Give the Dark My Love(43)

More than twenty other workers were laid out on cots and makeshift beds. Curtains had been raised in some sections to give a semblance of privacy, but it was plain to see that these people were in pain. Pant legs and shirts had been cut to expose infected limbs, and I counted fifteen with black on their hands or legs. Three had inky stains on their chests, over their hearts—there was little I could do for them.

A handful of workers were already dead, a green film covering their unblinking eyes.

“All this in less than twenty-four hours?” I muttered to Master Ostrum.

“The disease is spreading faster. It’s getting more aggressive,” he said.

He paused. “I’m going to investigate the grounds and question the workers who are still able to speak to me. If there’s any common link, I’ll find it.”

I was struck by how much studying diseases was like being a detective of a crime. The murderer was a plague, but the deaths were just as sure as a blade across the neck.

“I will do what I can,” I said, but Master Ostrum was already disappearing deeper into the factory. I liked that we could work as a team. I doubted other masters would treat their students like partners, but Master Ostrum trusted me.

I withdrew my golden crucible. It was worn now, but familiar, comfortable. I grabbed the nearest potion maker. “Take me to your supplies,” I said. She glanced at the golden crucible in my hands, then touched the three beads at her neck.

“Thank Oryous you’re here,” she said. “We have no tincture of blue ivy. Just poppy oil. It’s not doing much.”

“Do you have rats?” I asked.

She nodded. “Oh, there’s plenty of those.”

Before she could lead me away, the door opened, spilling in a blast of cool air. A surgeon strode forward, his kit in his hand, and he cast his eyes over the patients.

“Oh, Blye, thank you,” the potion maker said, waving him over. “This is Blye. He’s a butcher by trade, but he offered to help at the factories for a morning.”

“Thank you,” I said, offering him my hand. “Nedra Brysstain.”

“Alchemist?” he asked, eyeing my crucible.

“In training.”

“Don’t worry, she’s very good,” the potion maker said. I gave her another look and realized I knew her from the quarantine hospital. Her name was Marrow; she usually worked night shifts. From the dark circles under her eyes, I suspected she’d been here since early evening yesterday. She probably started treating patients about the same time I was dancing with Grey, pretending that there was nothing wrong with the world.

I swallowed down the bile rising in my throat.

Blye nodded without speaking as Marrow started to tell him about the patients he’d be seeing. I could tell Blye wasn’t the kind for small talk, and as he laid out his tools on a small tray, I recognized some of them from the butcher shop in our village. Tools meant for cows and pigs and sheep.

He’d come from one slaughterhouse to another.





TWENTY-FOUR


    Nedra



“Five this morning,” Marrow said. “Are you up for it, Nedra dear?”

I nodded grimly.

“Legs or arms first?” Marrow asked, turning to Blye. Another potion maker scurried forward, presenting me with a wheeled cart holding four rats in small wire cages.

“Arms,” Blye said.

I pulled back the curtain for us to enter the surgery room. Room. A room would indicate walls, not heavy cloth partitions.

“Nedra?” a weak voice said.

My eyes snapped to the girl who’d spoken. My heart lurched as I recognized the patient.

No.

“Dilada.” My voice was a strained whisper, a plea, begging for this not to be real.

She held up her left arm, exposing withered black fingers, the shadows creeping like ink through her veins, all the way past her elbow.

“Carso would laugh,” Dilada said as Blye pulled his cart closer and took a seat above her shoulder. “He always said we had the worst luck of anyone on the island.”

“I thought—” I shook my head, my words dissipating on my tongue. Dilada wasn’t supposed to be here. She was supposed to be on her farm, with her parents and brother, safe and sound. But her parents had died, and so had Carso, and the job in the forest—the one clearing land for graves—had ended, and she’d come here. And caught the plague.

“I’m so scared,” Dilada confessed, her voice almost silent.

I crouched closer to her. “It’ll be okay,” I said. “I’ve been working with my master since I started here. People live, when we catch it early enough.” Sometimes, I thought to myself.

She shook her head. “No, I mean—I felt ill two days ago. But I came to work anyway. If I missed a day, they would have fired me . . .”

“Oh,” I breathed. She was scared that the illness spreading through Berrywine’s was her fault. That she had brought the death here. Maybe she had; we had no way of knowing.

Blye moved his cart, rattling his instruments, his eyes on me. He was waiting.

Dilada swallowed. “I know what has to be done, Nedra,” she said.

Of course she did. She’d seen the millworkers who survived the plague but couldn’t go back to work. She’d seen the beggars on the streets.