Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

“You’re speaking of scents, not poisons.”

“I’m speaking of essence,” Nissa said. “Have you never noticed how your scents alter the essence as well as the physical perception of a substance?”

Sarai stared at the waves. “Why would you tell me this? She is your sister.”

“Sweet can be transformed into bitter. Love can be transformed into hate,” Nissa said. “I had a home once, too. My sister turned it to ash.”

“Was she always the way she is now?” Sarai asked. She had trouble imagining the queen as a real person. Sitting next to the queen’s sister, seeing the lines of her face, she had to acknowledge it.

“Of course not. But one can only live stewing in the fear of death deferred for so long before one starts to rot,” Nissa said.

“What was it like with her, before?” Sarai asked.

“Is that what you want to hear?”

Sarai considered. “No,” she said at last. “Not exactly.”

“Then what do you need to know?”

“Everything,” Sarai said.

When Nissa was done, long after the sun set and stole the barest hint of color from the rock, she clicked her tongue against her teeth. “There’s one more thing you need to know,” she said. “You need to know if you can truly do it. Kill someone. Be killed in turn. They’ll know it was you. You might be able to conceal the poison long enough for it to do its harm, but even if the queen dies they’ll guess the source, and they’ll kill you.”

“At least I’ll get to see the court,” Sarai said. She imagined she could see the spot of crimson at the edge of the horizon. It was too dark, of course, but she had stared at it so many times it appeared like an after-image in her vision.

Nissa spat. “You will at that.”

At dawn they would begin. Sarai could not sleep. She would suffer, she would survive. She would create the poison that could kill the queen, and when Sarai touched the queen’s skin to prove herself by ’taming the poison in the queen’s veins, she’d pass along a new poison. A masked poison. She thought she knew how to do it. Which poison to use, which essences to blend with it to make it ’sense harmless.

The queen would die, and Sarai would die.

But first, she had to live.

She stared at the vial. Bellman’s Sigh. One ’tamer in twenty earned Mastery. Most gave up before it, accepted lesser tasks on the island, other Masteries. Or died.

A knock on the door signaled Jarad’s entry.

“Come to argue me out of it?” she said.

He sighed. “No. I came to sit with you. One way or another, I lose you in a few days. I’d like a little time with you while I can have it.”

She looked up at him, surprised. She was hardly his first student. Not even the first he’d lost.

“But you are my favorite,” he said, as if he knew what she was thinking. “And you are the best.”

“Not at poison-taming,” she said.

“No,” he agreed.

“You think I’ll die.”

“Yes.”

“It would be worth it.”

“It would help no one. Least of all your kin,” he said, and when he said it she thought he hid himself within the echo of that last word. “Please, Sarai. It is not your talent,” he said, and said no more.

It is not your talent.

She set her jaw. It was true; she could not let it be true.

She held the red-bark sachet to her nose. She saw golden sand, heard her mother calling her home. Saw ash and smelled charred wood.

You’ll never go home.

She let the halves of her hope fall away from one another. Jarad was right. It was not her talent. She would fail. She could not go home.

She took up the slip of paper, on which was written the queen’s name.

This is your talent.

She could not go home. But perhaps she could save it.

The day the someday queen had felt the tarsnake’s bite, she was walking with her sister along a disused path, the scent of lemongrass twining around them. They did not see the man by the river until they were quite close, did not think he could be anything but a laborer until they were steps away. And the young girl who would someday be queen did not think, until the man turned and flung the snake, that anyone might fail to love her.

The someday queen’s sister, ten minutes younger but already less loved, killed the snake with a rock. The palace guards killed the man. The queen’s sister clutched her close and quelled the poison, and the soldiers carried her home. They wrapped her in linen cloth, and her sister lay beside her, hugging her long, bare arms around her body. The queen’s sister smelled of spices and the loamy earth by the river. The not-yet queen’s physicians packed her wound with compresses, sharp and medicinal, full of herbs the poisoned girl could not name. The queen’s sister whispered stories to her, reminding her of the salt-tang scent of their summer home, of the flowers that grew on the hillsides there. Of every place she had felt safe.

The queen’s sister did not sleep for days. That day and for twenty years after, she kept her sister alive with her craft and her devotion. And when the assassin’s blade robbed her of her usefulness, the queen kissed her brow once and sent her away.

Other moments, other stories—the death of an advisor, the lilies in the blood-choked water of her first war. Nissa told Sarai them all; she had been at her sister’s side every day, nearly every hour, keeping her alive and watching her wither. Sarai picked among them. Salt-tang, honeysuckle: the scents of bliss. The day that destroyed it: lemongrass and loam, linen and spice. The scent of the husband she loved and who betrayed her: bergamot and amber.

She built up joy, shattered it; brewed a tincture of love and the loss of it, of security turned to rank fear. And she made it beautiful.

She went to Jarad with the vial in hand three hours past dawn. She had not slept; neither had he. He looked at the vial pinched between his fingertips, looked at her. “What is this?” he asked.

“My Mastery,” she said. “There is a ship down at the dock. Send it with them.” She walked away, and pretended she had not seen that he began to weep with the violence of relief.

Sarai returned the Bellman’s Sigh to the supply room and went to her room to wait.

A week later, she had her Mastery, a dark tattoo on the back of her hand, indelible. “The queen is pleased,” Jarad said, a strange tone in his voice. “The queen is, by all accounts, entranced.” He gave her a look that was fear as much as satisfaction. She smiled to try to ease his worry, but he only shook his head and left her.

It was another two weeks before Nissa came. “She isn’t dead,” she said without preamble.

“She was not meant to die,” Sarai said. “It isn’t my talent.”

“She won’t leave her room. She won’t speak. She’s fallen into a melancholy mood,” Nissa said, voice almost sweet. “She mutters of deceit and death and shoves even the poison-tamers’ hands away. Not that they let her, of course. They’ve plied her with poppy to make her sleep, and our brother sits the throne in her place. For now, they say, until she’s well.”

“A great misfortune,” Sarai said, nodding.

“They suspected you,” Nissa said, and Sarai tasted something bitter in the back of her throat. “But when they gave the scent to others, it did nothing. It smells lovely, that’s all. Some don’t care for it at all. One man said it reminded him of his brother.”

Sarai smiled. “There was nothing of poison in that scent,” she said. “Only memory.” Distilled and woven to lift the spirit, to shatter it.

“You will never leave this place, now,” Nissa said, but even then she was wrong. When Nissa left, Sarai took down the sachet from her wall and pressed it to her nose. Red-bark and ambergris, salt-tang and oud-wood. Memories leapt and sparked and danced. She was on the golden sands again, the red-gold cliffs. In among the green-shadow trees, bare feet flying.