Give the Dark My Love(70)

I shut the book with more force than I’d intended. What did I care about the rest of the world when my own was crumbling down around me?

I reached for the next book.

The cover was so worn I couldn’t read the title embossed into the tan leather. I opened it carefully; the paper was thin as onionskin.

It was an alchemical text, but handwritten in an older style, not Standard Imperial. Hope surged within me as I recognized some of the runes. Finally, finally, here was a book that may help me.

“Neddie?”

I was so startled that I dropped the book, losing my place. “Ernesta!” I snapped, impatient.

She shrank against the doorframe as if I’d hit her.

“What?” I said in a softer tone.

“Nothing.” She slipped back into the hallway, silent as a petal falling.

I rolled my eyes and carefully picked the book back up, my fingers peeling the thin pages apart. She had spent almost the whole week huddled on her bed and had chosen now to interrupt me.

The ink was faded and the light was failing, but I read anyway. My head ached. The book was mostly full of warnings about the evils of necromancy, but then I found what I was looking for.

“A skilled necromancer manipulates both death and life,” the book said near the middle. “Death comes in many forms. Perhaps the easiest to manufacture is by means of a plague. The necromancer’s hand can be seen by the black stain of the victim’s blood.”

“This is it,” I whispered to the dark. Proof, finally, that the plague really was caused by necromancy. My hands trembled as I turned the page.

But there was nothing else. No hint of how the plague was made, exactly, or how to stop it, short of killing the necromancer. “No,” I whispered, turning the thin paper so frantically that several pages ripped.

What good was knowing the cause if I still didn’t have a cure?



* * *



? ? ?

“Nessie?” I said gently on the seventh day. She didn’t lift her head, but she opened her eyes.

Dehydration, my student brain thought, taking in her symptoms—sunken eyes, sallow skin, ashen look. Lack of vitamins and sunlight. Depression. I had spent so much time trying to ignore reality that I hadn’t taken a proper look at my sister since this nightmare started.

“It’s time,” I said.

“Time?”

“We can go.”

From outside, we could hear a bell. “Brysstain family!” a male voice called from outside. “Do any of you still live?”

Ernesta wouldn’t put the quilt down. She carried it wrapped around her shoulders, the end dragging on the floor behind her, as we staggered down the hall together. I went to the front room door but stopped. We could go out the back. We went through the kitchen. Only dry goods left on the table—some beans, flour, salt.

I opened the door.

We blinked in the sunlight, our eyes stinging from the brightness. The bell that had been ringing silenced.

A dozen or so people stood at the gate. They all had masks covering their faces. I did not recognize any of them, and I didn’t care to.

“Just the two of you?” the man called.

I nodded.

“Any sickness on you?” In one hand, he held the bell. In the other, he clutched a gun. I looked past the fence, to the other houses on my street.

Every single one was draped in black cloth.

I held up my bare hands, then lifted my skirt to show my unblemished feet. When no one did anything, I pulled down my shirt, showing that my chest was uninfected.

“And her,” the man said, waving his gun to indicate Ernesta.

She tugged down the front of her tunic, then lifted her feet, first left, then right. She shifted the quilt from hand to hand, turning her wrists to show all sides. She kept her eyes straight ahead, staring at the man.

The man let his bell drop the ground. He aimed his pistol with both hands.

“Back inside,” he said.

I started to scream at him in protest, but then Ernesta held up her hand to stop me.

And I saw the blackness leaking from her fingertips into her right palm.





FORTY-THREE


    Nedra



Back inside the house, I paced up and down the hallway.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded, not stopping.

Ernesta sat in a chair by the door, her shoulders slouched. “I didn’t notice.”

“You didn’t notice!”

But I hadn’t noticed either. I’d let Nessie lie in bed, clutching the quilt, while I read and read and read. I had believed I might find answers to the plague in either Master Ostrum’s old book or my father’s, but they had proven woefully inadequate.

I snatched up her hand and squinted in the dim light at the darkness leaking through her skin. “It’s not that bad,” I said. “I’ve seen worse.”

“You can stop it?”

I froze for a moment.

Yes.

I knew how to stop it from spreading.

“We have to get you to the city,” I said. “To real medical alchemists. To a . . . to a surgeon.”

“A surgeon?” she asked.

Then her fingers curled over her palm. She understood. She wasn’t na?ve. She’d heard Papa’s stories about the plague; she knew what I did at the quarantine hospital in the city.