It was early morning by the time I returned to Seneira’s house. I’d expected to find myself alone since she and Ferius were at the hospital with her family and Rosie was off who knew where. The whole way back I’d been thinking about Revian’s death, and what I could possibly do or say to make it any easier on Seneira.
It turned out I needn’t have worried about that, because when I got to the house, she and her father were already there, seated at the kitchen table, and something even worse had happened.
‘He’s dead,’ Beren said, his skin pale as a ghost’s as he clung to his daughter, and she in turn clutched a child’s cloth horse. Flickering light from the hanging lantern above cast shadows all around them. ‘My boy is dead.’
A great, wracking sob escaped his lips. He buried his face in his daughter’s hair.
Seneira sat quietly, reaching out her free hand to pet Reichis, staring off into a distance I couldn’t see and looking for all the world as if she had no idea any of us were there.
The sound of the door opening caught my attention and I turned to see Rosie enter. She gave Ferius a nod before going back out.
I felt Ferius’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Come on, kid. Let’s give them time to grieve.’
Outside we found Rosie standing next to a horse pulling a small, plain cart. A young woman stood nervously nearby, holding the hand of a small boy who looked to be about five years old. ‘She calls herself Adella,’ Rosie said.
The boy looked up at Rosie as if waiting for her to give his name. When she didn’t, he said, ‘My name is Yerek Farssus. My father’s name was Junius Farssus, but he doesn’t live with us any more. My sister’s name—’
‘Always this obsession with names,’ Rosie said, looking weary. To Ferius she added, ‘Last night I followed a trail of rumours to the town of Lastreida, about twelve miles from here, where these two live. Just over a year ago, the boy began suffering from a terrible fever, followed by the appearance of dark, winding markings around his right eye.’
I knelt down to peer at the boy’s face. There was nothing there – no markings, not even any scars like Dexan had. Yerek stared at me wide-eyed, and it took a second to realise he was staring at Reichis, who had come out of the house and hopped up to my shoulder. ‘Kitty cat!’ he said excitedly.
Oh, Ancestors, I swore silently as I grabbed hold of Reichis and stood up before he could maul the boy. He sometimes forgets that children aren’t just short adults and thus fair game for biting when they give offence.
‘What was it like when you got sick?’ Ferius asked the boy.
‘I got all sweaty and it hurt a lot,’ Yerek replied, nodding his head vigorously as if he needed to make sure we believed the story. ‘I heard a demon talking. It wasn’t very nice.’
‘We searched everywhere for a cure,’ Adella said, putting a protective arm around Yerek. ‘Nothing worked … No, it was more insidious than that – everything we tried only made him worse.’
‘Almost as if the disease could sense someone trying to interfere with it,’ Rosie said, but she was looking at Ferius.
‘Go on,’ Ferius encouraged Adella. ‘Tell us the rest.’
The young woman nodded. ‘The symptoms were so severe we started to think Yerek might …’ She looked down at her son. ‘We feared the worst.’ A smile appeared on her face. ‘But then a man came to see us, said he’d heard we were looking for a doctor who could cure the shadowblack. I mean, I didn’t even know that’s what it was called, but when he described it, well, it was just what Yerek had.’
‘What was his name?’ I asked.
‘Soredan,’ she replied. ‘Doctor Soredan.’
‘Soredan?’
Ferius asked, ‘This Doctor Soredan, was he a tall drink of water, dark hair, quick smile?’ She pointed to her head. ‘Wears a hat kind of like mine?’
Adella nodded. ‘Only his had symbols around it.’
‘Dexan,’ I said. ‘It was Dexan.’
Rosie rolled her eyes as if my statement had been too obvious to warrant saying aloud.
Over the next few minutes, Ferius patiently got the rest of the story from Adella, with Yerek chiming in every few seconds to make sure we didn’t forget he was the one who’d gone through it all. Dexan, in his guise as this Doctor Soredan, had said the procedure was dangerous and expensive. At first he’d been unspecific about how much it would cost, but after Adella had worked out how much she could get from selling everything of value she had and borrowing what her family could afford, the next day Soredan turned up with a price that was almost exactly that much. A few days later they got the money together and Soredan performed the ‘procedure’ – which sounded a lot like a ritual spell to me. The next morning Yerek was cured.
‘Times are hard now,’ she said. ‘We had to sell our shop and now I do laundry work for wealthier folks in town, but it was worth it.’ She pulled Yerek closer. ‘Worth every penny.’
‘I’m glad it worked out,’ Ferius said, her voice calm and light even though I knew she must be as angry as I was. She knelt down and stared at Yerek. ‘Yep. Looks like a regular kid to me. Kinda funny-looking though.’
‘You should talk!’ Yerek giggled enthusiastically, reaching out a hand to grab at the white forelock of Ferius’s otherwise red hair.
Adella gestured to the house. ‘Do you think … I asked your friend to bring us because I’d heard there were others suffering the same illness. I thought maybe they’d want to hear it from me that there’s hope. Maybe they could find Doctor Soredan and—’
‘I think they’ve found him,’ Ferius said, glancing back at the house, ‘but it might not be the best time to visit.’
Adella nodded as if she understood. ‘We’ll go then, but your friend here knows where to find us if there’s anything we can do to help.’
She picked up Yerek and set him on the seat at the front of the horse cart, then mounted up herself and took the reins. She gave us a brief wave before giving the horse a gentle slap on the hindquarters and setting it into a slow walk, pulling the cart around and back down to the street.
‘Convenient how the disease shows up, and a few days later so does the cure,’ Ferius said.
‘But didn’t Dexan say that Beren had sent men to grab him up? He didn’t exactly show up at their door.’
‘He’s getting smarter, that’s all.’ She nodded to the horse cart headed away from us. ‘You keep pulling the same scam the same way, pretty soon someone will figure it out. So instead he pays a few people to spread the word around town of a spellslinger who can cure the shadowblack. Somebody like Beren, with money and connections, well, he isn’t going to wait around.’
‘So Dexan just sits tight and waits to be found.’
She nodded. ‘Better money when you don’t make it so easy.’
I looked back at Seneira’s house. ‘But why not cure Tyne? Why let him die like that?’
‘Could be the boy’s condition spread too fast,’ Ferius replied. An edge came to her voice when she added, ‘Could be that a dead boy only makes a grieving father willing to pay even more to save his daughter.’ She turned to face Rosie and I saw now that Ferius’s anger wasn’t reserved just for Dexan. ‘Guess that’s that, ain’t it?’
Rosie nodded. It was only then that I noticed her horse was saddled nearby and she was carrying her pack.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘There is no plague here,’ she replied. ‘Whatever machinations are at play, whatever tragedies are yet to befall these people, it is no plague.’
‘So, what … you’re just going to leave?’
‘I am.’
‘You can’t be serious! You’re going to abandon Seneira and her father? The other kids at the Academy? They—’
‘Whatever is happening to them, it is about them, not the wider world. An Argosi—’
‘Don’t,’ Ferius warned. ‘He won’t understand.’
‘Understand what?’ I asked her. ‘That the Argosi don’t give a damn unless the “wider world” is about to fall apart?’
‘It ain’t like that, kid.’
‘You coddle him,’ Rosie said. She turned to face me, not showing a trace of remorse in her eyes. ‘The way of thunder is not to strike at every source of sorrow or suffering. An Argosi must choose carefully in what matters they will interfere. To do otherwise is to court even greater sorrows.’
There was a sort of cold logic to it: the Argosi didn’t just go around doing good deeds. They looked for events that could change the course of history for the whole world. A plague could do that. A conspiracy to hurt a few teenagers or their families, or even bring down the Academy, couldn’t. ‘Is that what you believe too?’ I asked Ferius.
‘The Path of the Wild Daisy has never seen the world quite the way the rest of us do,’ Rosie said. ‘She is … prone to interfere.’
‘I am at that,’ Ferius said.
The two women stared at each other for a long time. I didn’t see hostility there, or even disappointment, just a strange kind of shared uncertainty, as if, despite all the years they must have known each other, they just couldn’t understand the other’s way of thinking.
Eventually Rosie put a foot in the stirrup and mounted her horse. ‘Goodbye, Kellen of the Jan’Tep,’ she said to me. ‘I hope you find a path that suits you one day.’
I watched as she nudged her horse into a slow trot and made her way down the road.
‘Well, now I don’t feel so bad,’ Reichis said, still perched on my shoulder.
‘Bad? For what?’
‘I kinda stole a bunch of her stuff.’ He must have been expecting me to berate him, because he immediately added, ‘Not a lot. Just a couple of coins, a miniature carved elephant that looked kind of cool, oh, and that tiny jar of weakweed she kept with her. Never know when that’ll come in handy.’
‘What’s he on about?’ Ferius asked.
I translated, and I guess my utter lack of guilt over his thieving must have come through. ‘No point in hating her,’ Ferius said.
‘Yeah? Why not?’
She sighed. ‘Because hate gets you nowhere. Because it’s not Rosie’s fault. Because she might, in the end, be right about these things.’ Ferius turned and headed back towards the house. ‘But mainly because most days I can hate her enough for the both of us.’