Chapter 55 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 55: Flame in the Swamp 11
Lucita said nothing.
She knew little of the human world's current condition, but she understood one thing well: this world truly could not withstand any more upheaval.
"What about the people of Grande?"
“Unfortunately, the final testing of the formula wasn’t completed,” Stasia said. “To be safe, I think if we’re going to release a formula, we should use the one with hyssop and goldenrod, the milder one. Less risk.”
“The question is how to get the formula out there and circulate it widely without Primavera monopolizing it, especially since we can’t even enter the city anymore.”
Lucita heard this, and fell into thought.
"I'm going out for a moment," she said.
Outside the cave, sunlight filtered through the deep forest. The leaves of high summer trembled in dense, vivid layers beneath the light, broad-leaved trees of temperate and subtropical zones, lush beyond measure.
After Kelsey's condition stabilized, she drank nearly half the jar of sweet soup, and finally came around at dusk.
The cave had been lit with oil lamps, arranged in several corners, their warm yellow light filling the narrow space.
Stasia sat near the light with a quill, writing something. The glow fell across her sharp profile, softening her expression into something quiet and almost peaceful.
Kelsey moved her throat. Her voice came out rough: "Anna?"
Stasia startled; her fingers slipped, and a splash of dark blue ink bloomed across what she was holding — a leaf, as it turned out. She was writing on leaves.
She didn't stop to think, but came immediately to Kelsey's side, felt her forehead, and let out a long breath of relief, her voice coming out low and slightly choked: "You're awake."
Kelsey seemed to know what she was thinking. She turned her hand over and took Stasia's. "It's alright, Anna. It's alright. In your position, I would have done the same."
The reassurance seemed to loosen something inside Stasia. Tears she had been holding back for far too long finally spilled over, falling onto the back of Kelsey’s hand.
Kelsey had a fever, her senses dulled, and she couldn't tell whether the tears were hot or cold. She only felt a soft sensation spreading across the back of her hand.
“I’m sorry, I…”
Kelsey wouldn't let her continue. She smiled, shook her head with difficulty, and reached up to touch Stasia's face. "Hush... Anna. I'm so cold."
The words cut off whatever Stasia had been trying to say, and she wrapped Kelsey in her arms without hesitation.
Kelsey had a large frame, but she was even thinner than before now. Stasia felt bone pressing against her and held her carefully, as though afraid she might break her.
Kelsey found a comfortable angle and turned her face to bury it in the folds of Stasia's shirt, closed her eyes, and seemed to fall asleep again.
Stasia stayed exactly as she was, perfectly still.
Lucita, returning, stood in the mouth of the cave and wasn't sure she ought to go in.
Delphine asked curiously in her ear: "What are they doing?"
Lucita didn't know how to explain, and simply said nothing, making no response.
Delphine, getting no answer, began to sound faintly uneasy: "Lucita?"
"What?"
"You scared me. I thought you couldn't hear me anymore either."
Lucita hadn't expected Delphine to react so sensitively. She opened her mouth, and found she had nothing to say.
She suddenly realized that when there was only one person in the world who could see you and hear you, that was a terribly lonely thing. In a certain sense, it wasn’t so different from her own situation.
"I'm sorry," Lucita said. "I'll always answer you from now on."
Delphine didn't think too deeply about it, and waved a magnanimous hand. "It's fine!"
Lucita had apparently been standing at the cave entrance long enough, murmuring to herself, that Stasia finally noticed her.
She stood framed in the fading light, her outline blurred, and behind her was what looked like an enormous, rustling flock.
Birds, yes.
Stasia looked over with startled eyes and called to her.
Lucita was stroking a small robin perched on her hand. She said something to it, and the robin circled around her once, then beat its wings and landed on a low avocado tree at the entrance of the cave.
She walked inside.
Stasia looked up, her expression astonished: "A robin…"
"Let me introduce them." Lucita gestured toward the birds crowding the maples at the cave entrance, and smiled slightly. "These friends will be our messengers for distributing the formula."
Stasia's mouth fell open. In Kelsey's eyes, where the dusk light glimmered: "Extraordinary."
She looked down at the leaf in her own hands, covered in writing, and blinked.
Drawing on the food and water in the space, they stayed there for two days. The birds gathered great armfuls of leaves for them, and the leaves received the words they had long been waiting to carry.
Faintly reddening sweet gum leaves, thick deep-green avocado leaves, large yellow-green paulownia leaves, and clusters of horse chestnut.
They were covered in small, fine characters in dark blue ink, their surfaces dense with words under the lamplight, reflecting a faint, quiet sheen.
They wanted to spread the formula, but they had no paper. So they devised another way and wrote it on leaves.
At this time of year, in this region, perfect, full-sized broad leaves were everywhere.
On the evening of the third day, Lucita set down her quill and picked up a sweet gum leaf, read it through, and asked Stasia: "Perhaps this is enough?"
Stasia nodded.
Lucita did not delay. She gathered the leaves in her arms and carried them out of the cave.
The birds wheeled overhead, each taking one leaf in its beak, and with a great rush of wings flew upward into the sky.
Lucita closed her eyes. Her consciousness settled into a robin, and she looked down at the deep-red and pale-green forest stretching below.
In June of the year 576, as the sun descended, flocks of birds appeared on the horizon and descended upon Grande, a city dying under plague.
They carried leaves inscribed with a miraculous formula, and dropped them across every part of Grande, bringing down a rain of deep green and faint red over the grey city below.
It was the smell of the forest, a scent people had not breathed in for years.
The birds wheeled and sent out their low homeward calls, then scattered in every direction, vanishing into the distant mountains amid the warm, hazy evening mist.
This day would be called by those who came after it the June Miracle.
The vagrant Eppie was lying in a corner of Ivy Street, resting.
With the silver coins she had earned guiding those strangers, she had been eating enough to feel full. She bought the cheapest coarse wheat bread each day, and a few silver coins were enough to keep hunger away for nearly half a month.
And after half a month? Under the plague, she'd probably have died of it by then anyway.
Thinking about it that way, it was actually quite pleasant, at least she would die full.
She had just eaten a piece of bread for her dinner and was lying on a thin blanket she had recently bought when, all at once, a great dark mass of birds came streaming out of the evening sky.
She looked up in astonishment and saw swathes of fresh leaves drifting down through the fading light. One landed squarely at her feet.
The birds scattered the leaves and quickly wheeled away. Eppie sat watching the haze over the horizon for a long time.
Then she picked up the leaf at her feet, a deeply red Japanese maple leaf, covered edge to edge in fine dark blue characters.
Eppie could read. Her mother had taught her, when she still had a mother, before she had become a vagrant.
“Formula for the treatment of plague: one ling of mugwort leaf juice, half a ling of barnyard grass powder, two petals of plantain flower, one mature nettle leaf, half a ling of wild apple, one mature hyssop root, one goldenrod bud. Of these, the mugwort and barnyard grass powder must be boiled and dried before grinding. Combine all the above ingredients with half a liter of water and boil until the liquid is reduced by half. Note: barnyard grass powder is to be added only after the water has come to a full boil. — From physician Anastasia Callen.”
Eppie's dark brown eyes trembled with a light she dared not believe in.
A formula. God above, they hadn't been abandoned, had they?
She dug into her inner pocket and turned out the two silver coins and three copper coins she had kept there with such care, and set off toward the Primavera Medical Hall on Sycamore Street.
If there was a chance of living, who would choose to die?
Number 42, Ivy Street, the city lord's residence.
The city lord of Primavera stared at a yellowing tallow tree leaf in her hands, her expression dark enough to draw water, her fingers nearly crushing the leaf's edge.
The attendants around her trembled, not daring to breathe.
She was still for a long moment. Then, unable to contain herself, she slammed the leaf down on the table with a sharp crack, and forced words out through her teeth: "Cameron..."
She had just sent an attendant to search exhaustively through the aristocratic genealogies in the study. In several hundred years of Kenting's history, noble families had changed hands across generations, but the name "Cameron" had never, not once, appeared!
Her plan to monopolize the formula had been ruined by a girl of unknown origin.
Worse still, the girl had possessed a formula like this and had released it to the entire city in a single stroke.
And that Callen girl had been willing to go along with it?
The only course now was...
The city lord narrowed her eyes, crumpling the leaf in her fist, and turned the gold family signet ring on her finger slowly round and round.
Countless leaves fell onto the streets, into the water barrels in the back gardens of middle-class homes, onto the mud of the slums. People cried out and pushed open their doors, snatching up fallen leaves to examine closely.
Those who could read cried out before they had finished, weeping with sudden, overwhelming relief. Those who could not brought their leaves and knocked on the doors of literate neighbors.
Countless people who had been submerged in despair for so long pushed open their doors and pressed toward the apothecaries.
In the western forest, Lucita held out her palm. The robin with the orange-red breast feathers alighted there, tiny and weightless, tilting its head to look at her.
Stasia stood nearby, watching the little bird, and found herself smiling: "Kelsey and I have talked it over. When this is all done, we won't be going back."
"Oh?" Lucita looked at her in surprise. "Isn't Irttat good?"
Stasia shook her head. "But we're human."
"Mavis is human too."
“That’s different,” Stasia said. “She has no ties. And I… and Kelsey… we have things in this world we can’t leave behind.”
"Such as?"
"We could have better medicine. And yet people are still living in the darkness of treating illness through superstition and guesswork. I've spent half my life working on this, and I haven't been able to make people's lives any better. What's the point then? To take it to my grave?"
"I want to stay here. Wherever that is. Doing what I'm meant to do."
Lucita's expression shifted slightly.
"A choice worthy of respect. So Kelsey stays with you?"
"No. I also have something I need to do."
Kelsey came walking out along the cave wall, interrupting the two of them.
Lucita turned to look at her, mildly surprised. "I'm listening."
"Aren't you curious what's happening in that city right now?"
Following Kelsey's gaze, Lucita looked in the direction of Grande.
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