Briar's Book

by Tamora Pierce

Lark’s gone for a healer, Daja told him magically. We’re to keep getting Rosethorn to drink things and to rub lotion where she itches. She’ll be fine.

  Frightened as Briar was, Daja’s calm solidity was a comfort. How could Rosethorn come to harm with her and Sandry there? She couldn’t, of course, and things were starting to move in Crane’s workrooms.

  It’s just a shame she lost her bet, is all, Briar told the two girls, explaining about Rosethorn’s wager. She threw out spots, but we don’t have a cure.

  You will, Sandry told him firmly.

  Stop gossiping and get to it, added Daja.

  Briar obeyed.

  The next key that day was Osprey’s; the blaze of white light that announced it came just before noon. Crane developed another around two that afternoon. Osprey produced two more from Rosethorn’s notes; Crane brewed an eighth before they closed for the night.

  “Good,” Rosethorn said fuzzily when Briar reported to her. “Very good. Tell Crane when he’s got something to try on patients, I’m his first volunteer.”

  Briar swallowed. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  Rosethorn smiled, barely able to stay awake. “Before he reaches that point, there’s a test fluid we made—actually, there’s a set of ten fluids. I can’t remember what we called it—”

  “Human essence,” said Lark. She had taken over from Sandry and Daja, and sat in a chair by the bed, knitting.

  “That sounds right,” agreed Rosethorn. “Crane will test cures on the essences before he tries real people. Once he does that, his first cures may not work for everyone, but they won’t kill anybody either. They …” Her voice drifted off, and she slept.

  “You know the disease better than I,” Lark said to Briar. She leaned forward to hold Rosethorn’s hand. “I take it this wandering and confusion is normal?”

  Briar nodded. “It’s the fever. We almost never lost anyone with spots. It was always after they faded, when the fever got out of control.”

  Lark reached out with her free hand and took his. “We’ll all get through this,” she told him solemnly. “It will end, and we’ll be fine.”

  That morning Crane didn’t wait until his workers had finished in the washroom, but scrubbed when they did. Once inside, no one split off to begin their day’s work. Crane, Osprey, Briar, and Tris led the way to the inner workroom as the rest of the staff crowded in the doorway near Briar’s table. All eyes were on the cabinets where Crane and Osprey stored the previous day’s experiments.

  Gray and wet as it was outside, it could have been a sunny day once those cabinets were opened. Tray after tray blazed as they were brought out.

  “Well,” Crane remarked at last, when he’d looked it all over. “Well. Ten keys. Have you ever encountered a lock that needed so many, Briar?”

  The boy shook his head emphatically, speechless. Hope was so thick in his throat that it half choked him.

  “Now you have. A disease is the most complex lock there is,” said Crane. “We have more keys to find, so if we might begin?” He looked at his staff. They disappeared into the outer room, eager to get started.

  “What are you working on?” asked Rosethorn, holding out a thin hand.

  Daja jumped, startled—she had thought Rosethorn was asleep. When the woman’s fingers twitched, demanding, she blushed and passed her work over. She had been trying to shape copper wire to combine the signs for health and protection. She’d wanted to put it in a brass circle and hang it above the bed. For some reason, though, when she added her magic, the metal twisted, jumping out of the pattern.

  Rosethorn eyed the design. “Interesting. It might work better as a plant. If Briar built a trellis in this shape, we could grow ivy on it. You know why I hate plagues?”

  The girl hesitated, confused by the abrupt change of subject. That was the fever, she realized. It made Rosethorn’s mind skip about. “Why?” Daja asked.

  “Most disasters are fast, and big. You can see everyone else’s life got overturned when yours did. Houses are smashed, livestock’s dead. But plagues isolate people. They shut themselves inside while disease takes a life at a time, day after day. It adds up. Whole cities break under the load of what was lost. People stop trusting each other, because you don’t know who’s sick.”

  “How did you get in with Crane?” Daja inquired, curious. “Picking apart diseases?”

  “It was a game,” Rosethorn confessed. “I was sent here to complete my novitiate. Crane was a novice too. We were the best with plants. A lady was visiting one day, and I worked out the ingredients in her perfume before Crane did. Except he wasn’t Crane, then, he was just Isas, like I was Niva.” Her eyelids started to droop, a sign she was tiring. Daja poured out a cup of willowbark tea and gave it to her. Rosethorn sipped, made a face, and continued. “We just went on from there. We’d make scents and give the other a day to figure out what was used and the amount. Then we worked out the ingredients in stews, and the dyes for the complex weavings that came in from Aliput. Then medicines—and then diseases. The temple sent us both to Lightsbridge for three years. I hated it, all those books and dead chemicals, powders, nothing alive. And they made so much of him as a count’s son….” She finished her tea and eased herself back. “So arrogant. So good at what he does. He’s been a burr between my toes for years.” She pulled the blanket up over her shoulders.

  Daja set the empty cup in the bucket of things to be washed in boiling water and put the lamp behind a screen. She was about to try her work again when Rosethorn muttered something.

  “What is it?” asked Daja. “Or are you walking in dreams again?”

  “My boy. You three girls—look after Briar. When I’m gone.”

  Sandry and Tris would have argued passionately, refusing to admit there was a chance that Rosethorn might die. Daja was a Trader: they held it was mad to argue when the sick thought that Death approached. Denials only told Death here was someone who would be missed, Death’s favorite kind of victim.

  Daja did not protest. “We’ll look after him forever,” she promised.

  “And tell him to mind my garden,” whispered Rosethorn. She went to sleep.

  Daja went back to her chair, but she couldn’t work. Her eyes had gone blurry.

  So many keys were found that day that Briar and Tris fumbled their way home, the afterimages of lightsprays still floating in their eyes. They were giddy with hope when they reached Discipline, eager to tell everyone what they had seen.

  Their high spirits evaporated when they visited Rosethorn. She didn’t know them. She was flushed with fever, and hallucinating. They heard her plead with her father to go to the harvest dance, and in a younger voice scold someone for tracking across her rows of seedlings.

  Sandry, in the chair by the bed, smiled woefully at them. A piece of embroidery lay on her lap. When Tris picked it up, not wanting to look at the woman whose hands stirred restlessly on her blanket, she saw the beginnings of a needlework portrait of Rosethorn. She dropped it as if it were a hot coal.

  More keys were found in the morning. When Acacia announced lunch, Crane gathered his staff together.

  “Begin to pack the sample boxes in crates,” he ordered. “If things go well, we shall only need to burn their contents, then melt down the boxes. Distill no more blue pox samples for the present time. The five jars we have, as well as what is already in the trays, should suffice.”

  “We’re done?” someone asked. Two more began to applaud.

  Crane shook his head. “As far as I can tell, we have found all the keys to the illness. Now we formulate a cure. We have available a number of ways to cancel individual keys, which are different parts of the disease. These ways do not all work together. A bad combination of cancelers will kill a patient as easily as the blue pox. Also, different people react in different ways. Now we must devise the canceler blends that will treat the largest number of the sick.”

  “Some will die anyway?” whispered a man.

  “We’re mages, not miracle work
ers, Cloudgold,” said Osprey tiredly. “Our strength has limits, and we don’t have much time.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” mumbled Dedicate Cloudgold. “I’m just a librarian.”

  “We are all tired,” said Crane. “We shall be more tired still before we are done. If you will erase all of your variations, Briar?”

  “Everything?” demanded the boy, startled.

  “We begin on cures today,” said Crane. “For that we shall need a clean slate.”

  Briar obeyed, but seeing that black rectangle bare of writing made him feel almost naked. As long as instructions were there, he knew they were doing something. He had fixed on the slate to keep from thinking.

  An hour later, Crane lifted the slate down and chalked in new orders. Collecting all the materials he would need to create new additives, Briar whistled cheerfully. Once again he had things to do.

  That night, Rosethorn’s condition was the same.

  Light filled the greenhouse workrooms the next day to announce effective blends of cancelers tested against trays full of blue pox. Several times Tris had to beg Crane to stop dictation, as she worked the cramps out of her writing hand. Osprey had moved to Crane’s table, to help her teacher mix oils and powders for tests on the disease. Everyone in both workrooms protested a stop for lunch. They knew they were close and begrudged every minute not spent in blending and testing chemicals and herbal medicines.

  At the day’s end, Crane opened a cabinet at the end of his worktable, to reveal ten black glass bottles and ten dense black slabs. Someone had cut five wells three inches deep in each slab and polished the whole to a glossy finish. The bottles were sealed with layers of cloth and wax over a glass stopper. Everything shimmered with layers of magic and symbols written in power so intense it burned into Briar’s and Tris’s vision.

  The black trays went to the outer workroom, where blue pox essence was put in each well. Once they were returned to Crane, he and Osprey unsealed the bottles. Acacia carried in a series of small cups, each big enough to hold a dram. Like the bottles and the stone slabs, they were written over with strong magical symbols.

  “Briar,” Crane said. “Your hands are the steadiest. If you will oblige me?”

  Briar shook his head. “But I dropped a tray—”

  “Once,” Crane said drily. “And as often as you have made additions to the trays, you have not broken the lids, splashed the pox, nor dripped additives on your work area.”

  The boy stared at Crane, astounded. How closely had the man been watching him?

  “If you please?” Crane asked, raising his eyebrows.

  Briar looked at his trembling hands. This was even more important than the times he knew the Thief-Lord would starve him if he rang a single bell on the chuffle-dummy’s pockets as he lifted their contents. This was more important than the risk of the docks or the mines if a hinge squeaked as he went for a jewel box. This might be Rosethorn’s life.

  “Right,” he said, clenching his shuddery fingers into fists. “What do I do?”

  Crane directed him to fill the cups, one for each bottle, with a liquid every bit as magically strong as anything he’d ever seen. Next he added the contents of the cups to the black stone wells. Osprey marked each slab with a glued-on patch of brightly colored cloth. Purple was for old men, lilac for old women. Red was for men in their middle years, pink for women of that age. Olive-green was young men, yellow for young women, dark blue for boys, light blue for girls. Boy infants were black; girls were white.

  “Eight years,” Crane remarked softly as Briar measured and poured. “It took six of us eight years to blend these essences, to reduce the need to experiment on human beings. Xiyun Mountstrider, from Yanjing, died of breakbone fever in the third year. We thought we would never succeed without him. Rosethorn convinced us to press on. Ulra Stormborn went blind in the fifth year. First Dedicate Elmbrook took Ibaru fever and bled to death inside her skin in the seventh year, and we continued the work.”

  The thought of that kind of dedication made Briar feel small and untried. I don’t know if I could do that, he confessed to Tris through their magic.

  Me neither, she admitted.

  “Now the first round of cures,” said Osprey. While Briar poured the human essences, she had blended five different cures from her notes and Crane’s. “Gods willing,” she whispered, adding them to the liquids in the black stone wells. “Gods willing, these will be the ones.”

  That night they found Rosethorn’s condition to be the same.

  The cures were unsuccessful, as they all saw the next morning. Had they worked, Crane told his staff, the blue pox would have floated to the top of each well as a white oil. The workers scrubbed and boiled the black slabs while he and Osprey created five more cures. Briar once again measured out human essences; Osprey added the new medicines when he finished. Everyone went home, to wait.

  Rosethorn was no worse, but no better. Her blue spots had begun to fade. The four young people sent Lark to bed. When she woke late that evening, they made her eat.

  Briar wanted to cry when they reached the greenhouse at dawn, to find these cures hadn’t worked either. Tris did cry. When the slabs were clean, they did it all again.

  Returning home before sunset for the second day in a row, they found that Frostpine sat with Rosethorn. Lark and Sandry had returned to making protective oils and working them into cloth for masks and gloves. The smith went home around midnight, as Daja sat watch over their patient.

  Several hours before dawn, Little Bear’s yapping roused everyone. Briar lurched out of his blankets to see what had set the dog off; Lark, Sandry, and Tris sat up, blinking. Daja stuck her head out of Rosethorn’s room. Opening the front door, Briar found Crane about to knock. The tall dedicate looked as exhausted as a man could look. He clutched a flask in one hand.

  “One of the cures worked,” he told the boy in a croak. “I told Osprey to create more and try it on the other volunteers at the infirmaries. I want to administer this dose to Rosethorn myself.”

  Briar let him in.

  Frostpine arrived halfway through the morning and stayed, helping with chores. Crane came and went. He checked the other cure volunteers, all temple people who’d caught the pox while tending the sick, looked in on Osprey and the greenhouse crew, then returned to Discipline to watch over Rosethorn. Once people knew he was at the cottage, runners delivered the latest reports on the progress of the volunteers to him there.

  Rosethorn was doing better. Her sleep was more natural; she didn’t babble. She was cool to the touch and dewed with sweat. Lark felt good enough about her progress to draw everyone out of her room after lunch and let her sleep without a guardian nurse.

  Fortunately it was Daja, the most even-tempered of them, who looked into Rosethorn’s room late that afternoon. What they heard made them all go still, at the table or seated on the floor, their hands freezing on makework tasks.

  “Enough!” Rosethorn’s voice was a sandpaper-rough growl. “The next one who … who peers at me is going to die in a dreadful way! Either come in or stay out!”

  Daja blinked, then murmured, “Stay out,” and retreated.

  Briar sighed. “Ah, the sweet birds of spring,” he said blissfully. “I hear their glorious song.”

  Lark ran to her own room and slammed the door.

  Rosethorn began to cough. Crane stood and went into her room.

  A few minutes later, Frostpine asked, “Do you think she’s killed him?”

  “It’s too quiet for murder,” offered Briar in his best criminal judgment. “And he’d yelp more if she was mauling him.”

  “We’d better check,” said Frostpine somberly. He and the four young people looked into the sickroom very cautiously. Crane sat beside Rosethorn’s bed, accepting a cup from her. Rosethorn heaved a shuddering sigh and fought to sit up.

  “More?” Crane asked, offering the water pitcher. His manner was as nobly elegant as ever.

  “Willowbark, I think,” Rosethorn s
aid in a croak. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Please.” Her quick brown eyes caught her audience. “Something for you?”

  “No,” replied Frostpine.

  “No? Then go away. You too,” she informed Crane.

  He rose, poured her a cup of willowbark tea, then swept her an elegant bow. He ruined the effect by adding, “Don’t laze about too long. We must go at the blue pox, find out just how so deadly a variation was made, then write a paper to present in Lightsbridge.”

  “I’ll try not to laze,” Rosethorn promised, and drank her tea. “I would like to see Lark, though.”

  “Shoo, shoo,” Crane said, sweeping his hands—and Frostpine, and the four—ahead of him until all had left the room. He rapped on Lark’s door. “She wants you,” he called.

  “Coming,” Lark replied, her voice nearly as clogged as Rosethorn’s.

  Crane looked at Briar and Tris, arms akimbo. “I could use both of you,” he said. “There are problems with the cure’s effect on older and younger patients—we must experiment with those. For that, since time is precious, I would prefer that you sleep nearby, in the Air dormitories.”

  “I’ll tell Lark,” Sandry offered. She had been crying, though none of the four could remember when.

  “Time to go,” said Crane. “The sooner we begin, the sooner we are done.”

  13

  There was still a great deal of hard work before they could announce a cure to the frightened city. Teenagers, the very young, and the old did not fare as well as adults of Rosethorn’s age. Adjustments were made. Crane requested—and got—volunteers among the victims in Summersea, those with no magic whatsoever. He and his staff worked around the clock. Briar was vexed not to see Rosethorn, but getting a cure to Summersea was important. Hundreds had died and more were dying in the city; no one wanted those numbers to rise for even an hour longer if they could help it.

  At last, five days after Rosethorn began to mend, they gave their cures to the Water Temple, which began to make them in the huge amounts needed in Summersea. Crane sent Briar and Tris home. “There will be a meeting in a week or two,” he explained. “We learn better as we review what happened and what might have been done instead. Some of the discussion will be impossible for you to follow, but your observations will be of use.”