“I pursued my enemies and overtook them; I did not turn back until they were destroyed.” The absence of my lord from me, from my bed, from my daily presence, is like a chill of deepest winter that will not leave me. It is wrong to be without him now, when I should be swelling with new life as all of nature is. The grass and the corn are springing green. The lambs are born and suckling, and the orchard bees are busy with the blossom, assuring us of fruit to come.

This was the mood the second time my late guest arrived. They were still dressed as a witch but this time wore a cloak of ambiguous cut that masked it from a casual observer; the slashing diagonal weave might be a witch’s style, or it could be the even horizontal line a breath-person would wear turned askew in the weather. Something in the ambiguity called to me, an enticing possibility, though I was still unwaveringly comfortable folding my clothes into the straight hems and smooth lines of second-childhood. I nodded as they entered but waited several moments for them to settle before approaching their table.

Whatever the mallepulpus’s moral stature, it would not allow its enemies an uneventful exit. Even as Jacob, dripping and shivering, urged the Abbess and the canonesses to back away from the shore, a portion of the swamp coalesced into a roaring and amorphous mass of silt and muck. With a noise like a thousand oxen breaking wind, the monstrous pudding detached itself from Paludis Cochlea, flopped onto the shore, and undulated forward, seeking to suffocate its parent bog’s tormentors.