Chapter Twenty
TWENTY
Of course it would be a test of poison.
Deceptive.
Deadly.
Just like the lie that every noble on the isle is apparently in on. And the Whisperers…
I hate the way betrayal tastes. Bitter and sharp as acid, and way too familiar at this point. Wolf’s green eyes burn in my mind, and all I can think of is how much I want to slam my fist against his chest and yell until my voice breaks.
Or he does.
How could the Whisperers keep this from us all? Every one of us deserves to know the truth—to know that there’s still something left worth fighting for.
That there is still brilliant, wild hope left for our home.
The Whisperers aren’t just fighting to be able to use magic that mages might get from somewhere else. I’m sure of it. They’re fighting to save the magic left in the Seven Wells.
Magic that belongs to us all.
I close my eyes and tilt my face back to the sky above. Shaking breaths don’t come close to dulling the shock pulsing in a rampant beat through my bones.
There’s no way Wolf’s words in that temple were a coincidence, is there?
I look forward again.
Sapphire eyes pin on me, and ice blooms over my body.
There’s no shock on the prince’s smooth, cold face from his stepmother’s words.
And he’s the only one not cheering at all her vile words about magic.
I grab so hard on to the table ledge that my nails dig into the wood. The splintering pain slices through the haze of shock.
Old Ones, this changes everything.
I draw in a shaking breath just as the High Queen’s crimson lips curve and she glares down from the dais.
“In front of you is a challenge just as deadly as the threat magic poses for this isle. Each cup contains a poison. Some will have more than others, and none are entirely safe. Choose one to drink until you empty the cup. Pick well, and you will live. Pick poorly…”
She doesn’t bother to finish.
The nobles’ deafening cheers rip me out of my head and right back to the fencing yard, staring down at a table with around half a dozen cups. The standing screens separate me from sight of the noble daughters, and them from each other.
The bitter rage coursing through my veins is as dangerous as any of the poisons in front of me. I have to control it so I can think. My wits are the only thing that can save me now.
The High Queen’s pale glare flashes over me, lip curling in disgust. “You have five minutes to choose a cup and drink until nothing remains,” she says, then flips over a heavy hourglass on the banister, and the grains of sand start to fall. “Begin.”
Sweat gathers along my upper lip.
I wipe it away and fight to focus on the cups laid out in front of me.
Keeva would know what to do—even though just thinking of her and Finn makes pain sliver into my heart. Does either of them know there’s still magic left?
Hurt flares deep in my chest.
How can anyone keep a secret this big for years?
And the fact that the High Queen admitted this in front of not just Eireician nobles but the Leonese, too?
Old Ones, she must be so certain of her grip on our isle that she’s no longer trying to keep the truth from foreign nobles, from diplomats.
Does she want them to know that she has the power to drain what’s left, and no one can stop her?
But—I only have five minutes.
None of the questions hammering in my skull are going to help me pick which poison to drink. Everything that isn’t right in front of me, I have to shove away. It won’t work forever, but that doesn’t matter. It can work for now.
For all the hours I’ve spent around Keeva’s stall, did any of it really stick? She taught me how to pick apart powders and leaves, made sure I learned which ones might paralyze or blind or even drive a person mad. No one is immune to the right dose—not peasants or nobles or kings.
I focus on the cups.
Five of them, all filled with different liquids.
There’s a stoneware cup the color of sand with warm amber tea—it gives off the heavy waft of honey.
Keeva once said you can hide just about anything under honey’s dense sweetness, and my mind jumps to possibilities of obvious poisons. A musty, piss-like scent lingers just under the sweetness, easy to recognize and one of the most easily available poisons.
Hemlock, deadly fast at paralyzing the ability to breathe.
So… not that one.
A stemmed glass the shape of a rose is filled to the brim with dark, almost purple wine. I bring it to my nose, inhale deeply—and frown.
There’s nothing obvious about the scent to make me wary, just the usual smell of earth and bright berries. But I swirl the glass, tilting it so the wine almost pours out and I can see right to the bottom. That’s how I catch it.
Grit so fine, it would be easy to mistake for sediment left over from the winemaking process. I recognize it in a heartbeat, from hours spent helping Keeva grind the bark. Yew extract—deadliest when gathered during winter and ground from its evergreen needles.
Slow-acting, but certain to bring on stomach pain, diarrhea, convulsions, then death.
No, thank you.
The glass shakes in my grip as I set it down.
The crowd watches all of us with a hush, but I ignore them and turn to the next one: a small porcelain glass no taller than my thumb, barely big enough to hold an ounce of what smells like uisce beatha, the wickedly strong spirit distilled in the inner hills of the isle.
Again, I think back to Keeva’s lessons. The stronger the taste of what you put a poison in, the more a poisoner can hide. I might not remember the names of every flower and herb I’ve helped her handle over the years, but I remember enough.
“It’s so small,” one of the noble daughters to my left muses. Aisling? Neve? I can’t tell. “There can’t be as much poison in the smallest one, right? It must be safer.”
“You don’t know that,” a voice I recognize as Oona’s whispers back.
Apparently, there’s no rule that we can’t talk during this test—not that any of them would talk to me.
“Like you know any better,” the first voice bites back. I’m pretty sure now that’s Neve. “You always think you’re smarter than everyone else.”
There’s a faint sound, like the rattle of jeweled rings on porcelain, and a loud swallow.
I close my eyes, heart hammering in my ears, and hear a gasp roll off the crowd.
Wood creaks, like hundreds of people are leaning forward all at once. The moment hangs suspended around us, tension sharpening in the chilled air.
Time passes in slow heartbeats.
Old Ones, we only have five minutes. I have to pick one, but…
The noble daughter to my left coughs.
A hush quivers on a knife’s edge through the crowd, and she coughs again, a sputter that builds and builds into a fit of choking.
“No.” The plea is a broken whisper, and her shadow shifts behind the screen immediately to my left, closest to me in the row of us lined up along the table.
She spasms, stumbling backward, so she’s far enough behind the table that the screen no longer hides her from me. Neve. Blood spills between neat teeth as one hand claws at her throat.
Neve’s chest seizes, stiffening in heaving shudders, and the thumb-sized porcelain vial falls to the sand at her feet.
She looks out at the crowd, up at the dais—at the High Queen.
“Help.” Neve chokes on the desperate plea.
No one does. No one moves a single step toward her.
Her knees give out, and she collapses in the sand. Her limbs twitch. Blood foams at her lips in a reddish-pink froth. Spasms rock through her, and even as she jerks helplessly on the ground, no one says a word. Not as she stops breathing. Not even as her eyes glaze over.
Silence builds, and Oona breaks it with a sneer, too soft for anyone but us girls around the table to hear. “I think it, because it’s true.”
No one comes to get Neve from the sand. Her graying body lies there, just a few feet away from me. No mourners keen from the stands. If her family is here, every one of them is silent.
And even though everything in me screams not to, I draw my gaze up to the dais.
To him.
Prince Cashel stands as still as a statue bathed in the silver glow of ice sparkling like diamonds in the hazy sunlight.
His midnight-blue tunic is snug over his shoulders, tight and tense, and he holds one ringed hand locked on the hilt of the sword at his side.
And while everyone else stares at Neve, dead in the sand, his eyes stay locked on me.
Slowly—as if he wants me to see—he looks from the cups laid out in front of me to the shimmering bowl of ice on the table before him, then raises his own glass to his lips without actually taking a sip.
The sides of the glass are slick with condensation, but the ice inside has barely melted.
My hands brush the rims of the cups I haven’t figured out yet on the table before me. One glass is a lighter red wine, aromatic and tart. The other is full of clear liquid, with a single square cube of ice floating in the middle.
Neither has any obvious signs of poison, so I lean in closer again.
There are still no strange smells, like the bitter almond or mustiness that so often cling to Keeva’s stall.
I run a finger along the rim of the wineglass to check for powder or stickiness before swirling it, catching a tiny fragment of what could be mandrake leaf—a powerful hallucinogen—in the very bottom.
Then I pick up the glass with the ice.
There.
Clinging thinly to the surface around the ice cube is a strange, almost slick viscosity. Swirling the glass makes a thin web of tendrils stretch out from where they melt off the ice.
The High Queen’s words claw through me.
Some will have more than others, but none are entirely safe.
Realization slams into me. My eyes fly up to Prince Cashel’s.
His gaze darkens, and he glances down, then back up in what could be coincidence—or what could be a subtle mimic of a nod.
I shove away the acid bite of fear and reach for the glass of clear liquid.