The meal was poisoned for them both, as you already know, and for me. The boy—who was my son, not just his father’s—carried his profession, or it carried him, into some pustule of a hut in an unlanced boil town along his road, and there he contracted a fever that would not release him short of the gates of death. They say his skin burned to the touch, and that he cried out for a cold bath—which they would not give, believing that he would be better served by bleeding.