Page 2 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

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 draggingme—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 AldricVaelstrom ofKravenholt?—

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. Hissadprincess, 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.