The Foxglove King, page 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by Hannah Whitten
Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio
Cover illustration by Mike Heath | Magnus Creative
Cover background image by Shutterstock
Cover copyright © 2023 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Map by Charis Loke
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First Edition: March 2023
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Whitten, Hannah, author.
Title: The foxglove king / Hannah Whitten.
Description: First Edition. | New York, NY : Orbit, 2023. | Series: The nightshade crown ; book 1
Identifiers: LCCN 2022034979 | ISBN 9780316434997 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316435192 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3623.H5864 F68 2023 | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220721
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034979
ISBNs: 9780316434997 (hardcover), 9780316435192 (ebook)
E3-20230114-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
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The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The Winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.
—William Wordsworth
CHAPTER ONE
No one is more patient than the dead.
—Auverrani proverb
Every month, Michal claimed he’d struck a deal with the landlord, and every month, Nicolas sent one of his sons to collect anyway. The sons must’ve drawn straws—this month’s unfortunate was Pierre, the youngest and spottiest of the bunch, and he trudged up the street of Dellaire’s Harbor District with the air of one approaching a guillotine.
Lore could work with that.
A dressing gown that had seen better days dripped off one shoulder as Lore leaned against the doorframe and watched him approach. Pierre’s eyes kept drifting to where the fabric gaped, and she kept having to bite the inside of her cheek so she didn’t laugh. Apparently, a crosshatch of silvery scars from back-alley knife fights didn’t deter the man when presented with bare skin.
She had other, more interesting scars. But she kept her palm closed tight.
A cool breeze blew off the ocean, and Lore suppressed a shiver. Pierre didn’t seem to spare any thought for why she’d exited the house barely dressed when mornings near the harbor always carried a chill, even in summer. An easy mark in more ways than one.
“Pierre!” Lore shot him a dazzling grin, the same one that made Michal’s eyes simultaneously go heated and then narrow before he asked what she wanted. Another twist against the doorframe, another seemingly casual pose, another bite of wind that made a curse bubble behind her teeth. “It’s the end of the month already?”
Michal should be dealing with this. It was his damn row house. But the drop he’d made for Gilbert last night had been all the way in the Northwest Ward, so Lore let him sleep.
Besides, waking up early had given her time to go through Michal’s pockets for the drop coordinates. She’d taken them to the tavern on the corner and left them with Frederick the bartender, who’d been on Val’s payroll for as long as Lore could remember. Val would be sending someone to pick them up before the sun fully rose, and someone else to grab Gilbert’s poison drop before his client could.
Lore was good at her job.
Right now, her job was making sure the man she’d been living with for a year so she could spy on his boss didn’t get evicted.
“I—um—yes, yes it is.” Pierre managed to fix his eyes to her own, through obviously conscious effort. “My father… um, he said this time he means it, and…”
Lore let her expression fall by careful degrees, first into confusion, then shock, then sorrow. “Oh,” she murmured, wrapping her arms around herself and turning her face away to show a length of pale white neck. “This month, of all months.”
She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t need to. If there was anything Lore had learned in twenty-three years alive, ten spent on the streets of Dellaire, it was that men generally preferred you to be a set piece in the story they made up, rather than an active player.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Pierre’s pale brows draw together, a deepening blush lighting the skin beneath his freckles. They were all moon-pale, Nicolas’s boys. It made their blushes look like something viral.
His gaze went past her to the depths of the dilapidated row house beyond. Sunrise shadows hid everything but the dust motes twisting in light shards. Not that there was much to see back there, anyway. Michal was still asleep upstairs, and his sister, Elle, was sprawled on the couch, a wine bottle in her hand and a slightly musical snore on her lips. It looked like any other row house on this street, coming apart at the seams and full of people who skirted just under the law to get by.
Or very far under it, as the case may be.
“Is there an illness?” Pierre kept his voice hushed, low. His face tried for sympathetic, but it looked more like he’d put bad milk in his coffee. “A child, maybe? I know Michal rents this house, not you. Is it his?”
Lore’s brows shot up. In all the stories she’d let men spin about her, that was a first—Pierre must have sex on the brain if he jumped straight to pregnancy. But beggars couldn’t be choosers. She gently laid a hand on her abdomen and let that be answer enough. It wasn’t technically a lie if she let him draw his own conclusions.
She was past caring about lying, anyway. Lore was damned whether or not she kept her spiritual record spotless. Might as well lean into it.
“Oh, you poor girl.” Pierre was probably younger than she was, and here he went clucking like a mother hen. Lore managed to keep her eyes from rolling, but only just. “And with a poison runner? You know he won’t be able to take care of you.”
Lore bit the inside of her cheek again, hard.
Her apparent distress made Pierre bold. “You could come with me,” he said. “My father
And every nerve in Lore’s body seized.
It was abrupt and unexpected enough for her to shudder, to shake off his hand in a motion that didn’t fit her soft, vulnerable narrative. She’d grown used to feeling this reaction to dead things—stone, metal, cloth. Corpses, when she couldn’t avoid them. It was natural to sense Mortem in something dead, no matter how unpleasant, and at this point she could hide her reaction, keep it contained. She’d had enough practice.
But she shouldn’t feel Mortem in a living man, not one who wasn’t at death’s door. Her shock was quick and sharp, and chased with something else—the scent of foxglove. So strong, he must’ve been dosed mere minutes before arriving.
And he wanted to disparage poison runners. Hypocrite.
Her fingers closed around his wrist, twisted, forced him to his knees. It happened quick, quick enough for him to slip on a stray pebble and send one leg out at an awkward angle, for a strangled “Shit!” to echo through the morning streets of Dellaire’s Harbor District.
Lore crouched so they were level. Now that she knew what to look for, it was obvious in his eyes, bloodshot and glassy; in the heartbeat thumping slow and irregular beneath her palm. He’d gone to one of the cheap deathdealers, one who didn’t know how to properly dose their patrons. The veins at the corners of Pierre’s eyes were barely touched with gray, so he hadn’t been given enough poison for any kind of life extension, and certainly not enough to possibly grasp the power waiting at death’s threshold.
He probably wasn’t after those things, anyway. Most people his age just wanted the high.
The dark threads of Mortem under Pierre’s skin twisted against Lore’s grip, stirred to waking by the poison in his system. Mortem was dormant in everyone—the essence of death, the power born of entropy, just waiting to flood your body on the day it failed—but the only way to use it, to bend it to your will, was to nearly die.
If you weren’t after the power or the euphoric feeling poison could give you, then you were after the extra years. Properly dosed, poison could balance your body on the cusp of life and death, and that momentary concession to Mortem could, paradoxically, extend your life. Not that the life you got in exchange was one of great quality—half-stone, your veins clotted with rock, making your blood rub through them like a cobblestone skinning a knee.
Whatever Pierre had been after when he visited a deathdealer this morning, he hadn’t paid enough to get it. If he’d gotten a true poison high, he’d be slumped in an alley somewhere, not asking her for rent. Rent that was higher than she remembered it being, now that she thought of it.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Lore murmured. “You are going to tell Nicolas that we’ve paid up for the next six months, or I am going to tell him you’ve been spending his coin on deathdealers.”
Fuck Michal’s ineffectual bargains with the landlord. She’d just make one of her own.
Pierre’s eyes widened, his lids poison-heavy. “How—”
“You stink of foxglove and your eyes look more like windows.” Not exactly true, since she hadn’t noticed until she’d sensed the Mortem, but by the time he could examine himself, the effect would’ve worn off anyway. “Anyone can take one look at you and know, Pierre, even though your deathdealer barely gave you enough to make you tingle. I’d be surprised if you got five extra minutes tacked on for that, so I hope the high was worth it.”
The boy gaped, the open mouth under his window-glass eyes making his face look fishlike. He’d undoubtedly paid a handsome sum for the pinch of foxglove he’d taken. If she wasn’t so good at spying for Val, Lore might’ve become a deathdealer herself. They made a whole lot of money for doing a whole lot of jack shit.
Pierre’s unfortunate blush spread down his neck. “I can’t— He’ll ask where the money is—”
“I’m confident an industrious young man like yourself can come up with it somewhere.” A flick of her fingers, and Lore let him go.
Pierre stumbled up on shaky legs and straightened his mussed shirt. The gray veins at the corners of his eyes were already fading back to blue-green. “I’ll try,” he said, voice just as tremulous as the rest of him. “I can’t promise he’ll believe me.”
Lore gave him a winning smile. Standing, she yanked up the shoulder of her dressing gown. “He better.”
Pierre didn’t run down the street, but he walked very fast.
As the sun rose higher, the Harbor District slowly woke up—bundles of cloth stirred in dark corners, drunks coaxed awake by light and sea breeze. In the row house across the street, Lore heard the telltale sighs of Madam Brochfort’s girls starting their daily squabbles over who got the washtub first, and any minute now at least two straggling patrons would be politely but firmly escorted outside.
“Pierre?” she called when he was halfway down the street. He turned, lips pressed together, clearly considering what other things she might blackmail him with.
“A word of advice.” She turned toward Michal’s row house in a flutter of faded dressing gown. “The real deathdealers have morgues in the back. Death’s scales are easy to tip.”
Elle was awake, but only just. She squinted from beneath a pile of gold curls through the light-laden dust, paint still smeared across her lips. “Whassat?”
“As if you don’t know.” Lore shook out the hand that had touched Pierre’s shoulder, trying to banish pins and needles. It’d grown easier for her to sense Mortem recently, and she wasn’t fond of the development. She gave her hand one more firm shake before heading into the kitchen. “End of the month, Elle-Flower.”
There was barely enough coffee in the chipped ceramic pot for one cup. Lore poured all of it into the stained cloth she used as a strainer and balled it in her fingers as she put the kettle over the fire. If there was only one cup of coffee in this house, she’d be the one drinking it.
“Don’t call me that.” Elle groaned as she shifted to sit up. She’d fallen asleep in her dancer’s tights, and a long run traced up each calf. It’d piss her off once she noticed, but the patrons of the Foghorn and Fiddle down the street wouldn’t care. One squinting look into the wine bottle to make sure it was empty and Elle shoved off the couch to stand. “Michal isn’t awake, we don’t have to pretend we like each other.”
Lore snorted. In the year she’d been living with Michal, it’d become very obvious that she’d never get along with his sister. It didn’t bother Lore. Her relationship with Michal was built on a lie, a sand foundation with no hope of holding, so why try to make friends? As soon as Val gave the word, she’d be gone.
Elle pushed past her into the kitchen, the spiderweb cracks on the windows refracting veined light on the tattered edges of her tulle skirt. She peered into the pot. “No coffee?”
Lore tightened her hand around the cloth knotted in her fist. “Afraid not.”
“Bleeding God.” Elle flopped onto one of the chairs by the pockmarked kitchen table. For a dancer, she was surprisingly ungraceful when sober. “I’ll take tea, then.”
“Surely you don’t expect me to get it for you.”
A grumble and a roll of bright-blue eyes as Elle slinked her way toward the cupboard. While her back was turned, Lore tucked the straining cloth into the lip of her mug and poured hot water over it, hoping Elle was too residually drunk to recognize the scent.
Still grumbling, Elle scooped tea that was little more than dust into another mug. “Well?” She took the kettle from Lore without looking at her and apparently without smelling her coffee. “How’d it go? Is Michal finally going to have to spend money on something other than alcohol and betting at the boxing ring?”
“Not on rent, at least.” Lore kept her back turned as she tugged the straining cloth and the tiny knot of coffee grounds from her cup and stuffed it in her pocket. “We’re paid up for six months.”
“Is that why you look so disheveled?” Elle’s mouth pulled into a self-satisfied moue. “He could get it cheaper across the street.”
“The dishevelment is the fault of your brother, actually.” Lore turned and leaned against the counter. “And barbs about Madam’s girls don’t suit you, Elle-Flower. It’s work like any other. To think otherwise just proves you dull.”
Another eye roll. Elle made a face when she sipped her weak tea, and sharp satisfaction hitched Lore’s smile higher. She took a long, luxurious swallow of coffee and drifted toward the stairs. There’d been a message waiting for her at the tavern—Val needed her help with a drop today. It was risky business, having her work while she was deep undercover with another operation, but hands were low. People kept getting hired out from under them on the docks.
