The plant stands waist-high on a smooth stem, its leaves broad, wavy-edged, and grey-green with a waxy bloom that rubs off on the fingers, which gives the plant its name. In early summer it opens large, loose, four-petalled flowers, pale lilac or dull white, often with a dark purple blotch at the base, that drop their petals in a day. The seed head that follows is a smooth, round, blue-grey capsule the size of a walnut, crowned with a flat star-shaped lid. Scored with a blade in the evening, it bleeds white milk that by morning has darkened to brown beads. The plant smells faintly rank; the dried gum smells heavy and earthy.

It is grown, not wild: in garden plots along the corridor, on the higher field margins of the Lower Serath’s towns, and in small beds on the warm terraces of the Folds. Escapes grow in waste ground near towns and come up where the soil has been disturbed.

An annual, sown in autumn or spring, it needs warmth and dry weather when the heads swell; a wet summer gives little milk. Its seed is shaken out of the dry capsule like pepper from a pot.

It flowers in early summer, is scored in the week after the petals fall, and dies with the summer. The seed keeps for years.

The gum, given in a little wine or water or rolled into a pill, dulls pain, eases a racking cough and a running flux, and brings heavy, dreamless sleep. Corridor healers use it for broken bones, after surgery, and above all for the dying, whose last weeks it makes bearable. A Fold household keeps its jar on the counted shelves and knows to a pill how much it holds. The ripe seed has no gum in it and goes on bread and into cakes.

It is dangerous in two ways. A strong dose slows the breath until it stops, and children and small bodies need far less. And it is a habit: the injured and the sad who take it daily come to need it, grow thin and dull, and suffer when it is withdrawn. Both the corridor and the Folds know the habit and keep the gum under a household’s or a healer’s hand.

Serathic folk call it the river’s sleep and put a poppy head on the grave of one who died in pain. The Folds say a jar that empties faster than the count is a household with a trouble it has not declared, and a neighbour who notices says so at the commons, gently. Some believe that those who die under the poppy pass their threshold more easily; others that they wander. Both are said at every deathbed where it is given.

Poppy-sellers on the river follow the sellsword companies, and a camp’s surgeon who runs short of the river’s sleep after a battle is the most hated man in it.