Poison did not deign to make the obvious response. She had corrected her father every time for months: stepmother! Yet he never stopped referring to Snapdragon as Poison’s mother, and Poison would never call her anything other than Snapdragon, and she would never call Poison anything other than Foxglove. How idiotic, she thought.
She did not blame her father, or even Snapdragon. She believed that Snapdragon truly did love Hew, in her own way; that was why she made such an effort not to berate his daughter in front of him. And Hew loved Snapdragon, though Poison suspected he still saw his first wife Faraway when he looked at her. He was caught between two enemies, and he loved them both in different ways.
Poison did not begrudge him his happiness, even when he forgot her birthday because he was too wrapped up in Snapdragon’s affairs; but she could not help being a thorn in Snapdragon’s foot.
If Snapdragon had simply been herself, then everything might have been all right. It was just this ridiculous charade that she insisted on playing out. On the one hand, she protested that she was not trying to replace Faraway, while on the other she made every effort to do exactly that. She tried hard to be homely, to cook and clean and ask how Poison’s day had gone; she did everything she could to be an attentive wife and mother. But it was all fake. Poison could see that.
The real Snapdragon did not have a homely bone in her body. She wanted to be carefree, wanted to live the life she had heard about in stories, stories of glass slippers and three wishes and magick rings. Poison had watched her as she sat rapt at the storytellings that Fleet gave on the central platform, during those occasional days when he was in the village. She had seen the stars shining in Snapdragon’s eyes. Snapdragon was beautiful, and she knew it, and in her heart she wanted to be a princess. But when the tales were done, she would come home and protest that she had never heard such fancy and nonsense.
Snapdragon was a wife and a stepmother because she thought she ought to be. She was just another person floating down the river of life who had grabbed on to a spar and was hanging on, hanging on because she dared not let go. Like everyone else here, she lacked the strength to swim.
Poison was doing her a favour by making her life awkward. At least it made things a fraction more interesting for her.
She sat by Azalea’s pen. Her father gave her a smile. He had a kindly, simple face, creased with lines of care. Brown hair and a brown moustache, and eyes that seemed to have gone a few shades bleaker since Faraway had died. Poison loved him for the same reason she loved Azalea; she could not help herself.
Azalea was three years old now, almost four. She was old enough to scamper about the place on her own, but not unsupervised. Children in the village were not let outside the house on their own until they were wise enough not to totter off the edge of the platforms into the water, and certainly not before they were taught to swim in one of the safer pools to the north, where goatfish did not lurk. She reached up as Poison came over.
“Poy-zun!” she cried happily.
Poison scooped her out of the pen and dandled her on her lap. Azalea, believing that freedom was within her grasp, tried to squirm out of her grip and on to the floor; but Poison foiled her. Snapdragon cast an irate look over her shoulder at the infant. She half-expected Poison to let her go, knowing how she was forbidden to run about while Snapdragon was cooking. It was as much for the child’s sake as Snapdragon’s; she was terribly clumsy with kitchenware, and was forever sloshing boiling water about or dropping hot pans.
Poison got up, carrying Azalea into her room where she could play in relative freedom behind a closed door. Snapdragon, who had begun washing the mushrooms, said, “Careful now,” as Poison picked up the infant.
“If I can carry a basket of mushrooms, I can carry my own sister,” Poison replied, and shut the door of the bedroom behind her.
The hut was divided into four sections. It was single-storey, for the stilts of the platform could not take the weight of anything more than that. The main living-area took up almost all of the hut, with a fire and a stove and some chairs and a table. Everything was made of wood except the stone fireplace and the rusty iron stove. They took their baths there too; there was not much room for modesty in the Black Marshes. The remaining strip of space, which ran up against the back wall of the circular hut, was divided into three sections. The two biggest ones were the bedrooms: one for the girls, and one for the adults. A third one was the toilet, which was little more than a hole that emptied out into the lake beneath.
Poison’s room – she thought of it as hers, at least until Azalea was old enough to start asserting her personal space – was cramped and dim, but it was her refuge and she treasured it. A tatty single bed lay against one wall, and a crib in the other, with high bars to prevent Azalea from escaping it in the night. In between was a low table on which a candle burned, and a few shelves crowded with little ornaments and a few books, all of which had either been given to her or borrowed from Fleet. Snapdragon predictably disapproved of her friendship with the old man, but Poison could tell her heart was not in it; she was merely parroting the rest of the villagers because she thought it was the right thing to do.
Fleet brought her such wonderful objects from his travels: strange carvings, a feather which he swore came from a gryphon, a petrified egg from a bird which flew upside down. She suspected this last one was a fancy, for she had been very young and more credible when he had given it to her. The books were legends and tales, stories from all over the Realm. These she had devoured voraciously; so voraciously, in fact, that she started to become fatigued by them. It was possible to have too much of a good thing, she reflected.
“They’re all the same,” she complained to Fleet one night. “The soldier rescues the maiden and they fall in love. The fool outwits the wicked king. There are always three brothers or sisters, and it’s always the youngest who succeeds after the first two fail. Always be kind to beggars, for they always have a secret; never trust a unicorn. If you answer somebody’s riddle they always either kill themselves or have to do what you say. They’re all the same, and they’re all ridiculous! That isn’t what life is like!”
Fleet had nodded sagely and puffed on his hookah. “Well, of course that’s not what life is like. Except the bit about unicorns: they’ll eat your guts as soon as look at you. Those things in there –” here he tapped the book she was carrying – “they’re simple stories. Real life is a story too, only much more complicated. It’s still got a beginning, a middle and an end. Everyone follows the same rules, you know . . . it’s just that there are more of them. Everyone has chapters and cliffhangers. Everyone has their journey to make. Some go far and wide, and come back empty-handed; some don’t go anywhere, and their journey makes them richest of all. Some tales have a moral, and some don’t make any sense. Some will make you laugh, others make you cry. The world is a library, young Poison, and you’ll never get to read the same book twice.”
Poison snorted derisively, even though she loved it when the old man talked this way. “What kind of stories do the folk of Gull have to tell? They’re as boring and predictable as these legends are. Once you’ve read a few, you’ve read them all.”
“Do you really think so?” Fleet asked, his spine cracking like fireworks as he leaned nearer. “I think you don’t know the half of what goes on in this village, because you’ve already decided it’s not worth reading past the cover.”
Poison gave an insouciant shrug. “I don’t care,” she replied. “I’m not interested.”
“Well, let me leave you with this, then,” said Fleet. “Every story has its twists and turns, and you never know when the next one is coming. Don’t forget that, Poison.”
“I won’t,” she replied sarcastically, instantly dismissing it from her thoughts. But she took with her the books that she had been meaning to give back to him, and kept them anyway.
For some reason, Fleet’s words came back to h
er when she went to bed that night. Snapdragon’s soup had been the best she had ever tasted – a fact she attributed to her mushrooms – and then Snapdragon and Hew had gone out to watch the marshwraiths. Poison did not have the heart for watching the display tonight; she was unaccountably depressed. Instead, she tucked up Azalea, crawled under her moth-eaten covers and went to sleep with the sound of faint laughs in her ears, of children chasing the twinkling wraiths and the distant chiming of a small silver bell. The chime seemed to follow her down, down into sleep, and she remembered thinking it strangely out of place in the sounds of the marsh. Then Azalea gurgled in the midst of a dream, and Poison opened her eyes muzzily and looked fondly on the infant in her crib before oblivion claimed her.
It was the last time she ever did so.
It was Snapdragon’s scream that jerked Poison awake. She half-rose out of her blankets, sloughing off a thin dusting of sparkling flakes that covered her. Strangely, despite the circumstances of her waking, she immediately felt the warm hand of sleep enfolding her again, making her eyes droop. She shook herself in puzzlement, looking down at the stuff on her blanket and in her hair. It was like unmelted snow, yet it glimmered in the cloudy light of the morning sun that came in through the round window.
She felt herself drowsing again, against her will, and this time she flung her blankets aside and pulled herself out of the tattered old bed. The flakes . . . it was something to do with the flakes. . . She did not understand how or why, but some instinct had made the connection between the mysterious stuff that covered the bed and the weight of slumber that pressed down on her. She tousled and shook her hair and patted down her hemp nightrobe frantically, as if trying to beat out flames, and she felt her tiredness lift from her as the flakes fell free. She stared at them in alarmed wonder for a moment.
“What have you done?” Snapdragon shrieked at her from the other side of the small room, and Poison suddenly remembered why it was she had been awoken. Snapdragon was standing at Azalea’s cradle, her face a rictus of horror, her eyes needling accusation at Poison.
Poison rubbed a hand across her face to smear the last remnants of sleep from her eyes and came over to the crib, ignoring Snapdragon completely. There was a terrible sinking in her chest, a spreading void of premonition.
She looked into the crib. Whatever it was that lay in there, it was not Azalea.
“Why didn’t you wake?” Snapdragon hissed. “You were right there! You terrible thing! Why didn’t you wake?”
Poison was not listening. The world seemed to have shrunk to the size of the crib, and what was inside it. Sounds had become faint, even Snapdragon’s shrill voice in her ear. She could hear the slow whoosh of blood as it swept round her body, the inrush and release of her breath. She put her hands on the side of the crib to steady herself. Somewhere in her memory, a small silver bell was chiming.
She pushed herself away from the crib and snatched down the thickest tome on her bookshelf. She had borrowed it from Fleet a long time ago, and never thought to give it back. Its dusty leather cover creaked as she opened it, and the pages flickered under her fingers.
“Reading? Reading at a time like this?” Snapdragon howled. Poison spared her an annoyed glance before resuming her search. Her stepmother began to weep. “Poor Hew. What’ll I tell him? What’ll I say? His heart will break.”
The page that Poison was looking for flipped flat, and she felt her head go light. There it was. The leftmost page was dominated by a black-and-white woodcut print of a hunched figure dressed in a long, ragged coat, its face shadowed under a wide-brimmed hat. Its eyes were two slits in the darkness. It held out before it one long, thin arm, and its scrawny, emaciated hand held a tiny bell delicately between thumb and forefinger. With its other hand, it was scattering something that looked like dust. In the picture, it was in a wooded glade, surrounded by sleeping people.
“The Scarecrow,” she whispered.
Poison heard the chime again in her head. She frowned, puzzled, and stared hard at the page. Had she seen something move there, just a moment ago? She peered closer.
The picture suddenly seemed to grow under her gaze, as if she was falling into it or it was rising from the page to swallow her. The black-and-white leaves of the trees seemed to stir. She felt dizzy, her violet eyes going wide.
The Scarecrow turned its head to look at her, staring out from the page, and her throat tightened in terror. She wanted to close the book suddenly, but she could not will her muscles to move. She felt herself pinned there, unable to even blink. Disbelief and panic clawed their way upward from her chest.
The Scarecrow began to walk towards her. Its movements were curiously jerky, as if she was watching a flicker-book, but it was definitely moving. Coming closer in short, hobbling steps, its tiny bell held out before it.
Impossible, she told herself. Impossible.
But she could not draw back, could not look away. The chime sounded again as the Scarecrow twitched the bell, a pure and unutterably sinister note, quiet and yet clearer than anything else she could hear. It had loomed until its upper body almost filled the page now, as if she was looking at it through a window and it was almost at the sill. The bell chimed again, dominating her consciousness. The white slits of the Scarecrow’s eyes burned into her from within the inky darkness of its face.
Poison could barely breathe. What air she could force into her lungs came in shudders. Everything she knew was telling her that this could not be happening, that it was only a picture on a page she was looking at; and yet the Scarecrow grew, shuffling closer and closer until it seemed that there was only the thickness of the page separating them.
It put one hand on the edge of the picture, and its fingers folded over the bottom of the page and scraped against her wrist.
The slam of the outside door jolted her out of her trance, and she flung the book away with a cry. It tumbled to the floor and landed shut with a heavy thump on the planks. Trembling, she stared at it from her bed, ready to run if it should do anything other than lie where it was.
Nothing happened.
Poison felt her heartbeat decelerate slowly, and began to breathe again. She clasped her hands in her lap to try and stop them shaking, stealing glances at the book now and again. There must be an explanation, there must be. . .
It was then that she noticed that Snapdragon was gone, and married that realization to the slam of the hut door she had heard a moment ago. The crib was empty too.
In a flash, she saw what Snapdragon was going to do; and she scrambled off her bed and fled out of the door to try and stop her.
It was a cold and dank morning, the sun clambering up through the faintly greenish miasma that hung over the Black Marshes. A little early still for the flies to be out, for the waters of the marsh had not yet warmed to the day’s heat. Poison emerged from her hut into the chill, clad only in her hemp nightdress. It did not bother her overly: most of the village was still abed after the excitement of Soulswatch Eve, and though she looked faintly ridiculous, her nightdress was thicker and warmer than her daywear and she did not care what the villagers thought anyway. She had the sense to pause to put on some boots though, for it was virtually suicide to walk barefoot in the mud of the marsh, where there were insects and snakes, venomous spiders and spiny snails underfoot, any of which could kill with a bite or a scratch.
Snapdragon was nowhere to be seen, but there was only one bridge from their platform to the next, so she hurried over it to her neighbour’s platform, where the wraith-catcher snored in Bluff’s house while Bluff and his wife made do with the floor. Two rope bridges branched off from there; one of them was still swinging slightly in the wake of Snapdragon’s passage. Poison took it, already knowing where Snapdragon was going.
She caught sight of her stepmother just as she was disappearing into the trees that crowded up against the lake in which Gull stood. The thing that had been in the crib was wrappe
d up tight in a blanket, held against her chest. Poison called out to her as she ran on to the rope-bridge that spanned the murky water from shore to village. Snapdragon paused momentarily and looked back, and there was a kind of madness in her expression; then she plunged on into the trees. Poison rushed after her and slipped on the moist planking of the bridge, but she caught the ropes at either side with her armpits before she could fall, and she suffered only sore burns on her skin. Cursing herself, she ran on and into the marsh.
The ground squelched beneath her boots as she followed Snapdragon. This was relatively solid ground as far as the Black Marshes went, and she knew it to be mercifully free of bogs and sinkholes. She caught a glimpse of her stepmother’s blonde braid swinging ahead of her through the trees. Something crunched under her boot, but she did not stop to see what unfortunate creature she had stepped on. The trees had been chopped back a little way here, forming a bumpy trail that had been flattened down by innumerable feet. She put on speed and began catching up with Snapdragon, who was slowing as she ran out of breath, until by the time they got to the well Poison was almost close enough to touch her.
The well sat in the middle of a roughly hewn clearing, a stone-lined shaft with square walls that rose out of the ground to waist-height. A tight, rusty grille lay over the shaft, and a roof above that. The roof was sloped inward to a funnel, so that any rainwater it caught was spouted down into the shaft. Rainwater was fine, and so was the clear water from the underground spring that the well fed off; but they did not want any of the murky surface pollution of the marsh to get into their precious drinking supply, nor any slimy marsh creatures to fall in, hence the wall and the grille.
Snapdragon stumbled to her knees as she entered the clearing, dropping her burden to the soft earth. It made not a sound. When Poison reached her, she was hyperventilating great whoops of air.