Tor.com is honored to reprint “St. Dymphna’s School For Poison Girls,” a novelette by Angela Slatter originally appearing in The Bitterwood Bible, available from Tartarus Press, with pen-and-ink illustrations by artist Kathleen Jennings.

The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings returns to the world of Slatter’s Sourdough and Other Stories, introducing readers to the tales that came before. Stories where coffin-makers work hard to keep the dead beneath; where a plague maiden steals away the children of an ungrateful village; where poison girls are schooled in the art of assassination; where pirates disappear from the seas; where families and the ties that bind them can both ruin and resurrect and where books carry forth fairy tales, forbidden knowledge and dangerous secrets.

Originally published in the Review of Australian Fiction.