Page 74 of Dare
The venom would attack me. It would give me a fool’s mind, cremating the last vestiges of intellect and rationality. I would forget logic and science. My lineage would fade. In its place, madness would surface: eating mouthfuls of sand but calling it snow, drinking from lightning rain, ranting about medicine, lapsing into a melancholy stupor.
Soon, I would become like that little beast. I might wind up choking her, as I’d attempted in the tower. Back then, it had been a bluff, however much I despised myself for having done it in the first place. This time, it might be real, an impulse I wouldn’t be able to control.
I would become more brutal than before. I would go mad and hurt her.
After that, the venom would incinerate my viscera. From there, I would die.
At least my family would be spared. They wouldn’t have to witness that version of me.
But who would occupy my medical den and sit on my throne? Who would replace me?
To the former, not the Court Physician’s apprentice. I deplored that numbskull of a man, who exercised few aspirations in understanding basic anatomy, to the point where he couldn’t tell his cock from his ass.
Clenching my eyes shut, I raised my hand. Opening my eyes, I stared. My fingers shook so violently that I mistook them for someone else’s. Initially, I overlooked the details.
But then, I gave my hand a second inspection. Scratches marred the top of my wrist … from the predator’s scales. Mere scratches.
No broken flesh. No blood. No bites.
With a groan, I hung my head, dicing my quaking fingers through my hair. To have a venomous effect, a siren shark would have to sink its teeth into its prey. But it could have gotten me. From another angle, it could have happened.
The woman’s feet appeared in my periphery. How long had she been standing there?
Having gotten dressed, this spy had the nerve to approach. How dare I risk myself for the likes of her? I wasn’t myself around this female. I didn’t conduct myself as I should.
Frigidness toward born fools came effortlessly because it was practical. Fundamental to testing for the greater good, for the health of Winter’s people. Mine was an indifferent cruelty.
But not with her.
There, I had failed on every account. My malice had become personal for no reason other than her impulsions and those fucking hands. Also, the way she looked at me. Invasive. Daring. With minimal effort, this woman disrupted me, routinely pulling me into fragments.
Her arm stole out. She reached across the divide to make contact.
“Don’t fucking touch me!” I growled, tearing myself away.
She wrenched her hand back, yet she didn’t quail. Fleetingly, I wondered how that touch might have changed me. She might have polluted my senses with those fatal hands.
Or not. On the contrary, she might have set me aflame.
“I don’t want your help,” I hissed. “I don’t need it.”
She opened her mouth, but I cut her off. “You’re nothing but a plague. Fools like you burden your families, shame your kin, ruin their livelihoods. Your minds are warped. You mutilate yourselves. You assault people. You’re unnatural—and stop fucking staring at me like that! I am your sovereign, not your inferior! Do you want to know what I’ve done to people like you? I’ve shackled them to chairs. I’ve used them as guinea pigs.”
She grimaced. Motivated by that reaction, I nodded. “I’ve poured untested mixtures down their throats. I’ve contaminated them. I’ve impaired their sensory perception. I’ve hindered their reflexes. I’ve amputated them while they were awake. I’ve administered sleeping vapors to see how it disrupted their breathing—to see if they’d wake up during surgery.”
The woman’s reaction blazed across her face, inflammatory thoughts teetering at the edge of her mouth, the words fixing to leap at me. In the past, I had enjoyed that. From the first moment when she’d cracked my vial, I had wanted her to pay for compromising my judgment, for branding herself into my head.
That had not changed. No, it had not.
It should not.
“You’ll ask what I know about being treated like a fool. In return I would ask, what do you know about treating them?” I sneered. “The mad harm themselves and inflict torment on others. They roar and agonize. They attack out of nowhere, sob out of nowhere. Either they can’t focus, or they finagle. They’re impossible to reach.
“Do you want to know what some of the born did before we caught them? One stole a surgical probe and used it to puncture a child’s eardrum. Another set a communal root cellar on fire, having claimed it housed an evil spirit. Because of that, an entire village starved for weeks until word reached us, from a peasant who arrived at the castle with frost-bitten toes.
“You’ll call these abominations ‘born souls’ and say not all of them are unstable. Indeed, the majority are docile, unable to comprehend the most infantile thoughts and actions, nor the most appropriate ones. They need constant direction lest they should stray. They labor under the Crown’s supervision. Call it slavery, but Royals shoulder the task for those who can’t afford to.
“Poet and Briar may be nonconformists to this rule, but they cannot and will not outweigh the other leaders of this continent. I’m not like them and never will be,” I spat.