Briar's Book (20 page)

“Except she didn’t,” Lark said bitterly. “Willowwater told me she was helping a couple of sick novices.”

Briar stared at Rosethorn, frightened. Rosethorn’s eyes were glassy; her lips were dry and peeling. She was feverish. It was as if death circled his teacher.

Quietly he poured a cupful of willowbark tea and brought it to her.

“I am so
sick
of this rubbish!” cried Rosethorn, glaring at him. “I swear, I’m going to float away in a sea of
horse
urine!”

“Oh, no, love,” said Lark, taking the cup from Briar. “I assure you, horse urine is
much
more strongly flavored.”

Rosethorn, Briar, and Tris stared at her in horror. “How –?” began Rosethorn.

“You don’t want to know,” Lark replied solemnly. “It’s better to drink this.”

Rosethorn stared at her, then drank the tea down.

Lark winked at Tris and Briar. “You just have to know how to talk to her.”

Normally Rosethorn would have groaned and thrown a pillow at Lark. Tonight she only smiled and lay back. Lark nodded to the door with her head; Tris and Briar left.

It was the first time since her return from the greenhouse that Rosethorn had no notes to send back to Crane.

In bed that night, Briar dreamed he searched for Rosethorn in a foggy place, knowing she was there but unable to see her. The fear that she was lost – that she might be hurt, or worse – made it impossible to breathe.

He woke with a start, facedown in his pillow. His room smelled like night terrors and sweat without the
shakkan
to sweeten the air. Disgusted, he walked out into the main room, dragging his blanket, and lay it on the floor next to the dog. Tris was curled in a knot before the gods’ shrine in the corner, clutching her blanket to her chest. Briar covered her more thoroughly.

Sandry joined them a few minutes later with her own covers. Daja thumped down the stairs with hers. Hearing Daja, Lark came from Rosethorn’s room and looked them over. “I’ll get pallets in here tomorrow, if you want to do this,” she said quietly. Daja, Briar, and Sandry – Tris had not woken – nodded.

Briar was just setting up the next morning when he saw white light shimmering in the shiny surfaces around him. Tris yipped with glee, clapping her hands. The boy turned.

Crane was removing a pair of trays from his personal cabinet, where he kept his experiments. They blazed hotly, marking the first breakthroughs since Rosethorn had gone. Once he’d put them on his worktable, Crane turned to Tris. “There is hardly a need for such enthusiasm,” he drawled. “It was bound to happen at some point.”

“But two of them!” Tris pointed out, refusing to be deflated. “Two!” Looking at Crane’s drooping frame, the girl shook her head. “I’ll be happy for both of us,” she said, uncovering her inks.

The more emotional he feels, the limper he acts, thought Briar. Remembering his first encounters with Crane he added, Unless he’s so furious he forgets he’s nobility. It’s like somebody taught him it’s wrong to be excited.

He reached for Sandry, who sat with Rosethorn that morning.
Two?
repeated Sandry, once Briar had explained the good news.
That’s splendid.

Briar frowned. There was a shadow in Sandry’s mind.

No, don’t!
she cried, feeling him shift to look through her eyes. She covered her face, but it was too late: Briar had seen. Rosethorn was covered with dark spots.

Lark’s gone for a healer,
Daja told him magically.
We’re to keep getting Rosethorn to drink things and to rub lotion where she itches. She’ll be fine.

Frightened as Briar was, Daja’s calm solidity was a comfort. How could Rosethorn come to harm with her and Sandry there? She couldn’t, of course, and things were starting to move in Crane’s workrooms.

It’s just a shame she lost her bet, is all,
Briar told the two girls, explaining about Rosethorn’s wager.
She threw out spots, but we don’t have a cure.

You will,
Sandry told him firmly.

Stop
gossiping and get to it,
added Daja.

Briar obeyed.

The next key that day was Osprey’s; the blaze of white light that announced it came just before noon. Crane developed another around two that afternoon. Osprey produced two more from Rosethorn’s notes; Crane brewed an eighth before they closed for the night.

“Good,” Rosethorn said fuzzily when Briar reported to her. “Very good. Tell Crane when he’s got something to try on patients, I’m his first volunteer.”

Briar swallowed. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

Rosethorn smiled, barely able to stay awake. “Before he reaches that point, there’s a test fluid we made – actually, there’s a set of ten fluids. I can’t remember what we called it – ”

“Human essence,” said Lark. She had taken over from Sandry and Daja, and sat in a chair by the bed, knitting.

“That sounds right,” agreed Rosethorn. “Crane will test cures on the essences before he tries real people. Once he does that, his first cures may not work for everyone, but they won’t kill anybody either. They…” Her voice drifted off, and she slept.

“You know the disease better than I,” Lark said to Briar. She leaned forward to hold Rosethorn’s hand. “I take it this wandering and confusion is normal?”

Briar nodded. “It’s the fever. We almost never lost anyone with spots. It was always after they faded, when the fever got out of control.”

Lark reached out with her free hand and took his. “We’ll all get through this,” she told him solemnly. “It will end, and we’ll be fine.”

That morning Crane didn’t wait until his workers had finished in the washroom, but scrubbed when they did. Once inside, no one split off to begin their day’s work. Crane, Osprey, Briar, and Tris led the way to the inner workroom as the rest of the staff crowded in the doorway near Briar’s table. All eyes were on the cabinets where Crane and Osprey stored the previous day’s experiments.

Gray and wet as it was outside, it could have been a sunny day once those cabinets were opened. Tray after tray blazed as they were brought out.

“Well,” Crane remarked at last, when he’d looked it all over. “Well. Ten keys. Have you ever encountered a lock that needed so many, Briar?”

The boy shook his head emphatically, speechless. Hope was so thick in his throat that it half choked him.

“Now you have. A disease is the most complex lock there is,” said Crane. “We have more keys to find, so if we might begin?” He looked at his staff. They disappeared into the outer room, eager to get started.

“What are you working on?” asked Rosethorn, holding out a thin hand.

Daja jumped, startled – she had thought Rosethorn was asleep. When the woman’s fingers twitched, demanding, she blushed and passed her work over. She had been trying to shape copper wire to combine the signs for health and protection. She’d wanted to put it in a brass circle and hang it above the bed. For some reason, though, when she added her magic, the metal twisted, jumping out of the pattern.

Rosethorn eyed the design. “Interesting. It might work better as a plant. If Briar built a trellis in this shape, we could grow ivy on it. You know why I hate plagues?”

The girl hesitated, confused by the abrupt change of subject. That was the fever, she realized. It made Rosethorn’s mind skip about. “Why?” Daja asked.

“Most disasters are fast, and big. You can see everyone else’s life got overturned when yours did. Houses are smashed, livestock’s dead. But plagues isolate people. They shut themselves inside while disease takes a life at a time, day after day. It adds up. Whole cities break under the load of what was lost. People stop trusting each other, because you don’t know who’s sick.”

“How did you get in with Crane?” Daja inquired, curious. “Picking apart diseases?”

“It was a game,” Rosethorn confessed. “I was sent here to complete my novitiate. Crane was a novice too. We were the best with plants. A lady was visiting one day, and I worked out the ingredients in her perfume before Crane did. Except he wasn’t Crane, then, he was just Isas, like I was Niva.” Her eyelids started to droop, a sign she was tiring. Daja poured out a cup of willowbark tea and gave it to her. Rosethorn sipped, made a face, and continued. “We just went on from there. We’d make scents and give the other a day to figure out what was used and the amount. Then we worked out the ingredients in stews, and the dyes for the complex weavings that came in from Aliput. Then medicines – and then diseases. The temple sent us both to Lightsbridge for three years. I hated it, all those books and dead chemicals, powders, nothing alive. And they made so much of him as a count’s son….” She finished her tea and eased herself back. “So arrogant. So good at what he does. He’s been a burr between my toes for years.” She pulled the blanket up over her shoulders.

Daja set the empty cup in the bucket of things to be washed in boiling water and put the lamp behind a screen. She was about to try her work again when Rosethorn muttered something.

“What is it?” asked Daja. “Or are you walking in dreams again?”

“My boy. You three girls – look after Briar. When I’m gone.”

Sandry and Tris would have argued passionately, refusing to admit there was a chance that Rosethorn might die. Daja was a Trader: they held it was mad to argue when the sick thought that Death approached. Denials only told Death here was someone who would be missed, Death’s favorite kind of victim.

Daja did not protest. “We’ll look after him forever,” she promised.

“And tell him to mind my garden,” whispered Rosethorn. She went to sleep.

Daja went back to her chair, but she couldn’t work. Her eyes had gone blurry.

So many keys were found that day that Briar and Tris fumbled their way home, the afterimages of light-sprays still floating in their eyes. They were giddy with hope when they reached Discipline, eager to tell everyone what they had seen.

Their high spirits evaporated when they visited Rosethorn. She didn’t know them. She was flushed with fever, and hallucinating. They heard her plead with her father to go to the harvest dance, and in a younger voice scold someone for tracking across her rows of seedlings.

Sandry, in the chair by the bed, smiled woefully at them. A piece of embroidery lay on her lap. When Tris picked it up, not wanting to look at the woman whose hands stirred restlessly on her blanket, she saw the beginnings of a needlework portrait of Rosethorn. She dropped it as if it were a hot coal.

More keys were found in the morning. When Acacia announced lunch, Crane gathered his staff together.

“Begin to pack the sample boxes in crates,” he ordered. “If things go well, we shall only need to burn their contents, then melt down the boxes. Distill no more blue pox samples for the present time. The five jars we have, as well as what is already in the trays, should suffice.”

“We’re done?” someone asked. Two more began to applaud.

Crane shook his head. “As far as I can tell, we have found all the keys to the illness. Now we formulate a cure. We have available a number of ways to cancel individual keys, which are different parts of the disease. These ways do not all work together. A bad combination of cancelers will kill a patient as easily as the blue pox. Also, different people react in different ways. Now we must devise the canceler blends that will treat the largest number of the sick.”

“Some will die anyway?” whispered a man.

“We’re mages, not miracle workers, Cloudgold,” said Osprey tiredly. “Our strength has limits, and we don’t have much time.”

“I didn’t
mean
anything by it,” mumbled Dedicate Cloudgold. “I’m just a librarian.”

“We are all tired,” said Crane. “We shall be more tired still before we are done. If you will erase all of your variations, Briar?”

“Everything?”
demanded the boy, startled.

“We begin on cures today,” said Crane. “For that we shall need a clean slate.”

Briar obeyed, but seeing that black rectangle bare of writing made him feel almost naked. As long as instructions were there, he knew they were doing something. He had fixed on the slate to keep from thinking.

An hour later, Crane lifted the slate down and chalked in new orders. Collecting all the materials he would need to create new additives, Briar whistled cheerfully. Once again he had things to do.

That night, Rosethorn’s condition was the same.

Light filled the greenhouse workrooms the next day to announce effective blends of cancelers tested against trays full of blue pox. Several times Tris had to beg Crane to stop dictation, as she worked the cramps out of her writing hand. Osprey had moved to Crane’s table, to help her teacher mix oils and powders for tests on the disease. Everyone in both workrooms protested a stop for lunch. They knew they were close and begrudged every minute not spent in blending and testing chemicals and herbal medicines.

At the day’s end, Crane opened a cabinet at the end of his worktable, to reveal ten black glass bottles and ten dense black slabs. Someone had cut five wells three inches deep in each slab and polished the whole to a glossy finish. The bottles were sealed with layers of cloth and wax over a glass stopper. Everything shimmered with layers of magic and symbols written in power so intense it burned into Briar’s and Tris’s vision.

The black trays went to the outer workroom, where blue pox essence was put in each well. Once they were returned to Crane, he and Osprey unsealed the bottles. Acacia carried in a series of small cups, each big enough to hold a dram. Like the bottles and the stone slabs, they were written over with strong magical symbols.

“Briar,” Crane said. “Your hands are the steadiest. If you will oblige me?”

Briar shook his head. “But I dropped a tray – ”

“Once!” Crane said drily. “And as often as you have made additions to the trays, you have not broken the lids, splashed the pox, nor dripped additives on your work area.”

The boy stared at Crane, astounded. How closely had the man been watching him?

“If you please?” Crane asked, raising his eyebrows.

Briar looked at his trembling hands. This was even more important than the times he knew the Thief-Lord would starve him if he rang a single bell on the chuffle-dummy’s pockets as he lifted their contents. This was more important than the risk of the docks or the mines if a hinge squeaked as he went for a jewel box. This might be Rosethorn’s life.