Pale Caps
The pale cap, a white woodland mushroom that looks like several good kinds and kills slowly after a false recovery.
Overview
The pale cap is the most dangerous mushroom of the cradle-web woods. It looks much like several kinds that are good to eat, it tastes pleasant, and it gives no warning at the meal: a household that eats it falls ill most of a day later, seems to recover, and then begins to die. Its poisoning is set out under Poisonous Fungi.
Appearance
A handsome mushroom the height of a hand, with a smooth, rounded cap that flattens with age, white to a faint greenish or yellowish olive, slightly sticky when wet. The gills underneath are white and stay white, which tells it from the field mushrooms whose gills go pink and brown. A thin, drooping skirt hangs on the white stem below the cap, and the stem's foot sits in a loose, white cup in the soil, which careless gatherers break off and leave behind. Young caps come up as white eggs in the leaf-litter. It smells faintly sweet, a little like honey and old roses, and stronger as it ages.
Habitat and Range
It grows in woods from late summer into autumn, most often under oaks and beside other broad-leaved trees, and in some damp cave mouths, through the Elderweald and the forest-edge woods of the Confluence Basins.
Life Cycle
It lives as threads in the soil joined to the roots of its trees, and comes up in the same places year after year. A wet late summer brings it out in numbers.
Uses and Dangers
It has no use. One cap can kill a child and a whole cap kills about half of those who eat it unhelped. It is most dangerous to outsiders, children, and the hungry, who gather by look alone; the forest peoples who are taught the caps are seldom caught.
Lore and Belief
Wood Elf children are taught to look under the cap and at the foot before anything else, and taught it again every autumn. Basin folk say a poisonous mushroom blackens a silver spoon, or that what the slugs eat is safe; neither is true of the pale cap, which slugs and squirrels eat without harm. Forest-edge villages tell of the family that ate a good supper and were well the next morning, which is how every story of the pale cap goes.
Poisoners use the pale cap because its death comes late and looks like a fever, and the songs of the basin towns are fond of the cook who served it to a cruel lord and walked out of the hall before the sickness came.