Audrieadea counted the freckles on her forearm by candlelight and found three new ones since dawn. Each brown mark was a clock. Each clock told her the same thing: the blight was spreading, and when it reached her throat, she would die the way her mother did, and her grandmother before that. She was the last of her line. Somewhere in the swamp, a cure had to exist, because the alternative was to sit in this hut and let the freckles finish her. The hut leaned on its stilts above black water. Wind pushed through the gaps in the walls and made the candle jump. She had inherited the place from an aunt she never met, along with a rune-marked cauldron squatting cold in the corner and a table crowded with bottles, root bundles, and clay jars. The tools were good. The location was not. The nearest village sat an hour's poling through the reeds, and the villagers there had burned a woman last spring for less than what Audrieadea planned to brew tonight. She lit the fire under the cauldron and started with what she knew: swamp cinquefoil, boiled bark, a pinch of powder from the smallest jar on the table. The mixture went green, then black, then threw up a column of pale smoke that punched straight through a hole in the roof. Audrieadea swore and slapped a wet cloth over the pot. Too late. Any trapper on the water would see that smoke and know exactly what it meant. Witch-hunters paid in silver for tips like that. She had a choice. Leave the hut and hide in the reeds until the story died, or make the hut itself invisible. She pulled her aunt's book from under the bed's carved frame and turned pages until she found a warding rite. It required blood, salt, and a full night's burning. She cut her palm over the cauldron, poured salt in a ring around the stilts below, and fed the fire until her arms shook. By the time the sun came up, a low haze clung to the walls that made the eye slide away. From ten feet off, the hut looked like a hummock of rotted reeds. Audrieadea sat down on the mossy quilt of the bed and pressed the cut palm against her knee. She had a workspace now. She had cover. She also had a wound that would not close, and when she looked at the cauldron she saw the truth the rite had cost her: the ward drank from the caster, and it would keep drinking every night she brewed inside its ring. She had bought time to search for the cure. She was paying for that time in the same blood the cure was meant to save. She banked the fire and reached for the smallest jar again.

By midmorning Audrieadea had brewed three failed pots and lost three more cuts' worth of blood to the ward. Her palm throbbed. Her arms felt hollow. The rune-marked cauldron sat in the corner of the reed-walled hut, steaming a dull green that told her nothing. She did not know which root, which bark, which powder from her aunt's crowded table would answer the blight. Every wrong guess cost her. She could not afford many more. She stood at the table and looked over the bottles and bundled herbs. Cinquefoil. Bog myrtle. A jar of pale root she could not name. Her aunt's book listed cures for fevers and boils and lung-rot, but nothing for a hereditary mark. Audrieadea pressed her cut hand against the table's edge and made herself think. Guessing was killing her. She needed someone who had seen the blight before. There was only one name her mother had ever spoken with fear. She wrapped her palm, took a lantern, and poled out through the reeds before the light failed. The old woman lived deeper in the swamp, past water no villager crossed. Audrieadea found the crooked shack on its low stilts near sunset. Baba Yaga stood in the doorway already, wild white hair lifting in the wet wind, yellow nails curled at her sides, as if she had been waiting an hour. "You brew too loud," Baba Yaga said. "I smelled you two days back." She looked Audrieadea over and stopped at the freckles climbing her wrist. Her mouth pulled tight. "Your grandmother came to me with those. Your mother did not." She stepped aside. "Come in before the frogs listen." Inside, a heavy timber hearth burned low. Baba Yaga sat Audrieadea down and turned her arm to the firelight. "There is no brew for this," she said. "Not with cinquefoil. Not with any root on your table. The blight feeds on the same blood your ward drinks. Every night you burn in that hut, you feed it twice." She spat into the fire. "You need marrow from a white heron taken alive, and you need it before the freckles reach your collar. Nothing else works. I watched your grandmother try everything else." Audrieadea rode back through the dark with the lantern low and her hand pressed to her chest. She had her answer. The wasted brews would stop. But the answer was worse than the question. White herons nested in the shallows the witch-hunters patrolled by day, and taking one alive meant hours in open water, in open sight, with a wound that would not close. She tied the boat to her stilts and climbed inside the warded hut. The cauldron waited. She banked the fire and began sharpening a snare.