“Easier?” I step toward her, hopeful. I have no desire to experience the intense “feedings” of my youth, deadly potations that were all-consuming.
“Softer,” she says with a sympathetic smile. “When you are ignorant, the plants must work extra hard to draw you to them. The magic compels you to eat with such intensity because without it, you never would. But when you know what you are, what you do—when youpractice—it gets easier. Less force is required to direct you. The cycle informs, it doesn’t demand. Do you understand?”
“I think so.”
“Here.” She holds the tawny grisette out to me. “Take it.”
I let her drop it in my palm, light and damp. “Do you… do you want me to eat it?”
Her hair wafts around her as she shakes her head. “No. Just feel it.”
I look down. The cap has split into ridges along the edge where the gills are. I run my fingertip against them. “There was a mycology club at my college,” I tell her. “Maybe something like that would help.”
“No.” She curls my fingers around the mushroom, holding my hand in hers. “You can never be seen with yourflos mortis,Piers—yourflower of death.Do you understand? The risks are too great. If a kill is traced back to you… They have no mercy for our kind.” She shudders, as if remembering the heat of a pyre personally. “No books. No classes. No clubs. No internet. Not even a misplaceddocumentary. You must learn from here.” Her hand goes to my chest, over my heart. “And here.” It drops below my navel. “And here.” A finger between my eyes. “Let the magic teach you. Or another bane witch. Never the outside world.”
I swallow anxiously. How many times have I stood beside pokeweed with admiration in my eyes, chest swelling with longing? How many mistakes have I made? The suicide note I left behind for one. Don’s death for two.
“Now,” she says. “Close your eyes.Feelit.”
At first, it’s hard to vacate my mind, the jewel-bright berries I love so much like Christmas lights beside the shabby, nondescript exterior of this mushroom. I must wait out my thoughts, my breaths. Until finally, like a light in the distance, I begin to feel a moldering undercurrent beneath my ribs, velvety and unobtrusive, nuzzling. My nose fills with the aroma of fresh rain, a passing draft against my skin, and my tongue tingles along the sides, expectant. It’s not a voracious hunger but a cultivated appetite, the simple, grounded knowing that if I ate it raw, I would savor something delicate and terrestrial, with a bitter, buttery twinge. Until the stomach cramps set in. Which, of course, would never happen for me, but could put another through an unfortunate evening at best, and result in a trip to the ER and possible organ failure at worst.
I open my eyes and meet Myrtle’s. She has seen it find me, her smile echoing my own wonder. “And now you know,” she says, scooping the mushroom from my hand.
“Is it the same for you?” I ask. “How it feels; what it does?”
She grins, eyebrows lifting. “Finally beginning to ask the right questions, are you? There arevariancesamong us. How the toxins manifest in a mark can shift from one bane witch to another. But we don’t alter the fundamental properties of the plant. You can think of it like two people getting the same virus but displaying differing symptoms. One may run a fever. Another’s cough may linger. You get the idea. The marks themselves can have impact, too, depending on their current physical condition. You will find you feed more when your mark is young or strong.”
A patch of sunlight draws me like a spotlight to red stems. A shrub, chest high with flat, green leaves and white berries—I want to scratch my fingernail down to the pith, watch it bleed, suck the sap. Myrtle comes to my side.
“You found poison sumac. Go ahead, pick some,” she says.
I break off a stem and hold it to my chest, the wetness on my fingers a strange comfort. “It would take a lot of this to kill someone,” I tell her. “Unless…”
She cocks her head and waits.
“It would be extremely irritating to the mucus membranes and could lead to dehydration. Properly concentrated or combined with a diuretic or allergen, it could do the trick.”
“You learn fast,” she tells me. “That’s good.” She plucks the stem from my hands and folds a leaf into her mouth like its chewing gum. “Delicious.”
“It’s okay even if you aren’t feeding?”
“We’re never vulnerable to the plants’ toxins, but when we’re in bloom, we’re driven to them so they can build in our system, discharging as soon as we kill.”
She’s started back to the cabin when I place a hand on her elbow, tugging her to a stop. “At the conclave, when they gave me a time limit, you started to argue. You said I’d only just bloomed, just killed. That it was impossible to know something about the cycle.”
Her face falls.
“Tell me,” I insist.
“We can’t dictate when a mark will come to us. The bloom is not something we force. The cycle tells us when to feed, when to kill, not the other way around. And I have a suspicion about yourclass.” She pulls the scarf tighter about her shoulders, like a hug.
“My class?” I dart between her eyes, as if one will give the secret away over the other. “What is that?”
“It’s like having a type. The way certain women choose certain lovers again and again, specific traits and features of physicality or personality. We tend toward a particular kind of mark. It’s not ahard and fast line, mind you. You will deviate from it, taking the marks the allure calls to you. But you will find a kind of pattern begins to emerge.” She scowls, as if this annoys her. “It takes time to reveal itself, but I have a theory when it comes to yours. And if I’m right…” She shrugs the rest off like dead weight.
“What’s your theory?”
She doesn’t answer at first, but her eyes pucker at the inside corners, pitying.
