Nessa Mudwren kept her hands wrapped in oilcloth even inside her own kitchen. Under the wrappings, her fingertips wept a pale silver bead every hour, and one drop on skin was enough to blister a friend for a week. She had not touched another living thing in nine months. On the long plank table sat her problem: forty-two glass jars, each holding a plant, a resin, or a scrap of comb, and none of them had done a thing to the silver when she tested them on pork rind that morning. The rind still hissed. She had one week of dried liver left in the pantry, and after that she would have nothing to trade for another crossing of the fen. Buzzford knocked twice and let themself in, muddy boots on the mat, wide hat dripping. They set a small crate on the table and pushed it toward her with one gloved hand. Inside was a jar of the black comb they had brought back from the drowned oak together, thick dark royal jelly pooled at the bottom like tar. "Try it," Buzzford said. "My hives took to it. Maybe your blood will too." Nessa spooned a bead of the jelly onto a fresh strip of rind, then squeezed one silver drop from her wrapped finger on top. The rind smoked. The jelly blackened and curled. She scraped it into the slop bucket and sat down hard on the bench. Forty-three jars now, and forty-three failures. Buzzford said nothing, which was worse than if they had. Something tapped the floorboards near the door. A painted turtle had walked in behind Buzzford, shell cracked in a web of old lines, amber eyes fixed on the slop bucket. Nessa had seen the turtle before, sunning on the stones by her rain barrel. She had never seen one come inside. It climbed the bucket rim, dipped its beak into the ruined jelly, then swung its head toward her wrapped hands. It opened its mouth and coughed up a wet green pellet onto the plank. Chewed leaves. Bitter smell. Nessa knew the smell — bog arrow, the weed she pulled out of her garden every spring and burned. She had never once thought to boil it. She pressed a silver drop onto the pellet. The silver went dull grey and stopped moving. She stared at the dead bead for a long moment. Then she looked at Buzzford, and at the turtle still watching her from the bucket rim. "I need every bog arrow root I can pull before the frost," she said. She peeled the oilcloth off her right hand and laid it flat on the table, palm up, still leaking. "And I need to know what else this turtle eats, because one pellet isn't a cure. It's a start." Buzzford nodded once and went for the shovels.