“Isn’t the weather lovely this time of year!?” I scream.

“YES AUTUMN IS MY FAVORITE SEASON THE DEAD LEAVES SEEM SO DELICATE!” he roars in Alak, the words audibly scouring his throat.

And soon the Alak language gushes from his lips. His relief is obvious.

*

Speaking Alak together, Wormpig and I determine that a number of small doses, taken within the space of a single day, wouldn’t put Pepedora’s delicate health in danger.

I go to the shrine with the statue of the giant book and steal a flask full of the mare’s blood offering, laced with the poisonous saliva of the shrine bats. Three times the following day, I set a bowl of it in the vicinity of a big wasps’ nest Wormpig showed me; its paper mass bursts from the infested wall of an abandoned house. The wasps consume the blood, and on my two subsequent visits I collect those less hardy specimens whose bodies litter the ground below the nest. These I take to White Dead Nettle, who crushes them with indigo powder and adds them to the ink we brew together in the meantime. When a good quantity of this ink is ready and bottled, it joins my writing tools and a roll of special wasp paper I’ve secreted in a cave.

Now, as night is falling, I take several cups of a strong herb mixed with vinegar and return a fourth time to the nest. I peel back my sleeves, take up a stick, and give the exposed nest a strong blow. The groan of the nest swells, the air burrs with their heavy bodies, I feel the flutter of their legs on my skin and immediately pain like a dull knife heated up in a fire lances into my arm—these are the heartier wasps who drank the poisoned blood and survived. That poison is now mixed with their venom.

Crying out with pain I run for the moat, trying to sweep the wasps from my arms and neck—one tumbles down into my tunic and the next moment I feel a pain in my solar plexus that punches my breath out of me—it’s like a stone the size of an apple were rammed into and lodged in me. I’ve traced this route before but I am reeling and flailing with less and less control over myself, and I fight every moment the instinct to shut my eyes altogether made worse by the wasps flitting on and off my face.

Nearly unable to breathe, I throw myself into the water face first, lifting my head out of the water and plunging it back in again over and over, trying to move away from the heavy black darts. Finally I take hold of the far edge. A wasp lands at once and languidly thrusts its sting into my hand. I wail in despair and put my hand back into the water. Bursting with pain it swells and I believe it will drag me to the bottom like an anchor. I can feel the poison like mint in my blood—I have to get out of the water at once. My arms are pin-and-needle numb, stiff. I set them on the bank and drag myself out of the water with them as though they were wooden fakes. The wasps have gone.