Ch 47

No sooner had I begun the process of healing my wounds than Lilly burst into the room, walking towards me with purposeful steps. “There is still a lot more that I need to teach you, but I cannot teach them all to you here. As soon as you have stopped bleeding sneak out and meet me at the abandoned house you broke into before.”

I was flustered at her sudden arrival and delivery of directions and by the time I thought to object that I couldn’t train because I was wounded or ask any questions about the kind of thing I would be learning today she was already out the door. Normally she was quite bubbly when greeting me, so this abrupt treatment was strange.

Chalking it up to her being in a bad mood or simply having a bad day I went back to work on my wounds and roughly thirty minutes later, I felt that it had healed enough to travel on, roughly ten or eleven hours of healing for someone without the advanced healing spell, and I headed out the door. With my new skills in moving stealthily it was no longer any challenge to get passed all of the goblin guards.

Upon reaching the building that I had previously broken into I immediately went around to the back as I had done before and tried the door. Once again it had been locked. “Damn its Lilly.” I muttered under my breath as I pulled out my lock pick set and began work on the lock. It took me only about a minute to open it, but I still felt this left me exposed for too long.

As soon as I was inside, I closed the door quietly behind me. Heading up the stairs I carefully made my way to the attic, doing my best not to make any noises as I had done before. Once I reached the attic, I found the attic door unlocked and went inside. This time, there were alchemical apparati littered around the place along with several sacks of what looked like different dried plants.

Lilly was standing in the middle of the room as if she had been waiting for me to show up the entire time. “Took you long enough, I was beginning to think you weren’t coming and my time is valuable I’ll have you know.” I took a look at her and saw the serious look on her face and decided that I should just apologize and move on. She was helping me out after all. “I’m sorry Lilly, I’ll do my best to be more punctual.”

“Good, in that case let’s not waste any more time and get started. Today I am going to be teaching you about poisons. Here in this room are all of the poisonous plants that you will find in this and the closest neighboring kingdoms. There are roughly forty different poisonous plants in all but not all of them are deadly.” I looked around the room and examined the plants around the room with fresh eyes. Now that I know they are potentially lethal I would be more careful not to touch them.

“Ideally you would learn all of these as well as how to harvest them safely as well as preparing them to be used and using them but with the amount of time we have that will not be possible. Instead you will only be learning the ones that are best for use in killing people quickly and quietly as well as how to prepare and use them without killing yourself.” As she spoke, she began lining up several bags of herbs on one table.

“Familiarize yourself with these plants. I want you to be able to recognize them anywhere because the day may come that you need to find them on your own in the wild or recognize them unlabeled in an apothecary shop.” I approached the bags and started looking into the tops of them. One looked like crumbly brown twigs, another like perfectly circular round leaves, yet another looked like a dark red berry… and so it went.

After I had spent some time looking over the different plants, she had lined up she told me the names of them all as well as the characteristics like shape and color and smell. After that it was time to learn how to handle them. First, she brought forth a mortar and pestle and I was right about to reach for the first bag in anticipation when she stopped me.

“Hold on! This is what I’m talking about. If you don’t learn this stuff, you’ll just die.” She pulled out a box and within it were several items. There were leather gloves, goggles that had glass lenses and completely covered the eyes, and a mask that covered the nose and mouth with three layers of cloth. After she showed me how to put on all the protective equipment it was time to get started.

She taught me how to grind up the plants without them going all over the place as well as how to combine them with water in a small pot heated over candles to extract the essence of the plants and then carefully strain it through multiple layers of cloth before returning it to the heated pot to evaporate some more and become concentrated.

After this the liquid was carefully poured through a funnel into a small glass vial and stoppered with a cork and some wax. This liquid could then be applied to a blade or needle so as to stab one’s mark or even placed in their food or drink, although this was discouraged as they were likely to taste it unless there was a strong smell or flavor. Following this she showed had me clean all of the equipment and start again for each of the different plants. Only after I had created seven different vials of poison and the sun was long since set did she say we were done.

The journey back to the arena and into the resting room for sleep did not take long but I was a little sad I had missed dinner. Oh well, in the morning I would receive breakfast and I still had a full day to train. Even better, my shoulder was well on its way to healing. I was getting pretty good at maintaining the healing spell while doing other things. Unfortunately, Lilly did not allow me to hold on to the poisons that I had created saying that I would be immediately executed if caught with them. It made sense but damn it I was proud of my creations and wanted to look at them some more.