Poison Garden: A Fantasy Viking Norse Myth Romance (The Beautiful and the Deadly Book 1) Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Tessa Tempest

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Cover Design Copyright © 2019 Atlantis Book Design https://www.atlantisbookdesign.com/

  Contents

  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

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  One

  I’m tired of waking up next to dead men.

  I wrinkled my nose as the foul odor of last night’s royal-hopeful hit even before I opened my eyes. Blech. This never got any easier. But when your kiss is poison and a man must survive it to seize the throne, it’s a distressingly frequent occurrence. Especially since that throne would make one the most powerful ruler in the Eleven Realms.

  Holding my nightdress sleeve to my nose, I rolled over and took in the sight of him sprawled across the other side of my bed. Unseeing eyes stared up at the peaked glass roof of my quarters. The creeping vines of devil’s ivy and jasmine that covered most of the greenhouse cast macabre shadows across his weak-chinned face.

  I crawled across the crimson sheets of my bed, which was large enough for five grown men— thank the gods for small mercies since I refused to give up any of the comforts this position afforded me. With two fingers pressed to his neck, I waited for a pulse I knew I wouldn’t find.

  Before crawling back, I noted the lump on his head had swollen and turned a putrid purple color and smiled in grim satisfaction. Too many of this endless stream of men who came for the Poison Trial seemed to grow four pairs of hands and thought a dying man was entitled to having his way with the poison girl. I disabused this one of that notion with the shovel I kept under my bed.

  Once that unpleasantness was taken care of, I bathed and dressed and retreated to the far corner of the greenhouse.

  With only a wooden bench and a trunk piled with paints and canvases filled with my imaginings of the sea, this hidden nook was spare. Common. Especially compared to the opulence of the silks and pelts in the part I had to share with the power-hungry men who sought the crown. Perhaps it was common, but it was also the only place that felt like my own.

  After drawing a curtain I’d hung to cordon off the space, I cast a glance at the gates of the Poison Garden—the only way in or out of my cage. No sign of people through the tinted glass, either at the gates or on the path leading to the castle on the hill.

  A few moments to myself at last. I crouched down, shoulders relaxing as I pried up the loose floorboard. After one more look to confirm my earlier assessment, I pulled out my bag of treasures I kept tucked away beneath the weathered wood.

  Settling in on my bench, I pulled my knees to my chest. The moment my fingers sunk into my bag of shinies, my eyes fluttered closed on a contented sigh. A diamond earring, a loose ruby, scraps of metal and coins from worlds far beyond these walls, all forgotten in the garden, sifted through my fingers before I located the item I sought.

  The ridges of the seashell fit perfectly into my palm and I withdrew it, tracing my thumb over the smooth mother-of-pearl swirls that spiraled inward. I had no idea how it came to be in the garden, only that when I found it, it had been like holding a piece of home. Not that I knew where my true home had been. I’d been too young to form memories of the voyage that had brought me here and lost me my parents.

  I pressed a lavender sachet to my nose to block out the world around me and held the shell to my earMy cheek pressed against the cool glass as the soft susurration of the shell carried me to distant shores.

  Like they always did, a treasure trove of images and sensations flooded my mind: longboats with wind gusting into their sails, the smell of salty air, mirror lakes and mountains stretching all the way to the heavens. Wooden dwellings with shallow pitched roofs, and women who looked like me with their white-blond hair woven into braids. And then there were the Viking warriors. They haunted my dreams and imaginings more vividly than anything else—four of them anyway. Each as strong as the mighty oak that stretched over the wall that towered over the garden. Rough-hewn features that had known the savagery of war but still held kindness. One of them, the tallest, had a scar that cut across his face. I’d never seen them before in my life. They must have been cobbled together from myths and legends, childhood stories and snatches of travelers’ conversations. But even still, with one exception, they felt like the closest thing to family that I had. They were the stories I told myself to keep the death and desolation of this place from swallowing my soul.

  Rap. Rap. Rap.

  The glass rattled against my cheek, jolting me out of my longings. My neck muscles bunched and only let down slightly at the sight of Drysi’s ethereal form hovering in the garden on the other side of the glass. Even through the heavy panes, I caught the amusement in her milky-white eyes at my startlement. She hooked a transparent thumb in the direction of my front doors.

  I grumbled but raised an eyebrow as she misted away. She could’ve phased through the walls if she wanted—being a spirit and all—so I gathered that something was afoot in the garden.

  Despite my grumbling, Drysi’s presence was a welcome break from the darkness. When I first came to this place, I’d never imagined how alone I’d be with only entitled fools and servants with zipped lips and averted eyes for company. Then Drysi had burst into my life, devising games to keep me occupied, teaching me how to dispatch the lordlings who got too rough, and collecting shiny stories from travelers to bring to me like a magpie.

  When I threw open the greenhouse doors, her translucent eyes shone with untold gossip.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “The Braxton twins are at each other’s throats again over the Ninth Realm raid.”

  “You’re probably right about that, but I’ve got something even better.” She floated in carrying the opulent floral scent of the garden with her. Her hair streamed behind her as she circled me with a knowing smile. Though everything of her aspect was spun of milky white wisps, she had a way of bursting into a place in a riot of color.

  I raised an eyebrow, my curiosity piqued, but I knew she’d only continue once she’d allowed time for a dramatic build up.

  “The dead one gone yet?” She sniffed and wrinkled her nose in the direction of my bed.

  “Alas, no.”

  “Even better reason to get outside. This one try anything?”

  I shrugged and shook off the memory of his stink of oily fish and meaty hands moving
toward unwanted places.

  Her eyes flashed with protectiveness. After thirteen years of serving as my big sister and only companion, she could see past my every deflection.

  “You give him a good thumping for his troubles?”

  I smiled. “I rather like that new short shovel we found.”

  “Good girl.”

  “Now about this piece of news?” I prompted.

  Drysi’s eyes glittered. “Ah, yes. Fancy a little investigating?”

  “It’s something in the garden?”

  She floated past me and out the doors again, robes fluttering, trailing an enigmatic smile in her wake. “More like below the garden.”

  I followed her, pulling the door shut behind me.

  The morning mist curled at my ankles and sifted its fingers through the white snakeroot bells and the muted crimson berries of the nightshade plants.

  The garden teemed with tendrils that walked the razor’s edge between life and death: spires of foxglove flowers, rosary peas that glistened like pomegranate jewels. Every living thing here was cultivated to be as beautiful as it was deadly. Myself included.

  “Do you know who I saw coming out of the ossuary this morning?”

  My steps faltered. “Who?”

  I tried and failed to focus on the stone path underfoot and the intoxicating scent of the flowers. Of course the ossuary was the only place under the garden. But they’d already brought the new bones for the season last week. There shouldn’t be a new delivery until after the frost cleared.

  “Palace types. Not one, but six of them.” Drysi’s eyes gleamed.

  She carried on through the hedges of hydrangeas and dipped down to inhale the scent of the black tulips. “If it required that many, it must have been something big.”

  I wiped my sweating palms on the long skirts of my dress. “Maybe they’ve made another of their bizarre bone displays.”

  “I hope it’s something more creative than those avenging angels and leg bone chandeliers. What they really need is a dragon. Or a ballroom scene of a danse macabre.”

  Though I managed a half smile at Drysi’s musings, my skin prickled with prescience and dread. I rubbed my arms against the feeling.

  The scent of flowers gave way to the musty damp and dry bones as we passed through the archway that led underground to the ossuary. Bones—the remains of every person who threw away their lives in the Poison Trial for a chance at power—lined the walls.

  Torch light cast an aura of shadows and whispers on the line of skulls that followed us with their unseeing eyes until we made it to the main chamber. Bones curled into mosaic patterns of the night sky overhead. Constellations picked out from femurs and fibulae rained down as chandeliers.

  I swept the room for new ghoulish statuary but found none. Only the avenging angels with their hulking heavenly bodies built from a perversion of earthly remains stood watch from each corner. My stomach clenched. I moved to the dais in the center of the space, the truth of what I was about to find clawing at the corners of my mind.

  Drysi swept in front of me and froze at the end of the display, her expression stricken. “Maybe this was a bad idea. Why don’t we just—?”

  With blood roaring through my ears like a river, I pushed past her to the stone cases that held the remains of my predecessors. In all my previous visits, there had been ten. One each for Hywela, Addfwyn, Ceris, and Eilonwy and the other women who were chosen like me to be the vessel to bestow the toxic kiss that was a test of a king’s worth.

  Now there were eleven.

  I averted my eyes but the newly minted eleventh box wrenched my attention. Bile curled up my throat as I took in scenes from my life played out on the lid amongst ornamental swirls. All of it had been carved in exquisite detail, likely by the kingdom’s most skilled craftsmen: the ship on the sea that had brought me to this wretched place as a child, life as an urchin in the streets, and then me kissing a man and tending to his dead body. One blank spot remained under the words Astrid Northman.

  Thoughts swarmed like a hive of angry bees, the walls of my gilded cage pressing in. One more scene and my life was over.

  Without ever tasting the salty air of the sea. Without unlocking the secrets to my true history of my lost homeland.

  Even in death I’d be confined to this place.

  My trembling hands fluttered to my hair. After a moment, I realized that I’d been plaiting the long blond strands like the warrior women in my visions. My entire being itched to do something more.

  But what could I do?

  I turned away and leaned against my final resting place. All of my freedoms had been snatched away from me the moment I accepted the queen’s offer. I remembered the day—when I’d found my second set of caretakers’ bodies lifeless from the poison plague, and somehow I had survived. Immune.

  Live in luxury and deal in death or be sold into slavery. It seemed an alluring choice at the time, to be appointed to this position.

  At only twelve years old then, I’d gone to sleep with an empty belly more times than I could count while the elites draped themselves in silken finery and glutted their tables with roast goose, elk, every meat imaginable. This was my chance to be part of that, to be on the inside.

  But what I’d gotten was a half-life and a slavery of a different kind.

  With another glance at the blank space on my coffin, the part of me that demanded I reclaim something of my own raised a fiery wall between me and reason. My restless legs and heart set on the sea burned to hurtle myself over the barbed top of an impossibly high wall that bordered the garden, consequences be damned.

  But my thumb went absently to the stump where my right ring finger used to be. That had been my punishment for my last escape attempt. If I tried again, the queen had made clear, my life would be the debt I’d pay.

  Drysi floated beside me in silent solidarity. Sometimes I wished I could carve out the part of me that clung to breathing even if my last breath would be here. But it was strong. I wasn’t ready to stop living just yet. I stood there drawing breath in and releasing it, until I’d pressed it down inside of me—every hope I’d ever harbored for myself, every avaricious need.

  I had endured this life for thirteen years. I was fed, clothed, and wanted for nothing but freedom and answers. I had Drysi and my treasures and my dreams. I could endure once more.

  Once I’d wrapped my grim determination around me like a cloak, I ascended the stairs back to the surface. When I emerged in the garden, an impossible sight took shape before me.

  Four figures materialized from the vines and mist.

  Four strangers who would change everything.

  Two

  The men from my dreams.

  Impossible.

  But there they were. In my garden. Where no one was allowed to set foot unaccompanied upon penalty of ten lashes.

  The largest of the four dipped his hands into the stone fountain and drank deeply while the other three surveyed the garden. Ink marked the skin of their necks and hands peeking out from gauntlets and leather chest plates. Warrior’s clothing, but attire from some far-flung place. From some far-flung time, I thought.

  These men rising from the mist, walking the path through the vines, sent a wave of far-sickness crashing over me, tugging me under its powerful thrall. Seeing them there gave me the same feeling I got when I held my shell to my ear and heard the oceans of a distant land. It was there in the breadth of their warrior’s shoulders, the shades of golden hair so like my own, their possessive bearing. Everything about them whispered secrets of a homeland I’d forgotten, lost to time, or a homeland that was yet to be.

  I didn’t know what to make of the ache that lodged in my breast at the sight of them. But it set down anchor.

  Mine.

  I exhaled a bitter laugh at the wild notion. No. They could not be here for me. They must be here for power. And if they were to undertake the Poison Trial, even if I got to possess them for a night, revel in their stories that might unl
ock my own, they’d be dead or betrothed to the queen by the week’s end.

  I stood thunderstruck for another moment with Drysi whirling around me gleefully getting her own eyeful. Before I could think through my course of action, I grabbed a trowel discarded by the tulip beds and marched over to them. Resemblance to figments of my imagination aside, I could not afford to let down my guard. Even though something deep inside of me already yearned to.

  “What are you doing here?” I still managed to tip my words in suspicion despite the wonder rising inside of me like bread dough fed its yeast.

  My steely gaze darted from one to the next, trowel clutched in my fist. They were even more beautiful up close. They seemed to hold their collective breath as they took me in. Only the tallest one with head shaved nearly bald and solid as an oak hung back. His massive arms crossed over his chest, slate-grey eyes a mask of distrust. The other three lavished me with their gazes as if searching for something lost and very dear. With whatever they saw, their eyes brimmed with an emotion I could not name.

  My lips parted as the tempest tossed inside of me.

  The one I’d pegged as the leader stepped forward. His storm swept eyes, tossed on the waves somewhere between blue and grey fixed on mine, still searching.

  “You the lady of the garden? The one who gives the trial?” he asked with an accent that lilted at a different cadence than any I’d heard before. My eyes were again drawn to their unusual clothing—linen shirts with leather trim, wide leather belts from which hung a variety of axes. The sight probably should have made me uneasy. But nothing in their relaxed bearing hinted that they meant to wield their considerable power on me.