The Leech's Harvest at Blackthorn Farm

• Chapter 1 The Rotting Pasture
• Chapter 2 The Apothecary's Oath
• Chapter 3 The Lord’s Sickbed
• Chapter 4 Blight and Bone
• Chapter 5 A Death at Blackthorn
• Chapter 6 The Leeching Bowl
• Chapter 7 Whispering Shadows
• Chapter 8 The Maiden’s Fever
• Chapter 9 Roots of Belladonna
• Chapter 10 A Tainted Well
• Chapter 11 False Remedies
• Chapter 12 The Herbalist's Suspicion
• Chapter 13 The Poisoner Revealed
• Chapter 14 Accusations at the Keep
• Chapter 15 Burning the Salves
• Chapter 16 A Venomous Silence
• Chapter 17 The Traitor's Trap
• Chapter 18 Flight Through the Mire
• Chapter 19 Hunted in the Hedges
• Chapter 20 Night of the Hemlock
• Chapter 21 Blood on the Threshold
• Chapter 22 The Alchemist's Revenge
• Chapter 23 Trial by Fire
• Chapter 24 A Bitter Antidote
• Chapter 25 The Final Harvest
• Chapter 26 What Lies in the Earth

The rain had a foul habit of lingering in the hollows of Blackthorn Farm, turning the rye stubble into a slick, grey mush that clung to sheepskin boots like wet grease. Maren bent low over the ditch, her skirt pinned between her knees by a brass bodkin so the hem would not drag through the foul water. Her wicker basket, seasoned by years of damp moss and dried borage, hung from the crook of her elbow. Inside lay three fat glass jars sealed with pig’s bladder, their murky interiors stirred only by the slow, undulating ribbons of black flesh that gave her trade its living name.

A good leech, Maren often told the bailiff’s nervous wife, was not a monster of the deeps; it was merely an uncommonly honest beast. It took only what it could hold, it did not flatter, and it invariably left a clean wound that closed beneath a dab of dried yarrow. Men, in her practical estimation, rarely possessed two of those qualities, let alone all three.

The morning air smelled wrong. Usually, Blackthorn woke to the sharp, wholesome bite of woodsmoke mingled with damp manure and wet dog. Today, however, the breeze carrying over the eastern rise had the sweetish, cloying tang of old butcher’s scrapings left too long under an August sun. Yet Michaelmas was barely past, and the morning frost still glittered upon the brambles.

"Mistress Maren!"

The voice broke through the mist before the man did. Gervaise, the estate herdsman, came stumbling through the hazel copse that bounded the common land. His gait was that of a man whose knees had gone to water. His leather jerkin was buttoned awry, missing the pewter clasp at the throat, and he carried his ash crook not as a staff of office, but as a crutch against the morning’s dread.

"Mistress, you must come up to the high meadow," Gervaise wheezed, halting five paces off and leaning upon the crook with both trembling palms. His whiskers were dusted with white frost, but his cheeks were sallow, shiny with cold sweat. "Old Hob said you’d be down by the water-gate hunting for blood-drinkers. The bailiff is beside himself. He talks of sorcery, or the French sickness brought back by the wool-merchants from the coast."

Maren stood straight, resting the heel of her hand against the small of her back. She was twenty-eight, though the village priest, Father Paul, insisted she looked thirty-five because she spent more time examining men's spittle and the color of their bile than kneeling in the chapel pews. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbows, her forearms corded from working the pestle through heavy gums and dried oak galls.

"The French have enough sins without taking blame for our sheep, Gervaise," she said, her voice dry and steady as dry boxwood. "What is the matter with the beasts? Has the murrain taken the yearlings?"

"It ain't just sheep, mistress," Gervaise muttered, wiping his nose across a frayed cuff. "It’s the great dappled gelding Lord William bought out of Flanders. And the milch cows in the bottom close. Two dead since the cock crew, and three more down upon their hams, blowing froth as black as forge-slag."

Maren secured the lid of her basket, checking that the damp sphagnum moss around the jars had not dried. A practitioner who let her stock perish from thirst was no better than an ostler who forgot the hay. "If they blow froth, it could be the black-leg. Did they graze the wet clover after the rain?"

"They grazed where they always graze," the herdsman said doggedly. "Master Edwin, the young lord, he was riding through the pasture at dusk yesterday. He saw naught amiss then. He sat his horse by the gate and cursed the cold, just like always. But this morning... God’s wounds, mistress, you have never seen a cow swell so fast. The belly is like a brewer’s tun about to burst its hoops."

She did not wait for further lamentations. Maren caught up the basket and moved past him, setting a sharp pace through the dripping hedgerows. Blackthorn Farm was not a small holding; it stretched along the clay ridge between the great woods of the priory and the river shallows where the water-mills ground the manor’s grain. It was the prize parcel of Lord William’s estate, fertile and fat, normally yielding three crops of hay and the heaviest fleeces in the shire.

As they cleared the hazel copse and mounted the stony track toward the upper fields, the wind freshened, bringing the stench in earnest. It was not the familiar, heavy reek of a carcass that had lain out in the brush for three days. It had a sharp, mineral edge beneath the decay, something that caught in the back of the palate like the vapor from a lime kiln.

By the five-bar gate leading into the long pasture, half a dozen farmhands stood huddled together like rooks in a shower. None of them carried tools. None of them spoke. They simply stared into the center of the field, their shoulders hunched against the mist.

Near the trough, sprawled upon its side, lay the Flemish gelding. The horse had been a magnificent beast, seventeen hands high, with legs like stone pillars. Now it lay rigid, its neck arched backward so violently that the muzzle pointed toward the tail, as if striving to escape some agony that had seized it from behind. Its belly was indeed distended, taut as an iron-bound drum, and from its dark nostrils stretched a thick ribbon of greyish foam, speckled with dark grains like ground charcoal.

A few yards off, two brindle cows lay in identical postures, their limbs stiffened straight out from their carcasses like children's wooden toys tipped upon their flanks.

"Back off, the lot of you," Maren said, pushing her way through the huddle of men.

"Don't touch 'em, girl," warned Diccon, the smith, his leather apron stiff with coal-dust. He stayed three paces back from the fence, his hand clutching an iron nail he kept in his pocket against the evil eye. "It’s the breath of the fiend. The earth breathed upon them. I seen it happen once in the high fells when the ground split after a thunder-clap. It’s a devil-plague."

"The devil has better things to do than twist the guts of Lord William's cattle," Maren said without turning around. She slipped the wooden latch of the gate, swung the heavy rail, and stepped into the mire of the pasture.

The turf was torn where the gelding had drummed its iron-shod hooves into the earth before it died. Deep trenches were gouged into the sod, exposing the reddish marl beneath. A beast that died of the ordinary rot or the common murrain slipped away into dullness, its ears drooping, its tongue lolling while its strength drained away over three days of fever. These beasts had fought. They had fought their own blood.

Maren knelt by the horse’s head, her nose wrinkling at the sharp, sour tang that rose from its open maw. She reached into her leather pocket, drew out a small bone spatula, and pried open the horse's lip. The gums were not pale with the anemia of the liver-fluke, nor were they the dull yellow of a diseased gall. They were a violent, congested purple, bordered by a thin line of slate-colored discoloration along the roots of the long teeth.

"Bring me a bucket of water from the spring," she called over her shoulder. "And the clean linen rag from my basket."

No one moved. The men on the fence looked at one another, their faces pale under the grime of their daily labors.

"Gervaise," she commanded, sharpening her tone to the pitch she used when dealing with stubborn bonesetters. "The bucket. Unless you mean to pay the lord for thirty head of cattle out of your own skin."

The herdsman blinked, swallowed hard, and scurried toward the lower well-house.

Maren did not wait for him. She drew her skinning knife—the small, slender blade she kept honed on an oil-stone for removing tumors and cutting through the tough hides of dried roots—and made a cautious incision into the horse’s flank, just behind the shoulder where the skin was thinnest.

The cut did not bleed as a dead beast should. Instead of thick, dark venous blood oozing slowly into the wool, there was a sudden, hissing release of foul air, followed by a thin, watery fluid that ran clear and dark, like cider dregs. It smelled faintly of scorched garlic and bitter almonds.

She leaned back quickly, turning her face to the wind, letting the cold air clear the prickling sensation from her nostrils. She knew that smell, though she had never smelled it in such monstrous volume. Old Mother Joan, who had held the leech-craft in the village before her hands grew too palsied to stitch an ear, had kept a tiny earthenware pot tucked behind the dried henbane on her highest shelf. For the wolves, the old woman had said. Or for when a great man wishes his brother to sleep soundly in the crypt.

"Mistress Maren!"

A new shout cut across the pasture, sharper and fuller of authority than the herdsman's plea. Master Peter, the estate bailiff, was riding hard up the lane on his sway-backed mare. His face was the color of a turnip that had spent the winter in a damp cellar, his fur-trimmed cloak flying behind him like the wings of a grease-soaked crow.

He did not dismount at the gate; he rode straight into the pasture, the mare’s hooves throwing clots of dung-streaked mud into the hedge.

"Away from that beast!" the bailiff shouted, hauling on the reins so sharply the mare tossed her bit and sprayed white flecks onto his stirrup. "Are you mad, woman? Lord William has sent to the priory for Father Anselm to sprinkle the ground with holy water, and here you are carving up the meat like an infidel!"

"There is no meat here for any pot, Master Peter," Maren said calmly, wiping her bone spatula upon a clump of rank grass. She rose, brushing the dried clay from the knees of her coarse skirt. "Even the crows know better. Look at the ash tree."

Peter glanced up involuntarily. A dozen ravens sat along the bare boughs of the great ash at the field's edge. Usually, a dead sheep brought them down within minutes, their black beaks busy in the eye-sockets and soft bellies before the carcass was fully cold. Today, the birds sat motionless, hunched into their dark feathers, croaking intermittently with a flat, hollow rattle, refusing to descend upon the feast.

"A curse," Peter whispered, his thick lips trembling. "A judgment upon this place."

"It is no judgment," Maren said, walking toward him and holding out the tip of her knife. "A judgment comes from heaven and does not reek of the apothecary’s kettle. Smell the blade, bailiff."

Peter leaned down from his saddle, suspicious, then recoiled so violently he nearly lost his stirrup. He gagged, spitting into the weeds. "God’s mother! What filth is that? Did you smear it with the fat of dead toads?"

"It came from Lord William’s Flanders horse," she replied. "And from the brindle cow by the ditch. Their lungs are full of water, their blood will not clot, and their bellies are swollen with wind that burns the tongue. That is not the murrain. The murrain takes the liver and turns the eyes yellow like old parchment. This struck them in the space of three hours."

"How do you know it was three hours?"

"Because their grass is still green in their gullets," she said plainly. "They ate their fill at twilight yesterday and were dead before the moon reached the chapel gable. Look at the ditch-bank, Master Peter. See where the water seeps down from the upper orchard?"

The bailiff swung down from his horse, his heavy belly bouncing against the pommel. He was a small-minded man who measured the world in bushels of grain and silver pennies, but he was not an utter fool when his master's pocket was emptied. Thirty beasts represented more wealth than the village would see in three harvests. If the herd failed, there would be no rent paid, no wool-sacks sent to the London ships, and Lord William’s temper was known from here to the bishop’s palace.

"The orchard?" Peter asked, peering through his small, piggish eyes. "The trees have not been sprayed. The fruit was gathered three weeks back."

"Not the trees," Maren said, leading him toward the stone wall that separated the pasture from the orchard slope. "The ditch. The sheep drink here, where the water collects in the hollows before running down to the creek."

She pointed to the rim of the small pool that had formed beneath the stone culvert. A thin, greasy film floated upon the surface of the brown water, showing dull purple and copper tints where the pale autumn light struck it. Along the edges of the pool, several small creatures lay dead: two field mice, their tiny bodies stiff and arched like the great horse's, and three water-beetles floating belly-up with their legs splayed wide.

Peter stared at the puddle, then stepped back quickly, his boots squelching in the mire. "The spring is poisoned. The water-sprites—"

"Water-sprites do not buy yellow powder from the pack-merchants," Maren interrupted, her voice dropping to a low, cold murmur. "Nor do they carry lead-lined bags through the Lord's private paths. This was thrown in from the orchard above."

The bailiff’s jaw dropped. "Poison? You use a perilous word, Maren. If Lord William hears the word 'poison,' he will look for someone to hang before the sun goes down. He will look at the cowherds. He will look at the men who were whipped last Martinmas for taking deer from the chase. He might even look at you, with your jars of blood-letters and your dried weeds."

Maren held his gaze without flinching. She was used to men threatening her with the rope when their cows died or their women miscarried. It was the perpetual fee of her trade: she was called an angel when the fever broke and a witch when the mortification spread.

"Let him look where he will," she said evenly. "He may hang every ditcher between here and the sea, but it will not bring back the Flemish gelding, nor will it save the young master."

Peter froze, his hand still resting on the pommel of his saddle. "What did you say of Master Edwin?"

"The boy was in this pasture at dusk," Maren said, gesturing to the hoof-prints near the gate. "Gervaise told me he sat his horse here, talking with the men. Did he dismount?"

"He may have," Peter stammered, the color draining further from his cheeks until he looked like tallow. "He... he had a silver cup with him. He had been riding out toward the tavern at the crossroads with Sir Guy. When he returned, he called for cold water from the orchard spring because the wine had made him hot."

Maren felt a cold weight drop into her belly, heavy and solid as lead shot.

"Did he drink it?" she asked.

The bailiff did not answer with words. He merely turned his head toward the grey stone towers of Blackthorn Keep, which rose above the oak woods half a mile distant. From the high battlements, a single bell began to toll—not the clear, ringing chime for the midday Angelus, but the slow, heavy, broken stroke that told the parish a soul was laboring in its final agony.

"God have mercy," Peter whispered, crossing himself with a hand that shook so violently he struck his own nose. "He took the cup from the well-head. He drank it before he climbed the stairs to the great hall."

"Then God had better be quick with His mercy," Maren said, picking up her basket and setting her face toward the castle gate. "Because all the leeches in Christendom will not pull that water out of him if the dark frost has already reached his heart."

The mud of the upper pasture gave way to the sharp, uneven cobblestones of the lower bailey, but Maren did not slow her pace. The heavy iron bell atop the keep’s gatehouse continued its ragged, uneven rhythm, each strike shuddering through the damp air like an iron hammer hitting an anvil. In the outer courtyard, the daily life of Blackthorn Manor had ground to an uneasy halt. A scullery maid stood frozen by the pigsty, a wooden bucket of slops dangling forgotten from her fist; two grooms huddled beneath the archway of the stables, speaking in frantic, hushed tones while watching the high timber doors of the inner hall.

Maren kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, the wicker basket heavy against her hip. Beside her, Master Peter puffed and panted, his heavy wool cloak swishing against his boots like wet canvas as he struggled to keep pace with her long, practiced stride.

"You must not speak of poison to the lord," Peter gasped, catching at her woollen sleeve with a grey-gloved hand. "I warn you, girl! Lord William’s mind is not like other men’s. If you tell him his son was struck down by a cup of bitter water, he will have every well in the manor filled with lime and every stranger within ten miles stretched upon the rack before vespers!"

Maren flicked her wrist, dislodging his grip without looking at him. "And if I tell him the boy has the summer ague while his liver dissolves into black bile, he will cut off my thumbs for lying when the corpse turns black in the coffin. A false comfort is a poor ointment, Master Peter. It softens the hide, but it leaves the rot beneath."

They reached the low, arched door that led to the steward’s quarters and the small, vaulted chamber beyond where the manor’s medicaments were kept. The air inside the stone corridor smelled faintly of old tallow, dried sage, and the damp mold that forever clung to the lower masonry of the keep.

Father Anselm was already there, kneeling in the dim light near the foot of the narrow stair that climbed to the young lord’s bedchamber. The priest’s tonsure was fringed with coarse grey hair, and his embroidered stole was crooked over his dark habit. He held a bronze sprinkler in one hand and a wooden bowl of holy salt in the other, muttering prayers in a flat, rapid Latin that sounded less like a plea for heavenly grace and more like an accountant ticking off sacks of barley.

"Is he still breathing, Father?" Peter asked, coming to a halt and leaning his back against the cold stone wall.

Father Anselm paused, his lips resting mid-phrase, and looked up with small, watery eyes. "The breath stays in him, but it is thin as thread. Sir Guy is above with Lord William. The boy’s skin is cold as well-water, yet he sweats like a swine at the spit. It is an unholy affliction." The priest glanced at Maren’s basket, his nose twitching at the sharp, river-mud reek of the leeches. "You bring those filthy worms into this house, woman? This is a sickness of the spirit. The boy was touched by the night-mist while riding near the gibbet."

"Night-mist does not make a man’s tongue swell until it fills his cheek, Father," Maren said, stepping past him toward the narrow stone steps. "Save your holy water for the burial if I am too late, but stand aside while the blood still moves."

" arrogant wench," the priest grumbled beneath his breath, though he drew his skirts back to let her pass. "The leech thinks her small jars can hold back the hand of God."

Maren ignored him and began the steep climb. The spiral stairs were narrow, worn smooth in the center by generations of iron-shod boots. As she mounted, the cold air of the lower hall was replaced by a stifling, sickening heat. A great charcoal brazier had been dragged into the upper passage, filling the dark corridor with a dry, choking haze intended to drive out bad vapors, but which served only to make the chest ache and the eyes water.

She pushed open the heavy oak door into Master Edwin’s chamber.

The room was crowded with men, and the air was thick with the reek of vinegar, burnt rosemary, and human fear. Upon the high, curtained bed lay Edwin, the sole heir to Blackthorn Farm and all its broad acres. He was barely nineteen, a thick-set young man who usually spent his days coursing hares across the downland or shouting at the foresters. Now he lay sprawled across the linen sheets, his silk tunic unbuttoned at the neck to reveal a chest that rose and fell in short, erratic hitches. His face was a dark, congested red, almost purple across the bridge of his nose, and his lips were flecked with the same grey, dry foam she had seen upon the muzzle of the Flemish horse.

At the head of the bed stood Lord William himself. He was a broad, iron-grey man with eyebrows like gorse bushes and a jaw that looked as though it had been carved from an oak root. His fur-trimmed gown was thrown over one shoulder, and his thick hands were clenched into fists so tight the knuckles were white. Opposite him stood Sir Guy, the young lord’s frequent companion, a lean man with sharp, fox-like eyes, dressed in a close-fitting doublet of dark green wool.

"Where is the apothecary?" Lord William roared, turning his head as the heavy door creaked upon its iron hinges. His voice vibrated in the small stone room like a kettle-drum. "I sent for the leech an hour ago! Is the boy to die while the peasantry dig up dock-roots?"

"I am here, my lord," Maren said, setting her basket down upon the oak table near the window. The table was already littered with useless clutter: a silver chalice containing sour wine, a pewter dish of crushed garlic, and a bundle of dried vervain that Sir Guy had evidently tied to the bedpost to ward off the evil eye.

Lord William took two heavy steps toward her, his face dark with fury and grief. "Look at him, girl! Look at my son! He came in from the ride last night, complained of a burning in his gullet, and by midnight he was writhing like an adder in a hedge. He cannot speak. He cannot swallow his own spit. What herb has taken him?"

Maren walked slowly to the side of the bed. She did not look at the lord, nor at Sir Guy, who had smoothed his green sleeves and stepped back into the shadow of the window curtains. She focused entirely upon the body before her. Sickness was an enemy, but it was an enemy with rules; it moved through the veins and organs according to its own nature, and if a body was to be saved, one had to read the signposts left behind in the flesh.

She laid two fingers against the side of Edwin’s neck, feeling for the pulse. It was erratic, jumping like a trapped sparrow, fast and thin. She gently pressed her thumb against his lower eyelid, pulling it down. The white of the eye was thick with tiny red veins, but the pupil itself was stretched wide, huge and black, despite the bright glare of the wax torches burning nearby.

"He drank water last night, my lord?" she asked quietly.

"He drank wine with me at the tavern," Sir Guy put in, his voice smooth and cold as polished slate. "And when we reached the manor gate, he was flushed. He called for a cup from the spring house to cool his throat. It was simple well-water, brought by one of the stable-boys."

"Which stable-boy?" Maren asked, turning her head slightly.

"What does the boy matter?" Lord William barked, striking his thigh with a heavy palm. "The water was cold! It froze his blood! The priest says it was an apoplexy brought on by the damp air!"

"An apoplexy does not widen the eye until the pupil touches the rim," Maren said, her voice dropping into the flat, detached tone she used when assessing a fractured limb or a gangrenous toe. "Nor does it leave a blue mark upon the gums."

She took her silver spatula from her pouch, pried open the young man’s teeth, and inspected his mouth. The tongue was swollen, dry, and coated with a brown fur, but along the inner margin of the lower lip, right where the flesh met the bone, was a faint, slate-grey line, precisely like the one she had found on the dead horse in the pasture.

A cold certainty settled into her chest. It was not the grey rot, nor was it the breath of the fiend. It was the heavy, dark mineral that came out of the earth in the high hills to the west—the stone the alchemists called saturn, or lead-ore, roasted with sulphur and arsenic until it yielded a sweet, deadly flour that could be dissolved in water or wine without leaving a trace to the eye. But this was mixed with something else, something that struck the heart with the swiftness of an adder's strike. Henbane root, dried and powdered, which dilated the eye and dried the throat long before the heavy metal could finish its slow work.

It was a complex recipe. It was not the crude rat-bane bought by a farmhand to clear a granary. It was a practitioner’s concoction, weighed out on small bone scales with brass weights.

"He has been poisoned," Maren said.

The word fell into the warm, smoky room like a stone dropped into a dry well.

Lord William blinked, his great brow furrowing as if he had been addressed in an unknown tongue. "Poisoned? Who would dare poison the heir of Blackthorn? The French? The wool-merchants?"

"It was not brought from France, my lord," Maren said, picking up her basket and placing it upon the bench beside the bed. "It was mixed by someone who knows how much henbane will freeze a man’s gullet without stopping his heart immediately, and how much roasted lead will ensure he never wakes if the herb fails."

Sir Guy stepped forward out of the shadows, his hands tucked neatly into his belt. "Careful, leech. You speak of high crimes in the lord's own bedchamber. A country woman who gathers weeds in the ditch can easily mistake the rot of a bad sausage for the work of an alchemist. The young master ate sausage at the tavern last evening."

"Sausage does not make thirty head of cattle die in the long pasture before sunrise, Sir Guy," Maren replied, looking the lean knight squarely in the face. "Unless the swine were fed upon the same salt as the young master drank."

Lord William’s eyes widened, the redness in his cheeks turning to a dull, mottled yellow. "The cattle? What of the cattle?"

"The Flemish gelding is dead, my lord," she said plainly. "And two of your milch cows. Three more are down in the mud. They drank from the culvert that carries the overflow from the upper orchard spring—the very spring where Master Edwin’s water was drawn."

Lord William let out a low, gut-wrenching groan that sounded like an old timber splitting under a heavy load. He fell into the high-backed wooden chair beside the bed, his head sinking into his broad hands. "My horse... my boy... all in one night. God’s blood, who has done this to me?"

"We must purge him," Maren said, moving quickly now. The time for talk was over; the young man’s breathing was becoming shorter, a dry, rattling whistling sound coming from his throat. "If the poison is still in his belly, we must draw it out before his blood turns entirely to water."

" Purge him?" Sir Guy sneered, crossing his arms. "He is too weak for a purge. A heavy potion will kill him where he lies."

"If we do nothing, he will be cold before the sun reaches the chapel cross," Maren retorted. She turned to the door. "Master Peter! Bring me mustard from the kitchen! Two hand-spans of fresh lard, and a pitcher of warm water—not from the well, but from the rain-barrel in the inner court! Move!"

The bailiff, who had been hovering in the doorway, vanished down the stairs with a clatter of heavy boots.

Maren turned back to her basket. She lifted the pig’s bladder seal from the largest glass jar. Inside, the three long, dark ribbons of flesh stirred slowly, sensing the change in movement and light. They were large, healthy specimens, gathered from the mud of the deep alder-swamp three miles north, where the water ran clean over iron-sand.

"What are those?" Lord William asked, lifting his grey head from his hands.

"They will draw the bad blood from his throat and the base of his skull," Maren said, lifting a leech carefully with her wooden tongs. "It will not clear the belly, but it will ease the pressure on his brain so he may swallow the mustard."

" Filthy vermin," Sir Guy muttered, turning his face away toward the window. "You bleed a nobleman like a pig in the gutter."

"A nobleman’s blood burns with the same fire as a ditcher’s, Sir Guy," Maren said, laying the cold, wet parasite against the skin just behind Edwin’s ear. The leech contracted for a second, feeling the flesh, then attached its cup-like mouth with a slight, wet latching sound. She applied another behind his other ear, and the third to the thick vein at the base of his throat.

Almost immediately, the dark flesh of the leeches began to swell, their bodies darkening as they drew the thick, stagnant blood away from the congested vessels of the head.

Edwin groaned—a low, piteous sound—and his fingers twitched against the linen sheet. His eyes shifted beneath his heavy lids, but the black pupils remained large, unblinking, fixed upon the wooden rafters above.

"He lives," Lord William whispered, leaning forward, a desperate, pathetic hope breaking through his harsh face. "He moved his hand."

"He is fighting, my lord," Maren said, taking the wooden bowl of mustard grease that Master Peter had just brought panting into the room. "Now help me hold his head. If he breathes this into his lungs instead of swallowing, he will strangle."

Lord William did not hesitate. The great, proud lord leaned over the bed, his thick arms pinning his son’s shoulders to the mattress, his face inches from the boy’s grey lips. "Hold him, Guy!" he barked at the knight.

Sir Guy hesitated for half a heart-beat, his sharp face tightening, before he moved to the foot of the bed and took hold of the young man’s ankles. His hands were steady, but his eyes were darting around the chamber—from the window that looked out over the orchard to the small leather pouch that Maren kept at her waist.

Maren pried open Edwin’s jaw with her bone spatula, poured a spoonful of the thick, yellowish mustard paste into the back of his throat, and pinched his nostrils tight.

For three long seconds, nothing happened. The young man lay rigid, his throat locked in a silent spasm. Then, with a sudden, violent heave that nearly lifted him off the bed despite his father’s weight, Edwin gagged.

"Turn him!" Maren shouted.

Lord William hauled his son onto his side just as the young man vomited a thick, dark deluge into the pewter basin Maren held ready. The reek that filled the room was appalling—a mixture of old wine, sour grease, and that same sharp, metallic tang of scorched garlic that had risen from the dead horse in the high pasture.

The boy coughed, gasped, his chest heaving as he drew in his first deep, unblocked breath in six hours. The purple color in his cheeks began to recede, replaced by a dull, exhausted pale. His eyelids flickered, and for the first time, his pupils contracted slightly against the torchlight.

"Father..." Edwin croaked, his voice barely a rasp.

Lord William fell back into his chair with a heavy, shuddering sob, his great hand clutching his son’s sweat-soaked hair. "My boy. My boy."

Maren did not join in their relief. She took the pewter basin to the window, letting the cool outer air cut through the stink of the vomit. She reached into her pocket, drew out a small ivory rod, and gently stirred the dark mess in the bowl.

Among the grey curd and liquid were small, un-dissolved flakes of a dull, yellow-white stone, along with several tiny, black seeds—the unmistakable, kidney-shaped seeds of Hyoscyamus niger, the black henbane.

She raised her head and looked out the window. Below, the orchard slope stretched down toward the stone culvert and the pasture gate. The autumn trees were bare, their grey branches reaching up like skeleton fingers against the grey sky. Halfway up the hill stood a small timber shed used by the gardeners for storing lime, charcoal, and grafting wax.

A man was standing by the corner of the shed, shadowed by the overhanging thatch. As Maren watched, he stepped back into the dark interior of the hut, but not before the pale