholas, was a knight with a silver arm, questing after a sword cooled from its forge with the blood of sirens. At night, the sword became a siren with hair as black as ink and Nicholas fell in love with her. At this point the story stopped because Alice stormed off, annoyed that Cecily had made up a story where the boy from her locket fell in love with someone else.

Each day they would eat a salad of what looked like flowering parsley. Afterwards, their hands would tremble and they would become so cold that they had to sit close to the fire and scorch themselves. Sometimes their father came in and watched them eat, but he was careful to never touch them. Instead, he would read them prayers or lecture on the dangers of sloth and the importance of needlework. Occasionally, he would have one of them read from Homer.

Summer was their favorite time. The sun would warm their sluggish blood and they would lie out in the garden like snakes. It was on one of those jaunts that the blacksmith's apprentice first spotted Alice. He started coming around a lot after that, reading his weepy poetry and trying to get her to pay him attention. Before long, Alice was always crying. She wanted to go to him, but she dared not.

"He's not the boy in your locket," Mirabelle said.

"Don't be stupid." Alice wiped her reddened eyes. "Do you think that we're supposed to marry them and be their wives? Do you think that's why we have those lockets?"

Cecily had been about to say something and stopped. She'd always thought the boys in the lockets would be theirs someday, but she did not want to say so now, in case Alice called her stupid too.

"Imagine any of us married. What would happen then, sisters? We are merely knives in the process of being sharpened."

"Why would Father do that?" Cecily demanded.

"Father?" Alice demanded. "Do you really think he's your father? Or mine? Look at us. How could you, Mirabelle, be short and fair while Cecily is tall and dark? How could I have b.r.e.a.s.t.s like melons, while hers are barely currants? How could we all be so close in age? We three are no more sisters than he is our father."

Mirabelle began to weep. They went to bed that night in silence, but when they awoke, Mirabelle would no longer eat. She spit out her bitter greens, even when she became tired and languid. Cecily begged her to take something, telling her that they were sisters no matter what.

"Different mothers could explain our looks," Alice said, but she did not sound convinced and Mirabelle would not be comforted.

Their father tried to force Mirabelle to eat, but she pushed food into her cheek only to spit it out again when he was gone. She got thinner and more wan, her body shriveling, but she did not die. She faded into a thin wispy thing, as ephemeral as smoke.

"What does it mean?" Cecily asked.