The Poison Eaters and Other Stories (8 page)

Toran drops the bag, rises, backs away. “Your majesty,” he stammers.

Elienad pads closer. Courtiers shrink from him.

"This hand came from a wolf?” the king asks, still hoping that somehow it has not come to this.

One of Toran's party, all of whom idle near the doorway, not bold enough to interrupt the king, steps forward. “It was. We all saw it. That thing killed Pyter."

"The rumors are all true! The creatures walk among us!” Lady Mironov says, before swooning to the floor. She is practiced at swooning and is caught easily by her husband and his brother.

"It is gravely wounded,” says the king. “It will be tracked and destroyed.” He hopes it will be killed before it can be interrogated. He does not want to hear the things of which the creature might speak. His kingdom must have the illusion of safety, even at the cost of truth.

He does not remember the ring or the woman who wore it, but Elienad does. He recognizes the red stone and remembers the hand he licked clean under the table.

Elienad finds her by smell, behind Lord Borodin's stables. The horses shift and whinny in their pens as he passes. Her blood has soaked the icy ground around her and dotted the snow with bright red holes, like someone scattered poisonous berries. She is wrapped in a horse blanket, stiff with gore. Her hair is tangled with dirt and twigs.

She has never seen him with a human face, but she knows him immediately. Her pale mouth curves into a smile. “I didn't know they let you out of the palace,” she says. She is very beautiful, even dying.

"They don't,” he says and knees beside her. “Give me your arm."

He ties his sash around it as tightly as he can and the bleeding ebbs. It is probably too late, but he does it anyway.

"It is a hunger never ending, to be what we are. It gnaws at my stomach.” Her eyes look strange, her pupils blown wide and black.

"Where did you come from?” he asks her. He doesn't want to talk about the hunger, not with the smell of her blood making him dizzy.

"From the forests,” she says. “They caught my son. I thought it would be easy to find him. I had never even seen a city."

He can't help hoping. “Like me. They brought me—"

She sees his face and laughs. It is a thin rattling sound. “He's dead. And you never came from any forest."

"What do you mean?” he asks. He has brought a sack with men's clothes. They are too loose for her in some places and too tight in others, but they are warm and dry.

She struggles to get the shirt over her head. Her shoulders are shaking with cold. “You were born here, in this city. Didn't you know?"

"I don't understand.” Part of him wishes she would stop talking because he feels as he does when he's about to shift, like he's drowning. The rest of him only wishes she would speak faster.

"A mirror would tell you more than I could.” Her sly look bothers him, but he still doesn't know what she means.

He shakes off the questions. “We have to get you inside. Somewhere warm."

"No. I can care for myself.” Her hand slides under her body. She holds out a knife. Toran's knife. “I want you to take this and put it into the chest of the king."

His eyes narrow.

"Have you been to the dog fights? Have you seen how we are set against each other, how we are kept in stinking pens?"

"You murdered those children,” he says softly. “And then you ate them."

” Let them know what it is to have their babies snatched from them, what it is to be afraid and then find that they were killed for amusement.
For amusement
.” Her face is so pale that it looks like the snow. “You are not the only wolf he has kept, but the first one was grown when he got her. She died rather than become his pet. You are nothing but an animal to him."

"I see,” he says. “Yes, you are right.” Elienad takes the knife from her cold hand. He looks at his face in its mirrored surface and his features look as though they belong to someone else. His voice is only a whisper. “He must think I am an animal."

The king leaves his court late and stumbles tipsily to his rooms. The court will continue to celebrate until they collapse beneath tables, until they have drunk themselves so full of relief that they are sick from it.

The king lights a lamp on his desk and begins to write the speech he will give in the morning. He plans to say many reassuring things. He plans to declare Toran his heir.

He hears a laugh. It is a boy's laugh.

"Elienad?” the king asks the darkness.

There is silence, then the sound of laughter again, naughty and close.

"Elienad,” the king says sternly.

"I will be king after you,” the boy says.

The king's hands begin to shake so hard that the ink on his pen nib spatters the page. He looks down at it as though the wet black marks will tell him what to do now.

The boy moves into the lamplight, his face lit with an impish smile, showing white teeth.

"Please,” says the king.

"Please what, Father?” The boy blows down the glass of the lamp and the light goes out.

In the darkness, the king calls the boy's name for the third time, but his voice quavers. He remembers his age, remembers how stiff he is from dancing.

This time when he hears the boy's laughter, it is near the door. He hears the footsteps as bare feet slap their way out the door and down the dark hall. Like the court, the king feels sick with relief.

Later, when the king lights the lamps—all of them—he will think of another woman, now long gone, and of her liquid eyes staring up at him in the dark. He will not sleep.

In the morning, he will make his way to the throne room. There, he will find courtiers gathered around a young boy with black hair in need of cutting. Beside the boy will be a corpse. The dead woman's hand will be missing and her throat will be cut. Dimly, the king will remember that he promised the kingdom to whosoever killed the wolf. And the boy will smile up at him as the trap closes.

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Let me tell you something about unicorns—they're faeries and faeries aren't to be trusted. Read your storybooks. But maybe you can't get past the rainbows and pastel crap. That's your problem.

Zachary told me once why the old stories say that mortals who eat faerie food can't leave Faerie. That's a bunch of rot, too, but at least there's some truth in it. You see, they
can
leave; they just won't ever be able to find another food they'll want to eat. Normal food tastes like ashes. So they starve. Zachary should have listened to his own stories.

I met him the summer I was squatting in an old building with my friend Tanya and her boyfriend. I'd run away from my last foster family, mostly because there didn't seem to be any point in staying. I was humoring myself into thinking I could live indefinitely like this.

Tanya had one prosthetic leg made from this shiny pink plastic stuff; so she looked like she was part Barbie doll, part girl. She loved to wear short, tight skirts and platform shoes to show off her leg. She knew the name of every boy who hung out in LOVE park. Tanya introduced us.

My first impression of Zachary was that he was a beautiful junkie. He wasn't handsome; he was pretty, the kind of boy that girls draw obsessively in the corners of their notebooks. Tall, great cheekbones, and red-black hair rolling down the sides of his face in fat curls. He was juggling a tennis ball, a fork, and three spoons. A cardboard sign next to his feet had
will juggle anything for food
written on it in an unsteady hand.
Anything
had been underlined shakily, twice. Junkie, I thought. I wondered if Tanya had ever slept with him. I wanted to ask her what it was like.

After he was done and had collected a little cash in a paper cup, he walked around with us for a while, mostly listening to Tanya tell him about her band. He had a bag over his shoulder and walked solemnly, hands in the pockets of his black jeans. He didn't look at her, although sometimes he nodded along with what she was saying, and he didn't look at me. He bought us ginger beer with the coins people had thrown at him and that's when I knew he wasn't a junkie, because no junkie who looked as hard up as he did would spend his last quarters on anything but getting what he needed.

The next time I saw Zachary, it was at the public library. We would all go there when we got cold. Sometimes I would go alone to read sections of
The Two Towers,
jotting down the page where I stopped on the inside hem of my jeans. I found him sitting on the floor between the mythology and psychiatry shelves. He looked up when I started walking down the aisle and we just stared at one another for a moment, like we'd been found doing something illicit. Then he grinned and I grinned. I sat down on the floor next to him.

"Just looking,” I said, “What are you reading?” I had just run half the way to the library and could feel the sweat on my scalp. I knew I looked really awful. He looked dry, even cold. His skin was as pale as if he never spent a day in the park.

He lifted up the book spread open across his lap:
Faerie Folktales of Europe
.

I was used to people who wouldn't shut up. I wasn't used to making conversation.

"You're Zachary, right?” I asked, like an asshole.

He looked up again. “Mmhmm. You're Jen, Tanya's friend."

"I didn't think you'd remember,” I said, then felt stupid. He just smiled at me.

” What are you reading?” I stumbled over the words, realizing halfway through the sentence I'd already asked that. “I mean, what
part
are you reading?"

"I'm reading about unicorns,” he said, “but there's not much here."

"They like virgins,” I volunteered.

He sighed. “Yeah. They'd send girls into the woods in front of the hunts. Girls to lure out the unicorn, get it to lie down, to sleep. Then they'd ride up and shoot it or stab it or slice off its horn. Can you imagine how that girl must have felt? The sharp horn pressing against her stomach, her ears straining to listen for the hounds."

I shifted uncomfortably. I didn't know anyone who talked like that. “You looking for something else about them?"

"I don't even know.” He tucked some curls behind one ear. Then he grinned at me again.

All that summer was a fever dream, restless and achy. He was a part of it, meeting me in the park, or at the library. I told him about my last foster home and about the one before that, the one that had been really awful. I told him about the boys I met and where we went to drink—up on rooftops. We talked about where pigeons spent their winters and where we were going to spend ours. When it was his turn to talk, he told stories. He told me ones I knew, old stories, and he told me old-sounding ones I had never heard. It didn't matter that I spent the rest of the week begging for cigarettes and hanging with hoodlums. When I was with Zachary, everything seemed different.

Then one day, when it was kind of rainy cold and we were scrounging in our pockets for money for hot tea, I asked him where he slept.

"Outside the city, near the zoo."

"It must stink.” I found another sticky dime in the folds of my backpack and put it on the concrete ledge with our other change.

"Not so much. When the wind's right."

"So how come you live all the way out there? Do you live with someone?” It felt strange that I didn't know.

He put some lint-encrusted pennies down, and looked at me hard. His mouth parted a little and he looked so intent that for a moment, I thought he was going to kiss me.

Instead, he said, “Can I tell you something crazy? I mean totally insane."

"Sure. I've told you weird stuff before."

"Not like this. Really not like this."

"Okay,” I said.

And that's when he told me about her. A unicorn. His unicorn. Who he lived with in a forest between two highways just outside the city. Who waited for him at night, and who ran free, hanging out with the forest animals or doing whatever it is unicorns do, all day long, while Zachary told me stories and scrounged for tea money.

"My mother . . . she was pretty screwed up. She sold drugs for some guys and then she sold information on those guys to the cops. So one day when this car pulled up and told us to get in, I guess I wasn't all that surprised. Her friend, Gina, was already sitting in the back and she looked like she'd been crying. The car smelled bad, like old frying oil.

"Mom kept begging them to drop me off and they kept silent, just driving. I don't think I was really scared until we got on the highway.

"They made us get out of the car near some woods and then walk for a really long time. The forest was huge. We were lost. I was tired; my mother dragged me along by my hand. I kept falling over branches. Thorns wiped along my face.

"Then there was a loud pop and I started screaming from the sound even before my mother fell. Gina puked."

I didn't know what to do, so I put my hand on his shoulder. His body was warm underneath his thin t-shirt. He didn't even look at me as he talked.

"There isn't much more. They left me alone there with my dead mom in the dark. Her eyes glistened in the moonlight. I wailed. You can imagine. It was awful. I guess I remember a lot, really. I mean, it's vivid but trivial.

"After a long time, I saw this light coming through the trees. At first I thought it was the men coming back. Then I saw the horn. Bleached bone. Amazing, Jen. So amazing. I lifted up my hand to pet her side and blood spread across her flank. I forgot everything but that moment, everything but the white pelt, for a long, long while. It was like the whole world went white."

His face was flushed. We bought one big cup of tea with tons of honey and walked in the rain, passing the cup between us. He moved more restlessly than usual but was quieter, too.

"Tell me some more, Zachary,” I said.

"I shouldn't have said what I did."

We walked silently for a while ‘til the rain got too hard and we had to duck into the foyer of a church to wait it out.

"I believe you,” I said.

He frowned. “What's wrong with you? What kind of idiot believes a story like that?"

I hadn't really considered whether I believed him or not. Sometimes people just tell you things and you have to accept that
they
believe them. It doesn't always matter if they're true.

I turned away and lit a cigarette. “So you lied?"

"No, of course not. Can we just talk about something else for a while?” he asked.

"Sure,” I said, searching for something good. “I've been thinking about going home."

"To your jerk of a foster father and your slutty foster sisters?"

"The very ones. Where am I going to stay come winter otherwise?"

He mulled that over for a few minutes, watching the rain pound some illegally parked cars.

"How ‘bout you squat libraries?” he said, grinning.

I grinned back: “I could find an elderly, distinguished gentlemanly professor and totally throw myself at him. Offer to be his Lolita."

We stood awhile more before I said, “Maybe you should hang with people, even if they're assholes. You could stay with me tonight."

He shook his head, looking at the concrete.

And that was that.

I told Tanya about Zachary and the unicorn that night, while we waited for Bobby Diablo to come over. Telling it, the story became a lot funnier than it had been with Zachary's somber black eyes on mine. Tanya and I laughed so hard that I started to choke.

” Look,” she said. “Zach's entertainingly crazy. Everybody loves him. But he's craz-
az
-azy. Like last summer, he said that he could tell if it was going to rain by how many times he dropped stuff.” She grinned. “Besides, he looks like a girl."

"And he's into unicorns.” I thought about how I'd felt when I thought he was about to kiss me. “Maybe I like girly."

She pointed to a paperback of
The Hobbit
with a dragon on the torn remains of the cover. “Maybe you like crazy."

I rolled my eyes.

” Seriously,” she said. “Reading that stuff would depress me. People like us—we're not in those kind of books. They're not
for
us."

I stared at her. It might have been the worst thing anybody had ever said to me.

Because no matter how much I thought about it, I couldn't make it feel any less true.

But when I was around Zachary, it had seemed possible that those stories were for me. Like it didn't matter where I came from, like there was something heroic and special and magical about living on the street. Right then, I hated him for being crazy. Hated him more than I hated Tanya, who was just pointing out the obvious.

” What do you think really happened?” I asked, finally, because I had to say something eventually. “With his mom? Why would he tell me a story about a
unicorn
?"

She shrugged. She wasn't big on introspection. “He just needs to get laid."

Later on, while Bobby Diablo tried to put his hands up Tanya's halter top before her boyfriend came back from the store and I tried to pretend I didn't hear her giggling yelps, while the whiskey burned my throat raw and smooth, I had a black epiphany. There were rules to things, even to delusions. And if you broke those rules, there were consequences. I lay on the stinking rug and breathed in cigarette smoke and incense, measuring out my miracle.

The next afternoon, I left Tanya and her boyfriend tangled around one another. The cold grey sky hung over me. Zachary was going to hate me, I thought, but that only made me walk faster through the gates to the park. When I finally found him, he was throwing bits of bread to some wet rats. The rodents scattered when I got close.

"I thought those things were bold as hustlers,” I said.

"No, they're shy.” He tossed the remaining pieces in the air, juggling them. Each throw was higher than the last.

"You're a virgin, aren't you?"

He looked at me like I'd hit him. The bits of bread kept moving though, as if his hands were separate from the rest of him.

That night I followed Zachary home. Through the winding, urine-stained tunnels of the subway and the crowded trains themselves, always one car behind, watching him through the milky, scratched glass between the cars. I followed him as he changed trains; I hid behind a newspaper like a cheesy TV cop. I followed him all the way from the park through the edge of a huge cemetery where the stink of the zoo carried in the breeze. By then, I couldn't understand how he didn't hear me rustling behind him, the newspaper long gone and me hiking up my backpack every ten minutes. But Zachary doesn't exactly live in the here and now, and for once I had to be glad for that.

Then we came to a patch of woods and I hesitated. It reminded me of where my foster family lived, where the trees always seemed a menacing border to every strip mall. There were weird sounds all around and it was impossible to walk quietly. I forced myself to crunch along behind him in the very dark dark.

Finally, we stopped. A thick bunch of branches hung like a dome in front of him, their leaves dragging on the forest floor. I couldn't see anything much under it, but it did seem like there was a slight light. He turned, either reflexively, or because he had heard me after all, but his face stayed blank. He parted the branches with his hands and ducked under them. My heart was beating madly in my chest, that too-much-caffeine drumming. I crept up and tried not to think too hard, because right then I wished I was in Tanya's apartment, watching her snort whatever, the way you're supposed to wish for mom's apple pie.