The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

Renick

The hawthorn’s shadow falls across her bed, the branches scratching the window while the flies buzz. They find her before I do.

By the time I return to the cottage, my sister is gone. Dead. For at least a day, from the looks of it. She died alone. All alone, while I was five days gone begging for yarrow.

My hand fists the sachet of herbs, the ones that I promised would save her.

Five days of walking to the only healer left in the eastern village.

Pleading with a man with glazed eyes and trembling hands to part with something, anything, for a fever that had already turned my sister’s skin mottled.

He gave me yarrow and willow bark, and a look that said he knew it likely wouldn’t matter.

A wave of anger crashes over me, and I throw the sachet.

Gods-damn them all.

Kammy lies in her bed, her mouth slightly parted, her hands folded the way she always folds—folded—them in sleep. With her left over the right, her slender fingers curled, like she was holding something precious.

I bend down and pick up the porcelain figurine, the angel I gave to my sister for her last birthday. I turn it over, then silently slip it into my pocket.

She looks smaller than she should now. Thinner. The fever ate her from the inside for over seven days while I sold everything we owned to buy remedies that a proper healer could have replaced with a single tincture.

There are no proper healers anymore. The king’s last tax bled the countryside clean. It took the doctors, the medicine, the money to pay for either. All of it funneled upward, into the gleaming palace and its court.

As the sun sets against an overcast sky, I bury my sister behind our cottage, in the shade of the hawthorn tree where she loved to read. The ground is hard, and my hands blister and crack against the shovel handle. But I’m glad for it. Pain is the only honest thing left.

Kammy once told me that the hawthorn is a threshold tree, the boundary between worlds. I suppose it’s now protection and death in one, keeping watch over my sister.

When it’s done, I rest beside the mound of overturned earth and wait. For Grief, rage…a purpose. Anything.

This hopelessness hollows out my chest.

I run a dirty hand down my face, feeling the uneven skin beneath my eye, the scar that mars it.

“Fuck this,” I mutter, and climb to my feet. I dust the earth from my worn trousers. If there’s no longer any point to this gods-forsaken world, might as well get rip-roaring tanked on ale.

I find myself seated at a bar top, a tankard in my fist at the seediest tavern in Harrowglade. Dark and dank, the air thick with smoke and smelling of wet wool and old sweat. It’s the type of place where you can get lost.

Disappear.

The beer is tasteless and watered down, but I take a long gulp, doing a terrible job of drowning my sorrows. I’m halfway through my second when the commotion of the tavern starts to dull at the edges, and the grief sours just like the piss ale.

A fly buzzes near my ear, and I swat it away. A wave a dizziness brings on the image of Kammy’s folded hands on the bed, the flies circling her lifeless body. Those fucking flies—

I knock back the rest of the ale and slam the tankard on the bar.

“Another.”

The barkeep glances at me, uncaring as he pulls the ale.

Down the bar, a burly man is laughing. Big bastard.

Broken nose, missing tooth. His obnoxious laugh bounces off the rafters and lodges in the back of my skull.

He’s telling some story about a woman he bedded, something crass, to a younger guy beside him.

And the laughter rolls out of him in greasy waves.

A barmaid leans across the bar to set down my second tankard, lingering a little longer. She’s pretty in the soft, tired way of a woman who works these rooms. Dark curls escape her kerchief as her fingers brush mine on the handle. She smiles.

Any other night of my miserable life, I might’ve taken what she was offering. A few hours of warmth. A body to forget myself in.

Tonight, I look right through her.

She reads it on my face, and the invitation fades from her eyes. She straightens, collects two empty cups, and moves down the bar without a word. There’s nothing in me worth the trouble tonight.

I take a pull of ale, letting it burn in my throat. Another obnoxious laugh bellows out from the guy down the bar. “Hey, some of us are trying to cease to exist, pal,” I say to him.

His laughter abruptly stops. “Aye,” he snarls. “I can help you with that, mate.”

A dark smile curls my mouth. Might as well let the brute finish me off—whatever’s left of me. I rise from my stool.

He’s already off his stool before I reach him, a sneer splitting his face.

And me? This is exactly what I came here looking for.

Before he can act, I drive my fist into his jaw.

His head snaps back. The guy beside him shouts, and the whole tavern lurches up, ready for a brawl. Chairs scraping, tables shoved aside. The barkeep reaches for the truncheon under the bar.

The big bastard comes back at me hard. His fist catches me on the cheek, and the world goes white at the edges. I welcome the taste of blood across my tongue. I swing back, punching him in the ribs, and we go down together in a tangle of stools and spilled ale.

He’s a lot bigger than me. Heavier. He should win this in two strikes.

But he doesn’t, because I’m hungry for the physical pain—starved to feel anything other than the hurt hollowing me to a callused husk. I want the strikes to keep coming. I want to bleed. So I don’t stop swinging on him.

He hits me again. My head rocks. In the distance, someone is shouting. The younger guy has joined the fray with his boots, and I eat leather. I’m on the floor, sprawled with one arm over my face, taking the blows where they land, laughing.

Gods-damn laughing.

This seems to piss the bastard off more.

“You’re gone in the head,” he snarls, another meaty fist meeting my guts.

The barkeep breaks in with the truncheon. Swearing, he hauls me up by the collar, bodily dragging me—limping, bleeding—across the tavern, where he pitches me through the door and into the mud.

The cool damp of it presses against my swelling cheek, and for one long, ragged moment I just lie like this, breathing, tasting the sharp bite of iron, my ribs rattling, my knuckles raw, the laughter still trying to get out of me in small, broken bursts.

I push up out of the mud. My black tunic is ruined, one sleeve split clean at the shoulder seam, the front of it dark and wet with mud and the blood running from my split lip. I drag the back of my hand across my mouth and it comes away red and gritty, my laugh still rattling in my chest.

But when I see it—all laughter stops.

Like a shiny beacon, the notice is nailed to a post. The parchment too white, too clean for a town the color of ash and dried mud. The royal seal gleams at the top, catching the fading daylight.

I stare at it from the mud. I get to my feet, spitting a trail of blood, my ribs protesting as I stagger toward the notice and snatch it down.

Unlike my sister, I can’t read too well.

Kammy tried to teach me once, tracing letters in the dirt with a stick, making me repeat them until I could stumble through a sentence, and even then she’d giggle her little laugh at how I mangled the words.

Yet she was never cruel. I used to love that, with all the darkness around us, I could still light up her face.

Because of her, I can read enough to make out the bones of the flyer.

By decree of His Royal Majesty, King Aldric Vaelstrom of Kravenholt—

A call to all jesters, fools, performers, and men of wit. He who can coax a smile from the lips of the Princess Seravyn shall be granted a permanent place within the royal palace’s court.

I read over it twice. The words rearrange themselves in my skull, forming meaning. The king wants someone to make his princess laugh. His sad princess, the notice says, though it phrases it more delicately:

The Princess Seravyn of the Thorn Court, whose melancholy has proven resistant to all the court’s efforts.

And I realize this is what the whole town’s been buzzing about.

I catch pieces of it from two men leaving the bar.

A princess from Threnmere, a dominion north of here that’s whispered to practice dark magicks and customs. Though Kammy and I—as well most sane people—always thought that was just lore and rumor.

But the townies whisper that this court deals in a craft of old things.

Forbidden things. That this royal family has roots that go deeper than blood, into something blacker and stranger.

And I hear them talking now, saying that King Aldric saw this princess only once and was bewitched by her, offered her family a fortune for her hand, enough to save their crumbling dominion.

Now she’s here.

Maybe I should feel bad for this poor girl, being sold to a ruthless king, stolen away from her home. But as I stand here, holding this gleaming notice with dirt still under my fingernails from digging my sister’s grave, all I feel is something dark stirring in the pit of my empty, rotten soul.

And it makes a smile tug at the corner of my lips.

For the first time, there’s a way for commoners to enter into the palace. Into the throne room. To get close enough to the king to see his cool eyes, to watch the recognition dawn on his smug face when he realizes the fool before him isn’t a fool at all—

But his demise.

The jester’s outfit costs me everything I have left after all the ale.

A traveling merchant in the next village sells it to me from the back of his wagon. A motley mess of faded black and purple, patched at the elbows, ragged along the collar. The bells are tarnished and dull.

The merchant tells me it was donated by a widow, that the man who wore it before died.

I cock an eyebrow, thinking if he died in it, by the smell.

“You a performer?” he asks, squinting at me.

I’m tall and gaunt and filthy, and I look about as funny as a funeral procession.

“Yes,” I lie.