Her Father's Poison

, and I heard the

helf of paint tins, and pulled the canvas tarp off the old dinghy and over himself

door and open

nd the morning light made a warm gold of his skin. He was smiling the way he alw

up early,

ail. "Hester sent this down for your father.

, by the smell of it. I took it and set it on

the boathouse. "You we

w

r asked for

me like a hook.

ing on the bar this morning. A schooner went onto the rocks sometime before midnight. The

till on the d

at and finished, like a nail already hammered down. "I am ta

y m

r." He said it kindly. That was Cal. He could put a question through a man's ribs and make it sound like a fa

ack up the hill with his hands in his pockets

ut from und

to look at my

d put it into his hands. "Eat that. Do not light the stove again,

f," he said. "If you go aboard her, you will find it. It is lashed

at it is m

en I left Blackwater, and six of them carried medicine and five of them carried wolfsbane, and I do not know which one is

n the gunwale and watched the water for the color that means a wreck is under it. The bar showed green and broken past the second b

aw the pack's green stripe on their bows

time in the night and washed up into the rocks below the schooner's stern, and

at is not hers. That is a rogue c

d. "How do you kno

true thing I could think of, which was that the schooner was a

me for a mom

," he said t

it down at my feet. It was the size of a tea chest, and it was bound with iron, and the lid was nailed down h

face did not change. That was the thing

e pack mark

t

put his hand flat on the lid. "Why woul

not

reen of the harbor on a clear day, and they

and worked the nails up one by one, and the wood gave with a splintering sound that went

father had brought me up the hill to watch her grind herbs for the pack. Wet

fsb

seed heads packed into paper twists, forty or fifty of them, tied with st

e twists. He held it up and turned it

lfsbane into a pack harbor under our own mark, and the Council will come down on

what it

n tell me, Nell, since you were the one who read the tide wrong last night and the one who went out

ot say

t quite gone from his mouth. "If you know who the rogue is, you need to say it now. This i

around it in a knot I knew, because my mother had tied knots that way, and the paper had a date wri