Morgana DeVille drove her last stake into the peat and looked at the map she had drawn on the back of a wanted poster. The poster was her own. The map was the swamp called New Hellz, and the small X at its center was where she meant to build a town for people the cities had thrown away. She had walked three days to reach that X. She had one hatchet, half a sack of cornmeal, and a pistol with four shots. The stakes marked the corners of the first house. She had just finished the fourth when she smelled the thing that had been following her since dusk — wet fur, old meat, something with a mouth big enough to matter. She heard it breathing behind the reeds. She knew she could not sleep. She also knew she had walked too far to turn back, and four shots would not last the night. Morgana banked the fire high and climbed a cypress with her pistol in her teeth. From the branch she watched a low shape circle the stakes, testing the ring of light. She counted its steps and waited for a clean shot. Then the water under the fire went bright. A serpent rose out of the shallows on the far side of the camp, long as a wagon, its scales lit from inside with shifting green and gold. It made no sound. The predator in the reeds froze, turned, and ran. The serpent followed only with its eyes, then swung its head toward Morgana in the tree. She kept the pistol pointed at it and did not fire. It watched her for a long moment. Then it lowered itself into a coil beside her fire, laid its head across the peat, and closed its eyes, as if the camp were already its own. Morgana climbed down slowly. She did not sleep that night either, but she lived to see the sun come up over her four stakes, and she understood that the swamp had just introduced her to her first neighbor.

Morning came slow. The serpent still lay coiled by the ashes of the fire, its scales dim in the daylight but bright wherever a cloud passed. Morgana sat on a stump ten feet away and watched it breathe. She had four stakes in the ground and one neighbor she could not talk to. If she stood up wrong, if she stepped where it did not want her to step, she would learn the answer with her teeth. She needed a way to speak to it before she did anything else. She went through her pack on the stump, slow, so the serpent could see her hands. She had cornmeal, a hatchet, three shots left, and a small crimson vial her teacher had never known she took. The vial was blood, hers, drawn and sealed a year ago and worked with the only craft she knew. Lust magic was a poor word for it. What it really did was show a creature what it wanted and make the giver the source. She had used it on men. She had never tried it on a thing the size of a wagon. But she had nothing else to offer that a serpent might understand. She uncorked the vial and poured three drops onto a flat stone at the edge of the coil. Then she stepped back and sat down again. The serpent's tongue came out once. It slid its head over the stone and stayed there a long minute. When it lifted, the stone was dry, and the green and gold in its scales moved slower, like a full animal, not a hungry one. It looked at her. It did not look at her the way a snake looks at a mouse. It looked at her the way a dog looks at the person who feeds it. She tried a word. She said, stay. The serpent did not move. She said, hunt, and pointed at the reeds where the predator had run the night before. The serpent's head turned to the reeds, then back to her, and it did not go. She understood then that it was not a servant and would not be one. It had heard her. That was the whole of it. She corked the vial and put it back in her pack. One drop had bought her a conversation. She had maybe ten drops left. She stood up slow and walked past the coil to her fourth stake. The serpent watched her pass and did not strike. She picked up the hatchet and began to cut the first log for the first wall. Behind her the serpent shifted once, resettled, and closed its eyes. Morgana had a neighbor now, not a threat. She also had a swamp full of things that had not yet met her, and ten drops of blood to meet them with.

By noon Morgana had one wall standing and a problem she could not cut with a hatchet. A wall was not a town. A town needed people, and the people she wanted lived scattered across every village that had run them out. None of them knew the swamp held a place for them. She set the hatchet down and looked at the serpent, dozing by the ashes. She had ten drops of blood left and no messenger she could send. She thought through what she had. The serpent would hear her but not carry word. The swamp itself was full of eyes, though. She had seen a small winged thing the night before, dark-furred with orange wings that lit up when it moved. It had watched her from a branch and flown off when the serpent shifted. A creature like that could cross miles. A creature like that, given a drop of her blood, might cross them for her. She baited a flat stone at the edge of the clearing with one drop and waited. The winged thing came at dusk. It landed on the stone, licked it clean, and then sat back on its haunches and looked at her the way the serpent had looked at her, full and calm. She said the names of three towns that had run her off. She said, tell the ones they hate. She said it plain, four times, until the small creature's ears twitched at the sound. Then it lifted off and was gone over the reeds. She did not know if it had understood. She had spent a tenth of what she owned to find out. She learned three days later. A man waded into her clearing at dawn with mud to his knees and a knife in his belt. He said a fairy had come to his window and spoken her words in his own voice. Behind him, an alligator the size of a boat pushed through the reeds, ridged and dark, its mouth bent in what looked like a grin. The man said the alligator had guided him through the deep water and had not eaten him, which he took as a sign. Morgana looked past them both. Two more shapes moved in the reeds. She had spent one drop and bought arrivals. She had also brought a stranger's teeth into her camp, and she did not yet know whose side the grinning one was on.

The man with the knife stood in her clearing, and behind him the grinning alligator waited in the shallows. Two more shapes crouched in the reeds. Morgana counted them and counted her one standing wall. She had called these people. Now they hovered at the edge of her camp like deer, ready to bolt the moment the serpent shifted or the alligator turned. She had no room to hold them, no roof to point them under, nothing that said stay. If they scattered back into the swamp tonight, the ones behind them would hear it and never come. She told the man to sit by the ashes. She stepped past him to the wet ground at the clearing's edge and cut her thumb. Two drops. She had eight left after. She pressed the blood into the mud and spoke plain, the way she had spoken to the small winged thing. She asked for shelter. She asked for walls that would grow faster than she could cut them. Then she waited. The serpent lifted its head from the ashes and watched. The alligator watched. The man in the mud watched her thumb bleed. For a long minute nothing came. Then the ground near her hand shifted, and a pale root pushed up through the muck. Another followed. Roots braided into a trunk, and the trunk swelled and split and hollowed. Moss ran up the sides in sheets. Vines dropped like curtains from a crown of small branches. In an hour it stood taller than her wall, a round living hut with one wide mouth for a door and a floor of packed root above the water. Big enough for six to sleep dry. She had not asked for a shape. The swamp had chosen one. And as the last vine settled, a woman stepped out of the doorway who had not been there before, horned and winged, hair in every color the swamp did not have, watching Morgana the way the serpent had watched her the first night. Full. Calm. Waiting. Morgana did not ask who she was. She turned to the man and pointed at the door. She called to the reeds and said the same word twice. Come in. The two shapes rose slowly and waded across. The alligator settled at the threshold like a dog. The man ducked through the mouth of the hut and touched the wall and did not come back out. The others followed. Morgana stood in her clearing with six drops of blood left and a house she had not built and a stranger in the doorway who seemed to belong to the place already. She had her gathering room. She had also brought something older than her craft into the middle of her camp, and she did not yet know what it would ask for the shelter it had given.

The stranger in the doorway did not move. Morgana counted the people inside the hut and the drops of blood left in her vial. Six settlers. Six drops. One horned woman she had not called and could not name. The serpent lay by the ashes. The alligator lay across the threshold. Neither reacted to the woman, and that told Morgana something. Whatever she was, the swamp already knew her. Morgana did not. She had to learn before the woman spoke first, because whoever spoke first set the terms. She stepped away from the hut and crouched at the water's edge. She cut her thumb again. One drop. Five left. She pressed the blood into the reeds and asked for a small thing this time. Something quick. Something that could run at a woman's heels and see what a woman was. The mud stirred and a dark shape uncurled from it, fox-shaped, three tails trailing a low smoke. It sat on its haunches and looked at her with yellow eyes. Morgana pointed at the hut door. Follow her, she said. Come back and tell me what she eats. The fox slipped past the alligator and vanished inside. Morgana waited by the ashes. The horned woman came out then. She walked past Morgana without stopping and stood at the clearing's edge, watching the reeds. The fox trotted at her heel. It did not growl. It leaned against her calf like it had always been hers. Morgana understood. The swamp had sent the woman the same way it had sent the hut and the serpent. Not as a servant. As a neighbor. Morgana walked to the edge and stood beside her. Up close the woman smelled like wet stone. Morgana said, you can stay, but the people inside are mine to protect. The woman turned her head. Her eyes were calm and old. She said one word Morgana did not know, and the fox trotted off into the reeds and came back dragging a dead marsh rat. The woman laid the rat at Morgana's feet. Then she walked to the hut, ducked through the mouth, and sat down among the settlers as if she had been waiting for them to arrive. The man with the knife did not raise it. The others shifted to make room. Morgana stood in her clearing with five drops of blood, seven people under one roof, and a neighbor she had not chosen but had, for now, accepted. She had guessed. She had guessed right. The camp held.

By morning the settlers were thirsty. Morgana watched the man with the knife scoop swamp water into his palm and lift it toward his mouth. She caught his wrist before it reached his lips. The water was brown and warm and smelled like rot. She had seen towns lose half their people to worse. Six settlers, a horned neighbor, a serpent, an alligator, a fox with three tails. None of them would matter if her people drank this and died in a week. She had four drops of blood left in the vial. She needed clean water before she needed anything else. She walked out past the reeds until the mud came up to her shins. She cut her thumb and let one drop fall. Three left. She did not ask for a servant this time. She had learned. She asked for a neighbor who knew where clean water ran. The swamp held still. Then the surface lifted and a shape rose out of it, woman-shaped from the waist up, the rest a curl of moving water. Her hair ran like a current. Her eyes were closed. Morgana said, my people cannot drink what is here. The spirit opened her eyes and pointed east, past a stand of dead cypress, to a place Morgana could not see. Then she sank back into the swamp and the water where she had stood was suddenly cold and clear. Morgana cupped it and drank. It tasted like rain. She called the settlers over and they filled every pot they had. While they drank, something small pushed up through the mud at her feet, green and round, with leaves for hair and tomatoes clustered at its shoulders. It grinned at her. It handed her a carrot from its own arm. Morgana understood the swamp was answering more than one question. By nightfall the settlers had a spring at the east edge of the clearing and a small green thing following the horned woman around the fire, pressing vegetables into the settlers' hands. No one had gotten sick. No one had run. Morgana sat by the ashes and counted again. Three drops. Seven people fed and watered. Two new neighbors who had come without being called by name. She had spent blood and gotten water and food in return, and she had not asked either creature to serve her. That was the trade the swamp seemed to want. She could work with that. But she had noticed something else. Every time she bled, more things came. She did not know yet how many the clearing could hold before one of them wanted the place for itself.

Morning came gray and wet. Morgana sat by the ashes with the vial in her lap. Three drops of blood left. She held the glass up to the light and watched the crimson swirl. Every neighbor she had came from that vial. The serpent. The water spirit. The hut she slept in. Three drops would not build a town. Three drops might not last a week. She needed more blood, or she needed a way to make each drop go further. She could cut deeper and refill the vial from her own arm, but she had tried that once in a town two years back and slept for three days after. A witch bled dry could not protect anyone. She walked to the edge of the clearing where the reeds were thickest. She uncorked the vial and let one drop fall into her palm. Two left. She rubbed the blood between her fingers and spoke into the wet air. She did not ask for a servant. She asked for a messenger small enough to split the work of one drop into many. The reeds shivered. Something climbed out of them on wings the color of a lit coal. It was no bigger than her hand. A small succubus, black-furred, with a forked tail and eyes like hot glass. It landed on her wrist and licked the blood from her skin. Morgana felt the pull of her own magic settle into the creature and hold. The succubus grinned at her. It spoke in a voice like a struck bell. One drop, many errands. It would carry her lust magic in its own body and spend it in small pieces, wherever she sent it. She had traded one drop for a courier that could stretch the rest. She tested it before she let herself believe it. She sent the succubus to the serpent with a greeting, no blood spent, just the residue in the creature's mouth. The serpent lifted its head from the reeds and dipped it once, hearing her through the messenger. Morgana sat down hard in the mud. Two drops in the vial. A winged mouth to carry her voice. She was not saved. She was still one bad night from empty. But she had bought herself time she did not have yesterday, and time was what a town needed most. She corked the vial and put it inside her shirt against her skin. Then she called the settlers together to tell them the clearing had a new neighbor, and this one worked for her.