![]() ![]() After that, I’ll need your help with the mushrooms.” “Prepare this for the toads, then have Florette and Aveline feed them. “Here,” Sister Serafina hands me a plate of goose livers and a mortar filled with a grayish white powder she calls arsenic. Annith sorts through a bag of rye, looking for the highly prized black fungus used in a poison called Martyr’s Embrace. ![]() Two of the girls are outside collecting honey from bees fed on laurel and rhododendron, for even the sweetener in our potions is poisonous. She gives them careful instructions not to crush the stem, for it will fill the room with a foul odor. ![]() She has set the youngest girls to plucking the flowers, leaves, and berries from the nightshade I collected yesterday. A few days before Michelmas, we are all in Sister Serafina’s workshop where she is conducting a group lesson in poison. It is at the very end of the summer of my second year at the convent before I have my first true encounter with Death. As I worked on Grave Mercy, I ended up writing a lot of scenes that didn’t really earn a place in the final book. Sometimes it’s hard to know where exactly to start a book. ![]()
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