Nation

so, her hand shook, but a girl had a right to tremble a bit when two men were pointing guns at her.
    “Do sit down,” she said. “The mats are not as bad as the ground, at least.”
    “Much obliged,” said Polegrave, looking around the hut.
    It almost broke her heart. Once upon a time some woman had taught the man his manners, but to thank her he’d grown up to be a weasel, thief, and murderer. And now, when he was worried and ill at ease, an actual bit of politeness drifted up from the depths, like a pure clear bubble from a swamp. It wasn’t going to make things any easier.
    Foxlip just grunted, and sat down with his back to the inner wall, which was solid rock.
    “This is a trap, right?” he said.
    “No. You asked me to swear on my mother’s life,” said Daphne coldly, and thought: And that was a sin. Even if you have no god at all, that was a sin. Some things are a sin all by themselves. And I’m going to murder you, and that is a mortal sin, too. But it won’t look like murder.
    She said: “Would you like some beer?”
    “Beer?” said Foxlip. “You mean real beer ?”
    “Well, it’s like beer. It’s the Demon Drink, anyway. I’ve always got some freshly made.”
    “You make it? But you’re a nob!” said Polegrave.
    “Perhaps I make ‘nobby’ beer,” said Daphne. “Sometimes you have to do what needs doing. Do you want some?”
    “She’ll poison us!” said Polegrave. “It’s all a trick!”
    “We’ll have some beer, princess,” said Foxlip, “but we’ll watch you drink it first. ’Cause we were not born yesterday.” He gave her an unpleasant wink, full of guile and mischief and with no humor in it at all.
    “Yeah, you look after us, missie, an’ we’ll look after you when Cox’s cannibal chums come for a picnic!” said Polegrave.
    She heard Foxlip hissing at him for this as she stepped outside, but she’d never for one minute believed that they intended to “rescue” her. And Cox had found the Raiders, had he? Who should she feel sorry for?
    She went next door to the beer hut and took three bubbling shells of beer off the shelf, taking care to brush all the dead flies off.
    What I am about to do won’t be murder, she told herself. Murder is a sin. It won’t be murder.
    Foxlip would make sure she drank some beer first, to prove it wasn’t poisoned, and up until now she had never drunk much, only a tiny amount when she had been experimenting with a new recipe.
    Just one drop of beer would turn you into a madman, her grandmother had said. It made you defile yourself and neglect your children and break up families, among quite a lot of other things. But this was her beer, after all. It hadn’t been made in a factory somewhere, with who knew what in it. It was just made of good, honest…poison.
    She came back balancing three wide, shallow clay bowls that she put down on the floor between the mats.
    “Well now, you’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts,” said Foxlip in his disgustingly unfriendly friendly way, “but I’ll tell you what, missie, you’ll mix the beer up so’s we all get the same, right?”
    Daphne shrugged, and did as he said, with both men watching closely.
    “Looks like horse piss,” said Polegrave.
    “Well, horse piss ain’t too bad,” said Foxlip. He picked up the bowl in front of him, looked at the one in front of Daphne, hesitated for a moment, and then grinned his unpleasant grin.
    “I reckon you’re too smart to put poison in your bowl and expect me to be daft enough to swap them over,” he said. “Drink up, princess!”
    “Yeah, down the little red lane!” said Polegrave. There it was again, another tiny arrow into her heart. Her own mother had said that to her when she wouldn’t eat her broccoli. The memory stung.
    “The same beer is in every bowl. You made me swear,” she said.
    “I said drink up !”
    Daphne spat into her bowl and began to sing the beer song—the island version, not her own. “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” just wouldn’t work now.
    So she sang the Song of the Four Brothers, and because most of her mind was taken up with that, a smaller part took the opportunity to remind her: Air is the planet Jupiter, which we believe to be made of gases. Isn’t that a coincidence! And she faltered a moment before recovering herself, because some tiny part of her mind was worrying her with what she was about to do.
    There was a stunned silence when she finished, and then Foxlip said, “What the hell was that all