I STAGGER BACK TO THE GARDEN, STICKY WITH BLOOD.

“Dumbcane? Snakeweed? I have returned.”

There is silence. I sense only the chilling silver mist, enwrapping me in its tendrils.

“Moonseed? Larkspur? Speak, Poisons! I have performed the tasks you asked of me. Now you must give me the cure I seek.” I shout in anger to keep myself from weeping, for I know my soul is lost. I have killed, and killed, and killed again, and there is no amount of grace that can save me now.

“My subjects—the ones you call the Poisons—are not here.”

A young man rises from the earth. Some might call him beautiful. His hair is silver as wormwood, his lips are stained red as a yew berry. Twinned dark shapes—can they be wings?—lie folded against his back. He approaches me with outstretched arms.

“Welcome home, Weed,” he says.

I am exhausted with games and trickery, and murder still flows in my veins. It takes all my strength not to strike out at this smug creature and let his own crimson blood dye the earth beneath our feet.

“Who are you?” I hiss in fury.

The dark shapes on his back rise and flex. They are enormous wings made of dark, leathery leaves, stretched over a skeleton of branches that are gnarled and forked as a witch hazel tree. Only now does he lift his eyes to mine. They are wide and vividly green, like my own.

“Don’t you know me, Weed? We have met before, more than once. Surely you remember—the first time was long ago….”

The hypnotic power of his voice is impossible to resist. I close my eyes. My nostrils fill with the tang of salt air.

“I remember,” I say, dazed, as the long-forgotten images wash over me. “When I was a boy I used to run off; one time I made it to the docks and stowed away on a trading vessel bound for the Low Countries. A fortnight into the voyage, the ship was boarded by pirates. The crew bargained for their freedom. They offered to hand me over as a slave. I was terrified. I prayed for some way to defend myself.”

“And your prayers were answered. Remember?”

The horrors of the past flood my senses: The sudden, violent illness that swept over our captors but left us untouched, the vomiting, the stench of decay, the bodies thrown overboard one by one as the pirates died in agony …

“Our attackers grew sick and weak,” I answer in a daze. “Their numbers dwindled, and soon we were able to defeat them.”

“There is more, Weed. Remember?” His sinuous voice lures the memories from my mind. “The pirates were starving; they had been sailing for weeks with no provisions left but hardtack and whiskey. After seizing your vessel, they bound the crew in ropes. They took you for the ship’s boy, and ordered you to the galley to prepare a meal.”