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They used a boy

In the green and bramble, his smell eet as plums and pepperh to track an ani places, its loving places And by a pool clear as air they sat a boy down in the softly blowing dandelion seeds, a boy with large, cal of a brown beard, told hiht see so to tell his children about

I did not want to go The scent of it is horrible and wonderful, and we all of us try to ignore it, to bend our heads into the roses and blot out the solden beehive up in the poplar is of much more interest But eventually it wins out, the sweetness and the longing, the al which we are not, could never be, the curiosity, to touch such a foreign substance, like arace and be touched, for only awhich smells of violets, and thick salted bread, and wholeness

He held out his arround in, and knelt near hi that next would be the bridle and the whip—but I could not help it, his innocence wrapped olden and if I could but lay ht was race He would not hurt me, the scent said; he was not capable of it

He held out his arms to me, and slowly I sank into hiled a childish pleasure, and I opened my mouth to breathe hiently uponout a candle The secret music rose up, and I started in his erief song

“What are you doing, child?” I cried

“I wanted to hear the sound the wind hted

“But how did you know of it? It is ours, our own thing, and not yours to play”

“Myabout you, forelock to withers, so that when I found myself with your head in my hands, I would not hesitate…”

THE

POISONER’S

TALE

MY PARENTS NEVER WORRIED FOR EMPLOYMENT They were poisoners, the best of their breed, and when they had a son, they called him Bryony, after the black herb thatribbons They resolved that I would be a prodigy a as soon as I entered the world

My mother drank tiny slivers of s, in her h her h to taste—brackish and foul, if you’d like to know, like river water after a storht-shade sizzling in oil, salads of oleander and monkshood, pies of yew berries and rosary peas All these things they fed rown, none of theht hurt another boy They delighted in finding new things to weanuntil the breath is entirely gone; foxglove that inspires riots of excited , nearly poetry, before a convulsive death; thorn apple, which grants extraordinary visions, then a black blindness Onceof mistletoe and one of hemlock in each hand and eat a needle of one and then the other, while she wrote down my descriptions of stomach seizures

There were more exotic venoms—the saliva of a rabid wolf, harpy milk, basilisk bile But ays found the siine what can be made from a buttercup