by K. Ferrin
The Poison of Woedenwoud
Magicfall Book 3
K. Ferrin
Pixie9Press
The Poison of Woedenwoud
Copyright © 2017 K. Ferrin
Published by Pixie9 Press All rights reserved. All logos owned by Pixie9 Press
No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this book. e scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the copyright owner is illegal and punishable by law. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Ebook: ISBN-13: 978-0-9904890-6-1
Paperback: 978-0-9904890-7-8
Cover Design: Streetlight Graphics
Editing Services: ExLibris Editing
www.kferrin.com
Writing is often a solitary act, but publication takes an army. My eternal gratitude to my husband for his unwavering support, to my editor and cover designer for their help in bringing the vision to life, and to my friends and family. Without your support I could never do what I do.
All my love,
K.
Contents
Also by K. Ferrin
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Afterword
Also by K. Ferrin
Young Adult:
Magicless
Adult:
Across the Darkling Sea, Magicfall Book 1
A Dying Land, Magicfall Book 2
Chapter One
Evelyn stared at the ceiling, trying to remember where she was and how she’d gotten there. The wood above her was smooth, with a light silvery finish that was very different from the rich golden glow of her father’s riverboats. The steady rocking proved she was on the sea and most definitely not on a river. But that made no sense. It had been quiet in town, and she’d fallen asleep in her own bed last night after having dinner with her family. Her mother was chancellor; even if something had happened far from their home, they would have known about it.
She knew she had slept through the night without interruption—she even remembered her dreams. And yet here she was, on a strange ship on the sea, with no memory to account for it.
She looked around the room, searching for some clue about what had happened. She was on a typical ship’s bed. It was flat and hard and directly across from a closed door. Beside her was a bedside table with a single dimmed lantern resting in its center, and on the other side of that was another bed and a figure.
She sat up slowly, jumping as a thick book slid down off her chest and landed in her lap. She held it lightly as she stared at the figure on the other bed. It was a woman, if the swell of breasts beneath the covers was any indication. But she was unlike any woman Evelyn had ever seen. Short yellow hair fuzzed around her head, and she had a body shape that looked as human as any, but with iridescent blue scaling along her cheeks, along the sides of her neck, and even along the top of the shoulder that was facing her, vanishing with the arm below the covers.
The strange woman had been through some sort of incredible trauma. Angry storms of black and purple covered her body, swelling her face and leaving discolored knots so large they were clearly visible in several places on her skull, even beneath that halo of blond hair. One shoulder was held together with a twisting path of neat stitches, showing someone’s skill with a needle. But the stitches had been done with some thick cording never intended for such a purpose. Evelyn shuddered to think what had happened to the woman to cause such injuries. She looked down at her own body, but she was unmarked and felt no pain anywhere. Whatever had happened to the woman, it had happened to her alone.
She had never seen or heard of anything like that figure before, but her mind went immediately to the stories of Dreggs she’d heard as a child. The island of the warlocks, where magic and monsters roamed as openly as she did on a market day in Meuse. The stories were so fantastical no one beyond seven years of age believed them. But there was no denying what was right in front of her. Human-shaped, but scaled like a snake. She wondered if perhaps the woman had some disease that caused the scaling, but it was too perfect, too beautiful to be a deformity or disease.
Evelyn didn’t know whether to feel sorry for her or terrified of her. The people of Meuse feared and hated Dreggs. They spoke of it in the quiet tones reserved for the most feared of things. She’d stopped believing those stories long ago, and she felt the attitude towards magic in Meuse and Brielle was unfounded, but she couldn’t stop feeling deeply disturbed by the closeness of that strange figure. She was unrestrained, suggesting that whoever had put her there didn’t fear her. Evelyn studied her closely, watching the figure’s chest rise and fall with the deep, regular breaths of sleep. Whatever she might be, she was currently no threat to Evelyn, so she turned her attention to the book resting in her lap.
It was a deep brown with a swirling pattern on the cover in the shape of a left hand. It had no title, no writing at all on the outside. Evelyn lifted her hand to the cover and was surprised to see the imprint on the book matched the size and shape of her own hand perfectly. She shifted her hand palm up and studied the swirling patterns of the lines on her palm and fingers. With a shock, she realized the figure on the cover of the book matched her own hand in every way. A chill raised all the small hairs on her arms and the back of her neck. She pressed her hand to the cover briefly, half convinced something spectacular would happen when she touched it, but nothing happened at all.
She flipped open the cover to find her own tight script filling the pages, and as she read, her surprise deepened to incredulity, to disbelief, to fear, and then to something not so easy to describe. Terror, yes. There was so much terror. But anger too. Her mother had tried to kill her while everyone she knew stood by and watched. A boatsmyn had raped her, and later she’d watched that same man die, had pushed her hands into his still warm and pulsing guts and reveled in the pain it caused him. She’d been beaten, kidnapped, tortured. She’d almost gotten her friends killed, and perhaps did get Alyssum killed. And she’d endured all of it for nothing. She’d not found Grag. She’d not found a way to break the curse and wake Evelyn. All she’d managed to do was strand herself on a boat with a bunch of people she barely knew and get herself tangled up in some war to gain control over the last bit of magic that existed in the world. Worse, her rapist’s mother and sister, Celene and Amalya, were on board, thanks to Dreskin and his misplaced sense of honor.
She’d confronted him about it more than once, according to the grimoire. He insisted he had done the right thing bringing Celene and her daughter Amalya along, and had refused to see things from Ling’s perspective. Their arguing had served to isolate her even more from Dreskin and had made her dislike of Celene and Amalya even more intense.
I wish Witch had let me die that day, read the last line on the last written page of the grimoire.
&n
bsp; The next page was filled with a sketch of the woman in the bed next to her—Fern, she now knew—struggling against seething water. Creatures with plate-sized eyes and mouths filled with razor teeth lurked in the water around them, taking chunks of her flesh as they swam by.
Another drawing showed Fern being pulled into a narrow boat after Dreskin and the others had found them, limp, blood streaming from gaps in her flesh, darkening the pink seawater below to an angry red.
Before they had been found by the crew, she had spent ten long days floating with Fern in the Darkling Sea. Alone, at first. But the sirené had found them eventually. They might have been Mari once, but whatever bit of empathy for others of their kind had existed in them before had long since vanished, and that forgotten kinship had not stopped them from trying to rip Fern apart. Ling had been bitten too, gnawed and yanked and buffeted by their smooth-skinned bodies. But she had no meat to offer sustenance, and they’d eventually focused their attention on Fern. Ling had tried to keep them off her. But there were too many of them and they moved too fast. Now, Fern lay on that bed on the verge of death, broken, bloodied, sewn together with fish gut and twine.
Ling curled over onto her side and read the book again. She couldn’t decide how she felt about that last line. She’d obviously been sad when she’d written those words, but right now she was just angry. So many people had wronged her. Those she had loved the most had betrayed her in ways that were just gut wrenching, when she had needed their support most. She wanted to punish them. All of them.
She regretted not having done it already, but she still could. She could go back even now, leave this crazy quest behind, and spend the rest of her days taking revenge on everyone that had been so cruel. Everyone who had hurt her. Seeking revenge would be far more satisfying than drifting in this eternal dark, waiting for Fern to wake up, waiting for some hint, some indication of where they should go next or what they should do.
She scribbled in the grimoire, hard lines of thick black as she drew Laera, Evelyn’s mother, imagining her clamped in the same chair she’d tied Ling to so many months ago. In this drawing it was Ling who twisted the schor cloth around Laera’s chest, cutting off her breath, breaking her ribs, standing mute and blank in the face of Laera’s pleading. They had feared her, though she’d given them no cause for it. Now she wanted to go back and give them every reason for it.
Ling slammed the book closed and tossed it to the bed next to her before moving across the room and staring down at the woman lying there. Ling could remember nothing of her, of what they’d been through together, of ever having met her. But there were pages and pages of writing in the grimoire detailing all of it. There was more of Fern in those pages than anyone else. They had become allies and friends as they’d made their way through the vagaries of this never-ending war. Ling marveled at that even now. She’d been so certain she’d never have such a relationship again, but the abuse she’d experienced because of what she was had stopped at the borders of Brielle. Even Fariss didn’t hate her for what she was, though his desire to destroy her was no less.
Ling ran a finger lightly along Fern’s blue-scaled cheek. Warm, dry, a hint of roughness beneath her finger. She needed to talk to someone about what she’d read, what she’d been through, the hate and anger she was feeling. She wished fiercely that Rudy were here with her. Or, more accurately, that he had stuck by her side as she would have done for him. But he’d said nothing and done nothing as Laera had tried to kill her. His face had been twisted with anguish, but what good did that do her? He’d done nothing, lifted not even a finger to help her. She wanted to punish him too.
Perhaps Fern was the only friend she had anymore, but she didn’t feel like a friend. Ling dropped to her knees and rested her head beside Fern’s ravaged shoulder. She tried to dredge up something, some memory of their time together, some feeling for the woman lying on the bed in front of her, but there was nothing.
Of the others, she barely knew Dreskin, and even if that hadn’t been true, he’d brought Celene aboard this ship. Celene, the mother of the man who’d raped her. Her daughter Amalya too, a girl who was physically close to Ling’s own age, but mentally still a child.
Dreskin had been there; he had yanked Fraser off her and had dragged him up to see the captain. He knew what sort of man Fraser was, and had brought that woman aboard anyway. He was no friend of hers.
Captain Drake had helped her, and continued to help her, but she’d also allowed Ling to walk out into Marique with Fariss. Drake had known what Fariss was capable of, but had said nothing to stop Ling from leaving with him. Ally she might be, but she was hardly reliable.
And not one of them understood what it was like to be cut so perfectly adrift from everything you knew and from everything you were. Only Fern knew what it was like to be so different, so hated for that difference, and so completely alone. Ling was the only changeling in the world who thought and felt and looked so completely human. Fern was one of the last two Mari in the world, and may actually be the last if Alyssum had succumbed to her injuries. She and Fern were the only ones in all the world that completely alone.
Ling reached out and wrapped her fingers around Fern’s hand. She didn’t remember anything about this woman, but she did feel a kinship with her nevertheless. An odd sort of one, based entirely on words she didn’t remember writing in a book she never remembered seeing before, but it was there.
A sudden pounding on the door jerked her upright and started her heart thumping. She had no desire to leave the cabin. The endless black of the Darkling Sea sounded terrifying, and she had as much terror as she could deal with right now just from what she’d read between the covers of the grimoire. Besides, she wasn’t at all certain she could stop herself from choking Celene to death should she see her.
Chapter Two
“Ling, Drake’s looking for you.” It was a man’s voice. She didn’t recognize the voice from memory, but she knew it was Dreskin. He’d come looking for her just about every morning since she and Fern had been hauled on board. He always led her to Drake’s cabin, where they would ask her to tell them everything she could remember from before, then ask her to regurgitate everything she’d read in the grimoire that had happened since.
She understood why they did it. Memory was a fickle thing, and they thought perhaps telling and retelling all that she remembered from before, when she was still Evelyn, might shake something loose, some detail she’d not considered before. It was always in the morning, fresh from her daily ritual of reading through the grimoire. They didn’t dare ask to read the grimoire directly, but she knew they hoped for some new detail from her most recent reading.
They meant well, but it grated on her nerves. Learning she lived a life she didn’t remember anything about was hard enough. Knowing she would be quizzed over and over again on every piece of it only made it worse. Perhaps they thought the distance of the book, the lack of any direct memory of what she’d been through, made it easier for her. If so, they were wrong.
It was terrifying, only being able to experience your life from a book. It felt so much more dangerous that way, out of control. Like she was speeding down a mountain on a wheeled hobby horse with no way to steer, no way to leap off, no way to stop. She worried, constantly, about what hadn’t made it into the book. Were there things even more terrible that she’d decided to leave out?
She wanted to spend as little time contemplating her life as she could. But Dreskin and Drake would not allow it. They made her live it and relive it and live it again, and she hated them for it. It didn’t matter why they did it, only that they did.
Ling’s hands began to tremble, and she shook them hard as she crossed the small room to the bed and lay back down facing the door. She hoped if she ignored him long enough he’d go away, though if today were anything like yesterday and the day before, she hoped in vain.
“I’m not leaving until you come with me.”
She rolled her eyes and shifted onto her back. She knew h
e would do exactly that. They’d played this game many times according to the grimoire. Aside from that, she knew she couldn’t stay in the room forever no matter how much she wanted to. She dropped her feet to the floor one by one, pulled on a pair of boots, and swung open the door to the cabin.
She immediately recognized Dreskin from the description in the book. His hazel eyes and curling hair were lit from below by the flame of a tiny candle, but behind him was a wall of overwhelming blackness. A black so thick it felt like a physical weight, suffocating and heavy. A normal nighttime, softened by the light of the moon and a thousand thousand stars, was more like daylight than the dark of this place. It was so much darker than she ever could have imagined. Much like her life was turning out to be.
Dreskin smiled at her and stepped back, giving her room to move out the door. “How is she?” He asked, leaning his head around the corner to look in at Fern. Ling shouldered past him without looking at him.
“Same,” she muttered.
Ling immediately wished she’d let Dreskin go first. The candle he held was small, but it was the only light to see by. She’d drawn herself a map of the ship in the grimoire, but wandering around it in pitch blackness with only an artist’s rendering to go by wasn’t easy. Dreskin handed the candle up to her without a word. She took it without so much as a thank you.