Juniper & Thorn(47)
Fedir moaned, his blue-white chest heaving. I flipped to the page marked Diseases of the Stomach.
I had to hold the book up to the meager sunlight cast through the single dingy window, squinting and squinting. I could scarcely tell where one letter ended and the other began, but even once I managed to separate them my prospects did not improve. Everything was written as if it were a riddle; I couldn’t fathom why my careful and clever sister did not better organize her book. Perhaps she didn’t want anyone else to be able to read it.
I pressed my thumb to the page so hard that my nail tore a small slit in the parchment, taking the time to swallow each word as I went along, turning them over on my tongue like they were sucking candies.
If the Patient is fair of Hair and gray-eyed, use double the Dose and check Appendix I–II.
If it is Sunday and there has been a Bout of Rain, only use Herbs that have been cut twice at the Stem.
If You are angry when You treat the Patient, lick your Thumb before delivering the Dose.
Moisture was gathering at the corners of my eyes and my stomach was as tight as a flower bud. As I scanned down the page, Derkach’s voice grew louder and drifted toward me.
“. . . after everything that I’ve done for you, Sevas, at great personal cost, the least you could do in return is not make me look like a damned fool. Am I fool to you? Am I?”
“No,” Sevas said. I had never heard him sound so cowed. “I’m sorry.”
My heart gave a horrible lurch of hurt, as if I were the one who’d been scolded. Papa stepped closer to me until he was standing on the hem of my dress, the shiny toe of his boot crumpling the pink silk. I could not remember whether Fedir had gray eyes, so I had to hold my breath and lean closer and peel back one of his eyelids to check. His lips were bone-white and cracking like old plaster.
It occurred to me, quite suddenly, that if Fedir had consumed poison, he had vomited enough that it all should have been expelled. If he died of anything now, it would be only terrible thirst.
I turned back to the table of contents and perused the items listed under Diseases of the Mind. I remembered Papa saying that Titka Whiskers’s curse had its teeth in his head, too—that it had chewed up all the parts of him that remembered what it felt like to be full.
I flipped to another page of Rose’s compendium, then looked up at Niko and asked, “Do you have water here? Good water?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “From the bathroom down the hall.”
“Go fetch some, please. As much as you can.”
Niko nodded and went off, and I stared down at the book in brow-furrowed concentration, trying to close my ears to the sound of Derkach’s voice.
When I dared to glance up again, he was gently stroking Sevas’s cheek. I felt as sick as Fedir.
In another moment, Niko came back with a pail full of water. I opened the satchel of herbs I’d taken from Rose and sifted through until I found the ones I needed—thyme and motherwort and crushed poppies—all for treating men who needed to be convinced of their own illness, and the potency of its cure. Denial was, after all, a Disease of the Mind.
“Will you help me get him up?”
Niko crouched beside me and pushed Fedir into a sitting position. While he did that, I gently pried apart his lips and laid the herb mixture on his tongue. Then I pinched his nose and covered his mouth with my hand until he choked and coughed and swallowed it. I let my hands drop to my sides. Fedir groaned, head lolling, chin thumping onto his chest.
Seconds dragged past, like garbage caught in a sea net. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Derkach’s lips move against the shell of Sevas’s ear, and I looked away, flushing, and then at last Fedir said, “I’m so thirsty.”
Relief broke open in me, so warm and sweet that I smiled and even laughed. “Here,” I said, as Niko pushed the bucket toward me. I cupped water into my hands and lifted them to his mouth. “Drink.”
And he did and he did and he did. He lapped water out of my hands like a puppy and then cried like a child, and I felt my own eyes grow misty when he leaned over the bucket and scooped out water himself, beads of it falling past his lips and down the grooves of his chest, splashing onto the cot and floor. A bit of color returned to Fedir’s face, just two faint pink circles like rouge applied with little attention.
I sat there and watched Fedir drink until, above us, Papa cleared his throat.
“You owe me forty rubles for my daughter’s work,” he said.
Niko’s jaw went slack. “But we agreed on thirty—please, sir! That’s more than I made these past three weeks and twice as much as I owe in rent to Mr. Papadopoulos. I have work lined up tomorrow at one of the printing shops on Kanatchikov Street, but it will take me some time to come up with the money.”
The blood in my veins turned to ice. Niko had made a bad mistake, and now we would all suffer Papa’s anger, the rage of the great wizard Zmiy Vashchenko. The words of a spell were already rising in his throat and magic was lifting off him in waves of cold, a frigid mist stealing over the whole small flat. My teeth started to chatter so hard that it hurt, and I bit down on my own tongue and tasted a burst of coppery blood.
Across the room Sevas’s lips were bleeding too, the scabs split open and made new. There was a mark of red where Derkach’s hand had rested against the back of his neck.
“My daughter doesn’t work for free, boy,” Papa snarled, “and I don’t trust Ionik scum to pay back their debts, especially when they can’t make rent! I should call the Grand Inspector; I should have his men come and burn down this whole derelict slum. I’m loath to waste any more spellwork on you, but there must be fitting punishment for your silver-tongued deceit, for all the false tears you shed and all the sympathy you roused in my daughter’s simple mind. No—I think I know what I shall do. I think I shall turn you into a yellow-billed magpie. They sing pretty songs too.”