Food poisoning

Quickly, while she struggled, I knelt down and drew more symbols into the gravel.

“Suidigidir.”

The runic pattern etched beneath my palm burned, and my curse took hold.

The idea had actually come to me based upon something out of the Ulster myths. As the legend had it, all the men born of Ulster had been cursed to suffer the pains of a woman’s labor during their time of greatest need, and Cúchulainn, who wasn’t an Ulsterman by birth, had been the only one unaffected. He’d held off an invading army singlehandedly for months.

The curse that had been cast on Ulster was Ces Noínden, which Macha had cast after she’d been humiliated by being forced to run a footrace while pregnant. However, not only was I — was Aífe — not a goddess, it was also not what I needed. Debilitating pain wasn’t the point and wouldn’t solve anything.

No, what I needed was a curse that could force Noelle to expel the people she’d absorbed, something that would induce vomiting in an ordinary human. Enter Ces Grán Brén, the Debility of Rotten Grain, a curse that made someone violently ill, as though they had ingested oats or wheat that had rotted — hence the name.

In other words, I had just given Noelle the world’s worst case of food poisoning.

Even then, I’d held back a little. I hadn’t put as much power behind it as I could have, because I wasn’t sure how it might affect the people inside her. “Puking your guts out” was even less fun when you were literally puking out your guts, so I hadn’t wanted to risk her victims suffering even more.

And beyond that, I didn’t know if it would even work. It was a curse meant for humans, and at this point, I wasn’t sure how Noelle’s lower body might change that.

But, in spite of my worries, before my very eyes, Noelle’s lower body started to writhe and bulge, even as the girl situated atop the mass bent over, pawing at her stomach as much as she was able and groaning miserably. The tentacles and monster heads wriggled and waved, and the flesh itself seemed to heave as it fought the nausea.

Then, looking as though it was fighting with every bit of whatever will it might have the entire way, it contorted, and from the mouth of one of the monstrous heads, excreted a body, a man clothed in rags and castaways, and the sludge-like bile that counted as blood. I waited a few breathless moments, hoping, praying, as a balloon seemed to swell inside my chest, and the body moaned and turned over on the ground.

It worked.

Yes!

And even as I celebrated, the mass contorted again and slowly spat out another body and more bile. It was another homeless person, a woman, this time, who flopped on the ground next to the first man, groaning just as pitifully.