CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

Sweet Talk

It took us about two hours to get back to the greystone hill. It would have been faster, but Denna’s mania was growing stronger, and all her extra energy was more of a hindrance than a help. She was highly distractible and prone to larking off in her own direction if she saw something interesting.

We crossed the same small stream that we had before, and, despite the fact that it wasn’t much more than ankle deep, Denna insisted on bathing. I washed up a little, then moved a discreet distance away and listened to her sing several rather racy songs. She also made several none-too-subtle invitations that I could join her in the water.

Needless to say, I kept my distance. There are names for people who take advantage of women who are not in full control of themselves, and none of those names will ever rightfully be applied to me.

Once we reached the peak of the greystone hill, I put Denna’s surplus of energy to use and sent her to gather firewood while I made an even larger fire pit than our previous one. The bigger the fire, the quicker it would draw the draccus close.

I sat down next to the oilskin bag and opened it. The resin gave off an earthy smell, like sweet, smoky mulch.

Denna returned to the top of the hill and dropped an armload of wood. “How much of that are you going to use?” she asked.

“I still have to figure that out,” I said. “It’s going to require some guesswork.”

“Just give him all of it,” Denna said. “Better safe than sorry.”

I shook my head. “There’s no reason to go that far. It would just be wasteful. Besides, the resin makes a powerful painkiller when properly refined. People could use the medicine ...”

“... and you could use the money,” Denna said.

“I could,” I admitted. “But honestly, I was thinking more about your harp. You lost your lyre in that fire. I know what it’s like to be without an instrument.”

“Did you ever hear the story about the boy with the golden arrows?” Denna asked. “That always bothered me when I was young. You must want to kill someone really badly to shoot a gold arrow at him. Why not just keep the gold and go home?”

“It certainly shines a new light on that story,” I said, looking down at the sack. I guessed this much denner resin would be worth at least fifty talents to an apothecary. Maybe as much as a hundred, depending on how refined it was.

Denna shrugged and headed back into the trees for more firewood and I began the elaborate guesswork of how much denner it would take to poison a five ton lizard.

It was a nightmare of educated guessery, complicated by the fact that I had no way to make accurate measurements. I started with a bead the size of the last digit of my little finger, my guess as to how much resin Denna had actually swallowed. However, Denna had been liberally dosed with charcoal, which effectively reduced that by a half. I was left with a ball of black resin slightly larger than a pea.

But that was just the amount required to make a human girl euphoric and energetic. I wanted to kill the draccus. For that I tripled the dose, then tripled it again to be sure. The end result was a ball the size of a large, ripe grape.

I guessed the draccus weighed five tons, eight hundred stone. I guessed Denna at eight or nine stone, eight to be on the safe side. That meant I needed a hundred times that grape-size dose to kill the draccus. I made ten grape-size pellets, then mashed them together. It was the size of an apricot. I made nine more apricot-size balls and set them in the wooden bucket we had brought from the denner plantation.

Denna dropped another load of wood and peered down into the bucket. “That’s it?” she asked. “It doesn’t look like very much.”

She was right. It didn’t look like much at all compared to the draccus’ huge bulk. I explained how I’d come up with my estimate. She nodded.

“That seems about right, I guess. But don’t forget that it’s been eating trees for the better part of a month. It probably has a tolerance.”

I nodded and added five more apricot-size balls to the bucket.

“And it might be tougher than you think. The resin might work different on lizards.”

I nodded again and added another five balls to the bucket. Then, after a moment’s consideration, I added one more. “That brings us up to twenty-one,” I explained. “A good number. Three sevens.”

“Nothing wrong with having luck on your side,” Denna agreed.

“We want it to die quickly, too,” I said. “It will be more humane for the draccus and safer for us.”

Denna looked at me. “So we double it?” I nodded and she headed back into the trees while I made another twenty-one balls and dropped them into the bucket. She came back with more wood just as I was rolling up the last ball.

I packed the resin down into the bottom of the bucket. “That should be more than enough,” I said. “That much ophalum would kill the entire population of Trebon twice over.”

Denna and I looked at the bucket. It contained about a third of all the resin we’d found. What was left in the oilskin sack would be enough to buy Denna a half-harp, pay off my debt to Devi, and still have enough left over so that we could live comfortably for months. I thought of buying new clothes, a full set of new strings for my lute, a bottle of Avennish fruit wine....

I thought of the draccus brushing aside trees as if they were sheaves of wheat, shattering them casually with its weight.

“We should double it again,” Denna said, echoing my own thoughts, “just to be sure.”

I doubled it yet again, rolling out another forty-two balls of the resin while Denna fetched armload after armload of wood.

I got the fire blazing just as the rain started to come down. We built it larger than our last one with the hope that a brighter fire would attract the draccus more quickly. I wanted to get Denna back to the relative safety of Trebon as soon as possible.

Lastly I cobbled together a rough ladder using the hatchet and twine I’d found. It was ugly but serviceable, and I leaned it up against the side of the greystone arch. This time, Denna and I would have an easy route to safety.

Our dinner was nowhere near as grand as last night’s. We made due with the last of my now-stale flatbread, dried meat, and the last potatoes baked on the edge of the fire.

While we ate, I told Denna the full story of the fire in the Fishery. Partly because I was young, and male, and desperately wanted to impress her, but I also wanted to make it clear that I had missed our lunch due to circumstances completely outside my control. She was the perfect audience, attentive and gasping at all the right moments.

I was no longer worried about her overdosing. After gathering a small mountain of firewood, her mania was fading, leaving her in a content, almost dreamy lethargy. Still, I knew the aftereffects of the drug would leave her exhausted and weak. I wanted her safely in bed in Trebon for her recovery.

After we finished eating I made my way over to where she sat with her back against one of the greystones. I cuffed up my shirtsleeves. “Alright, I need to check you over,” I said pompously.

She smiled lazily at me, her eyes half-closed. “You really do know how to sweet talk a girl, don’t you?”

I felt for her pulse in the hollow of her slender throat. It was slow, but steady. She shied away a little from my touch. “You tickle.”

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Tired,” she said, her voice slightly slurred. “Good and tired and a little cold....”

While this wasn’t unexpected, it was still a little surprising considering the fact that we were only feet away from a blazing bonfire. I fetched the extra blanket from my bag and brought it back to her. She snuggled into it.