CITIZENS BE ADVISED IN THIS SEASON OF A RARE AND DANGEROUS PLANT GROWING WILD AROUND MYRKENTOWN. IF FOUND DO NOT TOUCH BUT REPORT DIRECTLY TO THIS LOCATION OR TO THE MYRKEN GUARD FOR SAFE DISPOSAL.
There was no immediate response, save for a few mercenary souls who popped in to inquire if perhaps Harpen was offering any sort of bounty for this strange flower. He hadn’t planned to, but it seemed safe enough to add a reward of a few pence for the location of any such flowers, with the repeated warning not to meddle with it if found. This turned out to be a mistake, as now he found himself sending Dennis out once or twice a day to examine a spray of pink-needles growing wild beside some nervous nanny’s outhouse.
“What am I s’posed to do if I find some, sir?” Dennis asked. A tray awaited the trip upstairs.
Harpen carried on mashing carrots with the back of a spoon. “You won’t.”
* * *
Ten or twelve days later, well after most of the interest had waned, Harpen awoke to Dennis’s worried face looming over him. “You better come down, sir. I didn’t touch it, I swear.”
Harpen made his slow and rocking way down the narrow backstairs. Morning sunlight like a golden veil filled the shop front, and he turned the corner, blinking when it pierced his squinting eyes, otherwise he might would have seen it at once. As it was the small delay might have saved him a lethal shock. The skin of his cheeks felt cold and numb, fingertips too.
Dennis would not cross the threshold again. “Door was all locked up, sir. I checked the windows already. I ain’t did a count but it looks like nothing else was touched.”
“Haven’t done” Harpen corrected absently. Second nature now. The lad was too good with his letters to go on talking like a guttersnipe.
Slowly, stunned, he tottered a complete circuit around the counter’s perimeter, his fingered lingering at his cold bottom lip. The truth did not change no matter what angle he viewed it from. Like the slender cadaver of some scarlet-clad maiden, a spray of digitalis fatum, the fairy’s foxglove, stretched across the full length of the counter. The bells were still damp from the ground, their long stems bound with butcher’s twine and their roots wrapped in a damp grainsack. The blooms’ honey scent overpowered the herbal-spicy-sulfurous odor that by now was part of the woodgrain, and their color was so vibrant he had to squint to look at them.
After a time, he muttered, “I reckon we’d better let the Inquisitory know.”