Poison Apples by Crow Kirby

Author:Crow, Kirby [Crow, Kirby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bonecamp
Published: 2015-07-30T22:00:00+00:00

***

In a valley below a castle, in a village glen, in a cottage with windows of blue glass, there lived an old man named Gula, the snake-healer, and he lived alone.

High on a mountain, in a fortress of stone, lived a noble baron who seldom left his rooms, attended only by a youth whose loveliness was like a flame. Spara was the name the young man had been given the bright morning he’d entered the garden of the fortress, which in his tongue meant forgive.

Tatterdemalion

The flower boy had no name. Neither did his slum in Cir by the Sea. It was one slum of many in that city, nothing more than a crumbling borough affixed to the west end of the Sea Market like a calloused wart or a puddle of brown wax. An alleyway had been home to the boy since the day his mother abandoned him on the barrier wall.

Fitch Alley was a stretch of murky, jagged cobblestone between two rows of lopsided warehouses in the slum, where the stink of low tide clung like a lover to the slimy walls and the sewers clotted with waste. The alley was home to common cutthroats, thieves, paroled prisoners, whores, pimps, witches, slavers, and scabby orphans more dangerous than any assassin. There were houses of a sort there; shaking huts piled five stories tall and teetering perilously. Collapses were not uncommon. Vagrants opted to sleep on the city wall rather than be crushed by falling rocks or drowned in shit.

Boys of the alley tended to become thieves, pimps, or the occasional traveling mummer. The flower boy had tried his hand at pick-pocketing and discovered he had no talent for it. A lack of innate dishonesty perhaps. During one failed robbery attempt, he’d been obliged to hide under a flower cart as a brace of city guards hunted for him. He passed that day watching an old woman sell posies. It seemed a boring occupation, but non-lethal, and the flower woman was far from skinny. Everyone, it seemed, had a few pennies to spare for a flower.

He vowed that if he escaped the guards, he would take up the trade.

The wares he sold were not as grand as the lush blooms of the flower carts. He had to make do with the hardy breeds that grew on the hills: vivid strawflowers, marigolds, thorny tea roses, sheaves of fern and purple vetch. He knotted them into wild, creative forms with twists of vine and willow bark. Although his posies were little better than weeds, they were clever and quaint, and it became sort of a fashion in Cir to wear daisies when one could afford lilies. The boy prospered.

Every day he woke early and walked for miles into the hills ringing the city to gather flowers, and every day he witnessed lazier boys die in the alley. The rats ate their eyes before their bodies were removed.

Motion was life. He had learned this from watching a mariner scrape a boat keel by

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