A Little Taste of Poison Read online

  “I’m sure that’s not—” Ghataj began, but Isaveth pressed on.

  “Even if he only means people who’ve broken the law, who makes those laws? You said it yourself the other day—right now it’s illegal to hold political meetings or organize protests in the city. But if men and women can’t get work, and their children are starving, and they can’t even scrape together enough coal to keep themselves warm at night, how can they not protest? And is it surprising that some of them end up breaking other laws to survive as well?”

  She must have spoken too loudly, because Ghataj made a shushing gesture. “Of course not,” he said. “But that’s the Sagelord’s fault, not the Lording’s. Eryx wants to fix all of that, don’t you see? But he can’t do it with his father in the way.”

  “But if—”

  “I know what you’re saying,” Ghataj told her. “We have to make sure the law is fair before we punish people for breaking it. And it’s never going to be fair as long as Lord Arvis is ruling the city. But from what I hear . . .” A smile touched his lips. “We might not have to worry about that much longer.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Isaveth, pulse quickening.

  Ghataj opened his mouth, then shut it again. With a rueful shake of his head he swept up his books and walked out.

  * * *

  A few weeks ago, Esmond had told Isaveth that the rumors of the Sagelord’s poor health were little more than wishful thinking, and that his father had no plans to retire. Yet Ghataj had hinted otherwise, and it troubled her. Isaveth had no love for Lord Arvis and would not be sorry to see the last of him, but the thought of Eryx ruling the city was even worse. She had to get that tracking spell working, so she could give it to Esmond.

  When she got home to Cabbage Street, however, the kitchen was full. Lilet and Mimmi sat at one end of the table, quarrelling over a game of Pardon, while Annagail hunched at the other end, bracing her textbook open with her elbows and plugging her ears. Isaveth studied the three of them, weighing her options, then marched up to Lilet and Mimmi and slapped the game board shut.

  “Hey!” screeched Mimmi, but Lilet folded her arms, unruffled.

  “Told you you’d be sorry you cheated.”

  “I did not—”

  “You can start a new game quietly,” Isaveth said, “or you can go outside. I have work to do.”

  Mimmi started to protest, but Lilet quelled her with a glare. “She means school work, Mim. She’s learning Sagery, remember? That’s more important than some stupid game. Come on, let’s get some blankets and start over.” She scooped up the scattered game pieces, tucked the board under her arm, and headed for the front room.

  “It’s cold in there,” moaned Mimmi as she trudged after Lilet. Annagail took her fingers out of her ears and gave a flickering smile, then returned to reading as Isaveth set up her next round of experiments.

  Her first few attempts at dissolving a source-tablet in liquid were not encouraging: Some of the solutions had a suspicious odor, while others were too dark not to leave a stain. Water, the obvious choice, failed to dissolve the tablet properly unless she heated it, but as soon as the mixture became warm enough to bubble, the magic fizzled out. By the time she succeeded in dissolving one tablet without ruining it, Annagail was waiting behind her with apron in hand.

  “I need to make supper, Vettie,” she said.

  It was agony to leave her experiment half-finished, but there was no way to convince her sister it was urgent without explaining why. With a sigh, Isaveth took the pot off the stove.

  By the time they’d eaten and cleaned up, the sky was inky black and Isaveth had to put new light-tablets in both the kitchen lamps to see by. Lilet and Mimmi hovered on either side of her, fascinated, as Isaveth brushed a scrap of paper with the source-tablet solution and fanned it dry. Then she picked up the vial with the matching decoction, swirled it, and waited for the flecks of magewort to settle.

  Please work, she prayed. Please, please, please . . .

  Isaveth held her breath until she felt ready to explode, but at last the miracle happened: The particles swam to the side of the glass closest to her test paper, and clung there. She wanted to grab Mimmi and dance her around, but she forced herself to act casual as she laid out three more pieces of paper and brushed them with the source-tablet liquid as well. She’d do a few range tests tomorrow to make sure the spell worked, then hide the bottles in the library for Esmond.

  “What does Quiz need magic paper for?” asked Mimmi, watching Isaveth pour the remaining solution into a bottle. “Are you helping him play a trick?”

  Isaveth wiped her hands on her apron. “Very good, Mim,” she said. “That’s just what I’m doing.”

  “Not an unkind one, I hope,” said Annagail, and Lilet scoffed.

  “Don’t be silly, Vettie would never. It’ll be funny, that’s all.” She turned to Isaveth. “If it works, you have to tell us all about it. Promise?”

  If the plan worked, Isaveth wouldn’t need to: The news of Eryx Lording’s downfall would be all over the city. But she’d still owe her family the truth about how it happened.

  “Yes,” said Isaveth. “I promise.”

  Chapter Eight

  ESMOND LAID DOWN HIS PEN and sat back, regarding the finished letter with mingled apprehension and pride. It had taken all evening and a small mountain of scrap paper to get the wording right, but by the time he copied it onto the pages he’d coated with Isaveth’s tracking potion, he felt certain Eryx would take the bait.

  The biggest challenge had been figuring out how to tempt his brother without putting Isaveth in danger. The drawback of having hardly any friends was that there was only one person to whom he could plausibly send such a personal letter, yet somehow he had to write it without giving Eryx any information he might use to blackmail her.

  So he’d made it sound like Isaveth was upset because he’d tried to kiss her—let Eryx wonder where and when that could have happened—and ever since she’d arrived at the college he’d been trying to get her alone to apologize, but she wouldn’t let him. So he’d poured out his feelings on paper in a soppy and thoroughly degrading way, and made sure to include a few ugly slurs against his family and hints that he’d started stealing drinks from the Sagelord’s private cabinet, something that would get Esmond in colossal trouble if it were true.

  By the end of the letter he wondered if he’d gone too far, but why should Eryx suspect anything? He knew Esmond had been trying to write to someone, and if any of his spies had been lurking around the Sporting Center the other day, they’d have seen Isaveth’s flustered reaction when Esmond greeted her. All the evidence fit, and since Eryx wouldn’t want Isaveth to forgive Esmond, he had an excellent reason to make sure she never received the letter. But Eryx also had good reason to hold on to it, because it was exactly the kind of letter that Esmond would not want his parents to see.

  The next trick was tempting his older brother to read the letter while appearing to want the very opposite. But the footman who handled the mail was already deep in Eryx’s pocket, so it wasn’t too hard. All he had to do was call Marguel aside, tell him that this was a private message and that he must make sure no one else saw it, and trust that Isaveth’s name on the envelope would do the rest. With luck, Eryx would read it tonight, and add it to his files tomorrow.

  And then Esmond would track it straight to his brother’s hoard of documents, and expose Eryx as the lying, murdering hypocrite he was.

  * * *

  “I have good news for you,” Mistress Corto announced the next morning as Isaveth and her classmates settled into their seats. “Today you will be making your first sage-charm.”

  A thrill rippled up Isaveth’s spine. She sat up eagerly, waiting for instructions.

  “The bad news,” their teacher continued, “is that first you must complete this test.” She handed a stack of papers to a student in the front corner, who took one and passed the others along. “When you have answered all the questions correctly,
you may proceed to the workshop.”

  Groans rose from the front row, and Isaveth glanced at Eulalie, who was staring at her paper with head in hands. What she could see of the other girl’s face did not look happy, and Isaveth braced herself for a challenge.

  To her relief, however, the test proved simple—she had only to fill in a few blanks. She checked it over to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, then brought it to Mistress Corto.

  “Excellent work, Miss Breck,” said the spellmistress. “You may go.”

  Had she really been the first to finish? Judging by the scowl Paskin was giving her, she had. Tingling with anticipation, Isaveth walked to the inner door.

  It was unusually heavy, and she had to use both hands to pull it open. Once she stepped through, she saw why: Its reverse was covered in iron plates, like the hull of a warship. Bands of the same metal ran about the perimeter of the room, while thinner strips cross-hatched the ceiling. Even the windows, currently shuttered against the cold, were grilled inside to protect the glass from explosion.

  As the door shut behind Isaveth, a thin young woman even paler than Esmond rose to greet her. “I’m Undermistress Kif,” she said. “Come this way, and I’ll help you get started.”

  Isaveth followed the older girl to a granite-topped table at the back of the room, where an assortment of magical ingredients was displayed. Strips of charm-silver, so light that Isaveth could have moved them with a breath; heaps of tiny crystals and semiprecious stones; vials of mysterious liquids labeled ARCANIC ACID, SAGE BROGAN’S ELIXIR, and EBONDRAUGHT.

  “You’ll need this to start,” said Kif, pushing a stoneware bowl toward her. “And these.” She handed Isaveth a roll of leather, heavy with the tools wrapped up inside it. “What charm would you like to try first?”

  There were ten different options, and all of them looked fascinating. Isaveth was leafing through the instruction cards, trying to decide, when Paskin came sauntering in.

  “I’m going to make a warming-charm,” he drawled, sweeping up a bowl in one hand and piling it full of ingredients with the other. He pulled up a stool at one of the workstations, lit the burner with a showy flick of the wrist, and began.

  Isaveth had chosen her spell and was reading over the instructions when light flared behind her, followed by a curse as Paskin leaped back, shaking his flaming sleeve. Kif swept a siphon from beneath the table and sprayed him with it, ignoring his yelps of protest. Then, as he stood dripping and bedraggled, she began to scold him for being so careless.

  The accident could have been serious, but it hadn’t been, and the sight of Paskin flapping about as Kif doused him with the siphon was so funny that Isaveth had to giggle. She clapped her hand over her mouth, but a snicker escaped, and Paskin turned an ugly red. “You little—”

  Kif stopped him with a warning hand. “Back to your work, Mister Paskin.”

  The boy obeyed, but the savage look he gave Isaveth warned her he wouldn’t forget. Hastily she gathered up her ingredients and picked a workstation at the other end of the room.

  The card Isaveth had chosen was a float-charm, the very spell Esmond had used to levitate himself up to her window on the night they’d confronted Eryx and saved her father. She propped it up next to the burner and unrolled her tool kit.

  After a week of studying charm theory, she’d learned one heartening truth: despite Sagery’s lofty reputation and the centuries of lore and scholarship that surrounded it, the actual work of crafting charms wasn’t that different from Common Magic. True, it was more jewelry-making than cookery, but as long as Isaveth took her time and followed the recipe, all would be well.

  Steady hand, she told herself, tweezing out a single strip of charm-silver. She passed it briefly over the flame to soften it, then dropped a flake of cloudy crystal in the middle, folded the strip in thirds, and tapped all four corners with a tiny hammer. Laying the charm into the bowl, she set it atop her burner and watched until the metal shimmered and began to turn blue. One, two . . . Her hands shook as she unstopped her tiny bottle of pearl vinegar. Four, five . . . She lifted the vial, tipping it toward the bowl. Seven, eight—

  The drop fell, sizzling, onto the surface of the charm. Quickly Isaveth removed the bowl from the burner, then tweezed the charm out and squinted at it. It was a lopsided square the size of her fingernail, smooth and shiny, betraying no sign of the crystal tucked inside it. She didn’t know if it would work, but it looked all right.

  Behind her the door creaked as more students filed in, lining up at the table and clamoring for Kif’s assistance. Isaveth waited for the commotion to subside, hoping she could show her charm to the undermistress and get her opinion. Perhaps she’d have time to make a second one if the first wasn’t good enough.

  Yet the noise in the workshop only grew as Kif rushed from one impatient student to another, and there was no sign of Mistress Corto—or Eulalie, for that matter—anywhere. Isaveth was turning the charm over in her fingers, wondering what to do with it, when the girl at the workstation next to her asked, “Are you finished?”

  She sounded curious, but not unfriendly. And judging by her relaxed posture and firm grip on the tweezers, she knew more about Sagery than Isaveth did.

  “I think so,” said Isaveth. “What should I do now?”

  “Try it out, of course,” said the girl, as though this were obvious. “What have you got—a floater?”

  Isaveth nodded.

  “It’s simple, then. Toss it on the floor, make the invocation, and step on it.”

  “Invocation?” asked Isaveth with a flicker of alarm. She hadn’t seen anything about that on the card, and Mistress Corto hadn’t mentioned it in her lectures, either. “What do you mean?”

  “You have to invoke the Sage who first made the charm.” She turned her palm upward in an inviting gesture. “Or the magic won’t work properly. Everyone knows that.”

  Isaveth swallowed. To call on a long-dead scholar of magic for help, as though he or she were the All-One—that might be common among Arcans and Unifying folk, but to a Moshite it was blasphemy.

  “You aren’t scared, are you? It’s only a little floater. It won’t hurt you.” The girl plucked the charm out of Isaveth’s hand and dropped it on the floor between them. “Go on, put your foot on it. And say ‘By Sage Trofim.’ ”

  Isaveth couldn’t explain her hesitation without betraying herself and offending the other girl as well. But there seemed no reason the charm shouldn’t work without the invocation. Taking a deep breath, she raised her foot and stamped as hard as she could.

  Power surged into her body. Isaveth shot upward, arms flailing as she hurtled through the air. The ceiling rushed toward her, too fast—

  CLANG.

  Pain knifed through Isaveth as she crashed into the iron lattice. She hung suspended for a sickening instant, staring helplessly at the astonished faces below. Then the tingling in her foot cut off, and she began to fall.

  “Catch her!” snapped Mistress Corto from the doorway, and the students rushed to obey. They tumbled down with Isaveth in a heap of arms, legs, and flying robes, and were still struggling to untangle themselves when the spellmistress seized Isaveth and hauled her aside. “What in the name of the Sages were you playing at?” she demanded.

  Lights flashed in front of Isaveth’s eyes, and the world blurred around her. She opened her mouth to apologize, and everything went black.

  Chapter Nine

  ISAVETH LAY HALF-CONSCIOUS on the workshop floor, her head full of lightning and thunder. Yet though she couldn’t move or speak, she could hear every word her classmates were saying about her.

  “. . . must have been crazy! Why didn’t she wait for the spellmistress?”

  “Maybe she didn’t know better. . . .”

  “Or she was showing off. It wouldn’t be the first time, I hear.”

  Where was Eulalie? She must have heard the crash when Isaveth hit the ceiling, just as Mistress Corto had. Why hadn’t she come?

  “Se
ffania said she didn’t make the invocation,” a girl piped up. “That must be why it went wrong.”

  There was a collective intake of breath, and then Paskin muttered, “Moshite.”

  “What? No! The school would never allow it.”

  “Even if she won the Glow-Mor scholarship?”

  Another pause, as everyone digested Paskin’s words. Then a flat voice spoke. “Well, that was a mistake, obviously. They must have felt sorry for her.”

  Anger sparked in Isaveth, filling her clammy skin with heat. She wanted to leap up and defend herself, but her body refused to obey. She was still lying helpless when the door to the workshop creaked open and Mistress Corto’s firm tread crossed the floor.

  “Out of the way,” she commanded, and the students shuffled back. Then someone who smelled of herbs was kneeling beside Isaveth, slipping a bony arm behind her shoulders and lifting her head up. The darkness behind her eyes whirled dizzily and she began to retch, but the healer tipped something against her lips that tasted like liquid sunshine, and she swallowed instead.

  It must have been a magical decoction, because the pounding in Isaveth’s head receded. Her strength flooded back, and the healer eased her into a sitting position as she opened her eyes.

  “You’re a fortunate young woman, Miss Breck,” said Mistress Corto. “You could have done far worse than knock yourself out. Can you get up?”

  “I . . . think so,” said Isaveth, and the healer, an aristocratic-looking master with a wave of snowy hair and an impeccably trimmed beard, helped her to her feet. He guided Isaveth out to the classroom, and the spellmistress followed, shutting the door behind them.

  “Undermistress Kif admits that she did not give you proper instructions,” said Mistress Corto. “She was not expecting you to make such a powerful float-charm on your first effort, let alone behave so recklessly with it.”

  She had been reckless; Isaveth saw that now. She should have guessed that energetic charms were similar to spell-tablets: if you used sudden force to break them, they released sudden power in return. “I’m sorry, Mistress,” she began miserably, but the older woman held up a hand.