Shadows Of Throne

Chapter 3: Lessons In The Dark

The training began at midnight.

"Poison is intimate," Kaelen said, his voice echoing in the stone chamber beneath the castle. "A sword kills from a distance, an arrow from farther still, but poison?" He held up a vial of clear liquid, letting torchlight fracture through it. "Poison requires trust, requires the victim to accept you into their body."

Lyra sat on a wooden stool, notebook open. The chamber smelled of old death, copper, herbs, and something sweetly rotten. Shelves lined every wall, holding thousands of bottles, each labeled in a language she didn't recognize.

"You're not writing," he observed.

"You're not teaching, you're performing."

The torchlight caught his smile. "Direct, good, the court will eat you alive if you simper."

"I don't simper."

"No, you calculate." He set the vial down and selected another, amber and viscous. "This is widow's kiss, kills in four hours, and its symptoms mimic heart failure and are untraceable after twelve hours." He handed it to her. "Smell, taste, and memorize."

She did. The scent was floral, like lilies at a funeral, the taste is bitter as regret.

"Why widow's kiss?" she asked. "The name."

"Because it was created by a queen who wanted her husband's mistress to die naturally, the queen administered it herself in a cup of shared wine they drank together. The mistress died, the queen..." He paused. "She drank too much in her grief, or so the story goes."

"She killed herself?"

"She joined her." Kaelen's voice softened almost imperceptibly. "That's the danger of poison, Lyra. It's not just a weapon, it's a choice. Every time you use it, you choose what kind of person you become."

Lyra set the vial down carefully. "And what kind are you?"

The question hung between them. Kaelen turned away, his silhouette monstrous against the torchlight.

"The kind who survives," he said. "Now, again, this one is called Lover's Lament..."

They worked until dawn. He taught her to recognize poisons by texture, temperature, and the way they reflected light. She learned to compound antidotes from memory, to calculate dosages by body weight and tolerance, and to hide death in honey and wine and the perfume of flowers.

But he taught her other things too, things not in any book.

"You're left-handed," he observed on the third night.

"My mother was, she taught me to write."

"Poisoners are right-handed, the heart is on the left, and when you administer a draught, you stand to the victim's right, your body blocks the view."

"Then I'll learn to use my right."

"You'll learn to use both." He took her left hand, his grip warm and calloused. She was startled, he'd never touched her before, not once. "Ambidextrous poisoners are rare and valuable, the court won't expect it."

He positioned her fingers around a glass rod, showing her how to stir clockwise with her right and counterclockwise with her left. How the different motions created different currents and how to hide powder in the eddies.

"You're trembling," he said.

"I'm tired."

"You're lying." But he didn't release her hand. "What frightens you, Lyra Blackwood? Death?"

She looked up at him, at the sharp planes of his face, the scar tracing his jawline, the gray eyes that held too many ghosts.

"You," she said. "You frighten me."

"Why?"

"Because you keep saving my life, and I don't know what you want in return."

His thumb brushed her knuckle once, feather-light, then he stepped back, and the warmth vanished.

"I want what everyone wants," he said. "I want to choose how I die."

He left her alone in the poison room, surrounded by ten thousand ways to kill, and for the first time, Lyra wondered if she was being trained as a weapon...

Or as a witness.