Timbol Whiskerfoot's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Three mouslings had gone missing from the western trails since the last frost, and Timbol Whiskerfoot had run out of poisons that could kill what was taking them. He knelt in the moss behind his burrow and laid out every vial he owned. Nightcap tincture. Boiled toadskin. Redroot paste. He had used the strongest of them on a rat once and dropped it in a breath. Against a serpent thick as a fox and long as a fallen pine, none of it would matter. He capped the vials and pressed his palms flat to the dirt to stop them shaking. He walked to the frontier inn at the forest's edge because that was where travelers spoke, and travelers had seen the serpent. The common room smelled of wet wool and burned onions. A trapper at the bar told him the snake had taken a hound two nights past, swallowed it whole, and slid back under the ferns without hurry. Timbol bought the trapper a drink and asked what killed a thing that size. The trapper laughed and said steel, maybe, if you had a hundred spears. Then he leaned closer and said there was one who knew plants that steel could not match. The oracle in the shadowroot hollow. Thorne Blackroot. Most who went looking never found him. Those who did came back changed, or did not come back at all. Timbol went anyway. He walked two days west, past the last trail marker, into ground where the trees grew close and the light turned green. He found Thorne Blackroot sitting on a stump with leaves woven into his beard, as if he had been waiting since morning. Timbol told him about the mouslings. He told him about the vials that were not strong enough. Thorne Blackroot listened without moving. Then he reached behind the stump and lifted a bundle of dark, veined leaves, purple and blue lines running through them like sickness under skin. Hexleaf, he said. Prepared right, it would stop the heart of anything that breathed. Prepared wrong, it would stop Timbol's. He named his price: a favor, unspecified, to be called in when he chose. Timbol agreed before he let himself think. He carried the bundle home wrapped in oilcloth, held away from his body like a hot coal. That night he laid the leaves on his workbench and understood what he had bought. He had the poison. He had no way yet to deliver it to a serpent that swallowed hounds whole, and he owed a debt to a man whose name travelers spoke like a warning. He pinned the oilcloth flat and began to read the veins.