CHAPTER 1

The mushroom’s gills were the deep-red color of severed muscle, the almost-violet shade that contrasts so dreadfully with the pale pink of viscera. I had seen it any number of times in dead deer and dying soldiers, but it startled me to see it here.

Perhaps it would not have been so unsettling if the mushrooms had not looked so much like flesh. The caps were clammy, swollen beige, puffed up against the dark-red gills. They grew out of the gaps in the stones of the tarn like tumors growing from diseased skin. I had a strong urge to step back from them, and an even stronger urge to poke them with a stick.

I felt vaguely guilty about pausing in my trip to dismount and look at mushrooms, but I was tired. More importantly, my horse was tired. Madeline’s letter had taken over a week to reach me, and no matter how urgently worded it had been, five minutes more or less would not matter.

Hob, my horse, was grateful for the rest, but seemed annoyed by the surroundings. He looked at the grass and then up at me, indicating that this was not the quality to which he was accustomed.

“You could have a drink,” I said. “A small one, perhaps.”

We both looked into the water of the tarn. It lay dark and very still, reflecting the grotesque mushrooms and the limp gray sedges along the edge of the shore. It could have been five feet deep or fifty-five.

“Perhaps not,” I said. I found that I didn’t have much urge to drink the water either.

Hob sighed in the manner of horses who find the world not to their liking and gazed off into the distance.

I looked across the tarn to the house and sighed myself.

It was not a promising sight. It was an old gloomy manor house in the old gloomy style, a stone monstrosity that the richest man in Europe would be hard-pressed to keep up. One wing had collapsed into a pile of stone and jutting rafters. Madeline lived there with her twin brother, Roderick Usher, who was nothing like the richest man in Europe. Even by Ruravia’s small, rather backward standards, the Ushers were genteelly impoverished. By the standards of the rest of Europe’s nobility, they were as poor as church mice, and the house showed it.

There were no gardens that I could see. I could smell a faint sweetness in the air, probably from something flowering in the grass, but it wasn’t enough to dispel the sense of gloom.

“I shouldn’t touch that if I were you,” called a voice behind me.

I turned. Hob lifted his head, found the visitor as disappointing as the grass and the tarn, and dropped it again.

She was, as my mother would say, “a woman of a certain age.” In this case, that age was about sixty. She was wearing men’s boots and a tweed riding habit that may have predated the manor.

She was tall and broad and had a gigantic hat that made her even taller and broader. She was carrying a notebook and a large leather knapsack.

“Pardon?” I said.

“The mushroom,” she said, stopping in front of me. Her accent was British but not London—somewhere off in the countryside, perhaps. “The mushroom, young…” Her gaze swept down, touched the military pins on my jacket collar, and I saw a flash of recognition across her face: Aha!

No, recognition is the wrong term. Classification, rather. I waited to see if she would cut the conversation short or carry on.

“I shouldn’t touch it if I were you, officer,” she said again, pointing to the mushroom.

I looked down at the stick in my hand, as if it belonged to someone else. “Ah—no? Are they poisonous?”

She had a rubbery, mobile face. Her lips pursed together dramatically. “They’re stinking redgills. A. foetida, not to be confused with A. foetidissima—but that’s not likely in this part of the world, is it?”


Copyright © 2022 by Ursula Vernon