Page 1 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

Chapter 1

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’stelling 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.