“You’re sure?”
“I think I would remember two men in furs running past us. It’s not exactly a Midsummer Festival out there.” Netsa gave him a glare that promised hours of chores for the snippiness that he responded with, but he found he didn’t much care. She whirled around and stalked into the shrine at her customary blistering pace. The acolytes gave him a look of mixed confusion and envy, as if he were prodding a sleeping dragon, then followed Netsa at a more reasonable speed, hoisting the baskets into their arms.
Once he was alone, Julius pulled the sheath and sword from his waist and placed them in the stone trenches that held the hedges’ roots, making sure the piece was completely concealed by leaves. If things are going to start getting violent, he thought, a sword in the hedge was worth two in the lockbox. Then he followed the party indoors, leaving the night only to the woods and the sinking sun.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
RIVER’S ROOM. THE WAY OF THE WOOD.
Much of the next day was spent indulging years-old routines. With Netsa’s permission to miss chores, Mel spent the majority of the light hours in her dormitory, rows of Calcifer’s leather journals at her side. She had no desk on which to take notes, so she stripped the sheets and used the mattress of her bed; it was comparable in stiffness.
Note-taking was an old friend to Mel, who spent years of study holed up in a tiny, square apartment above a butcher’s shop in Amora. Whenever Mel encountered a case that involved sleepiness, paralysis, or even waxy skin, she would record the page on her list. She also recorded any instance of Calcifer using his fantastical centrifuge, of which she was deeply curious. The man seemed hesitant to go into any detail about the device in his notes; in fact, his avoidance seemed utterly superstitious in places. She did not count this against him––medicine and myth were something like fraternal twins.
By the end of the afternoon, she had run through each of his thirteen most recent books a number of times, checking and double-checking the fullness of her notes, and the accuracy of the few diagrams she had sketched. By her tally, nine books were records of Calcifer’s patients at the Monastery, although old ones––she suspected he carried the most recent with him; two books were to do with the local berries and plants, in which Calcifer seemed to consider himself a specialist; and two were entirely inscrutable, written in the same careful handwriting but depicting utter nonsense. There were long stretches of monologue about strange and unrelated incidents, phrases of nursery rhymes, and in places, singular words with no attachment at all. These two books utterly puzzled Mel, and so became the object of her fixation after her notes were complete.
Mel became aware of the time as she realized how hard her eyes were straining to see the thin black ink. The sun was already retreating behind the treetops, and her room was bathed in the deep red of dusk. She closed the book and carefully placed it with the rest––two stacks of four, and one stack of five, lined evenly against the foot of the naked bed.
There was a knock at her door, and a voice like a silver bell. “Amelia Saul?”
“I told you, Mel is fine.”
“Right,” River responded. “Mel. I heard you took today off. Are you feeling quite alright?”
Heeding a sudden instinct, she took the two most puzzling books and tucked them away under the mattress. Then she crossed to the door, tarnishing the knob with ink-stained fingers. River was standing on the other side, still dressed in her chore robes, her curtain of dark hair tousled on one side. Based on the greasy scent of cooking oil, Mel guessed she was working the kitchen that day.
“I’m just peachy,” Mel responded. “Do you need something?”
“You agreed to come see me tonight, in my dorm,” River said, suddenly shy. “But I realized I had never told you where my dorm is, I just blundered on with something else, and––I mean, if that’s still okay! I don’t want to impose if you’re busy–”
“It is, and I’m not,” Mel cut across. The look of relief that flooded the acolyte’s face made her both curious and heartsick. “I apologize, it slipped my mind entirely. I was reading.” She held up her blackened hands, and River nodded. “Shall we?”
River peered into the room over her shoulder, and gestured to something. “You should bring that as well.” Mel turned and saw that she was indicating her knapsack, and her intrigue became tinged with concern. But when she turned back to the woman, she was already gliding down the hall towards a set of narrow stairs. Mel snatched up her pack and followed.
River’s dorm, a floor below Mel’s own, was familiar in furnishing, but smaller in dimension. It was wedged in the corner of the hall, and so the room took an awkward pentagonal shape, leaving little room to move in some places. Although it was on the same side of the hall, it had no window looking out over the grounds; the main source of light was a row of candles in a brass trough full of melted wax. Those misgivings aside, it felt much more like a home than Mel’s own room; there were a number of crafts and necklaces dangling from the wooden head of the bed, and on the wall, a few illustrations were pasted in place, paintings on coarse, yellow paper. It seemed River was an artist as well as a disciple. Mel wondered absently whether Netsa knew about these decorations––they seemed to run against her perfectly prepared grain.
“I probably should’ve cleaned, but I can’t say it’s in my nature,” River explained, crossing the room with the ease of routine. Mel moved a little more slowly, taking in the painted scenes––landscapes of the Boreal, she recognized. The acolyte sat on the edge of the bed, much as she had in Mel’s room, and patted the spot next to her. She sat. They were silent for a moment.
“You wanted to show me something?” Mel started.
“Yes,” She replied. There was another moment of vague unease, as if she was already regretting her decision to expand her circle of secrecy. But need won out over caution, and she continued, “Calcifer hasn’t been here in a long time.”
Mel’s heart stopped. “Oh?”
“They tell us that he comes and goes, but I know for a fact he hasn’t been here in at least a year.” River began to knead her fingers through her hair, which reflected the warm light of the candle. “I suspect longer. I used to have a friend here, in my rank. His name was Tobi. He was like me––I mean, he––ugh.” She started over. “They encourage us to be independent here. They want us to act out the isolation Saint Shina is supposed to represent. If we don’t depend on anything in the world, then we’ll be ‘enlightened’. But I can’t always do that––I was a very social person once upon a time. Tobi was like that too. We were thick as thieves, and twice as secretive about it. But Tobi…” She trailed off, retreating behind the veil of memory. Mel put her hand on River’s and was surprised by the coolness of her skin. After a second, she returned to the present. “He got sick. He got sick quite often––he was always so pale, you could see his veins, purple on his face, and––one time, he wasn’t getting better. He went to see Calcifer, but the doctor wasn’t there. Netsa said he was away. Every time he checked, every time I checked, he was in the Republic, he was in Asla, he was in the mountains, he was––he wasn’t here.” She looked up at Mel, and her brown eyes were clouded with tears. “Maybe at first that was true, but I don’t think he ever came back.”
Mel didn’t respond. She could hear a knackeral in the distance, and River’s labored breaths, and her own heart beating in her chest, a war tune composed by fear and performed by anxiety. The truth was already familiar to her; she recognized it in Netsa’s bizarre expression when she mentioned Calcifer, and the age of the physician’s journals, and the thin layer of dust that coated his study, entirely antithetical to his neurotically clean mind. Calcifer was long gone.
Finally, she found a reply. “Tobi. He’s gone?”
River nodded. “He died in the spring. Water-lung––at least, that’s what they told us.” She turned more fully to Mel. “There’s something else, too.”
“Regarding Calcifer?”
“Well, sort o
f. We haven’t had a physician in a while, and I––well, it’s better if I just show you.” Reaching down, she undid the buttons on the front of her robe and pulled the fabrics back, revealing a pair of tan pants. Even before she peeled back her left pant-leg, Mel could spot the problem; her thigh was heavily swelled and misshapen, pushing against the seams of her clothes.
“Goodness. How long as your leg been like this?” Mel asked, not waiting for a response to kneel next to the bed and examine more closely. With the fabric out of the way, she could see a tight, red quality to the skin, and a number of more agitated spots that she guessed were rashes. She knew if she prodded, it would elicit a moan of sharp discomfort, and so she skipped that step, rooting through her bag for appropriate ointments.
“A few weeks.”
“Do you have any reactions to certain spices or fabrics?”
River shook her head. “I used to go on the foraging trips into the woods with the other acolytes. On my last trip, I fell into a bush full of thorns, or brambles––whatever. In the next few days I could hardly walk on that leg, and it itched something fierce. That passed, but…” She trailed off. Mel ran an internal checklist for poisonous plants with brambles, particularly ones that lived in cold environments. She came up with a few.
“Blue flowers?”
“Yes!” River said. Mel groaned internally. “I’d forgotten about that. You know it?”
“I do. It’s called waspthorn. I think you can guess why.” She lined three bottles of herbs on the floor, plus a jar of watery paste, a bowl and a thin knife with a hooked tip. She could release some of the tension immediately, but it was an unpleasant procedure. “I hope you’re not afraid of seeing blood.”
River swallowed audibly, but shook her head. “Go to town, doc.”
The entire affair took the better part of two hours. The first hour was mostly bloodletting, which, to Mel’s distinct pleasure, River described as instant relief. Then she set about mixing an antidotal paste for whatever remained of the toxin. She expected the swelling to go down within a week or so.
“Are you okay to rest here alone?” Mel said, approaching the door. “Because I can sneak down if you need me to. Netsa doesn’t scare me.” She took some comfort in the easy smile that rose to River’s lips.
“That’s okay,” She replied. But as Mel began to turn away, another phrase followed. “You know about the Lhord sympathizers?”
“How they escaped?” Mel said. As hard as Netsa tried to suppress the incident, it was common knowledge amongst the acolytes, and she supposed that included her at this point. The most consistent elements of the story depicted how the soldiers had lifted the hinges right out of the doors, probably with a concealed weapon of some sort, then opened a window and crawled out across the garden.
River nodded. “Yes. I know the acolyte who found the empty cell. She reminds me a little of Tobi, actually. Friendly.” She leaned forward, conveying secrecy. “She told me about it––about what she saw.” Something about her tone was grave enough that Mel moved away from the door, back to the bed. “Would you like to hear it?”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Had Mel been looking from her window instead of reading in the moments before River interrupted her studies, she might’ve seen Julius sitting on the far side of the gardens, his back to the Monastery and his eyes locked on the receding dusk of the forest. Every few minutes, his hand fished through the stone trenches that housed the flora, plucking round rocks from the soil and whipping them into the trees with a practiced flick of the wrist. He lavished in the sound of the rustling bushes––a comfort he didn’t have from the window of his dorm.
Julius had discovered a happy impasse with Netsa earlier that day; so long as he was out of sight, she wasn’t apt to chase him down and force him into the hall to do chores with the acolytes. And so, on the first day without a foraging trip since his arrival, he left for the woods just as he had in the days prior, sword at his hip.
Alone, the forest was serene in a way he hadn’t felt in a long while, even travelling with Mel. With two people, one was always apt to be moving or talking. But alone, Julius fell into long stretches of breathing so shallow, moving so little that he could practically forget himself, leaving only the indomitable way of nature around him. Some part of him knew that he was supposed to be here––that something waited for him in the white wood. As that feeling passed through him, filling his heart with early sunlight and the pure, chilling wind, he finally understood meditation. He thought Lin would’ve been proud.
He tossed another stone into the woods, relishing the remnants of that rightness. As his eyes followed the stone, it occurred to him that he was feeling faith. It wasn’t much different from knowing where the stone would land, he mused––only you were the stone, and the world was the pitcher. The stone landed in the bushes, next to a pair of moon-filled eyes and a scraggy black snout.
Julius stood. Fido wagged his tail companionably, and sat next to the bush, which was situated next to a large boulder. He memorized the spot, then ran back into the garden, searching for the hedge where he stowed his sword earlier that day.
He reached the circular dais and was greeted with a familiar set of blue robes and a long thin braid. Julius stopped and shoved his hands into his jacket pocket, doing his best to look casual. Netsa turned, her eyes already probing him, and he knew he’d failed in that endeavor.
“You’re out late,” He said, taking the offensive.
“The same could be said for you.”
“I like to walk outside at night. Especially since the foraging trips are over.” Julius instantly regretted saying this, knowing that it would draw attention to his absence in the day’s chores. But she said nothing about this, instead drawing her robes closer in the night chill.
“The lesser acolytes have a curfew. I know you aren’t part of the Monastery, strictly speaking, but you would do well to try and fit in.” Her usual snippiness was all but absent, perhaps tucked away in order to escape the cold as soon as possible. Julius saw this and, for the first time since arriving, feigned obedience.
“You’re right. I’ll be in shortly,” He said. If Netsa found this at all odd, she didn’t say so; she only turned and sped down the garden path to the front doors. Then she paused.
“I don’t dislike you, Julius. But I am invested in the wellbeing of the Monastery, and that includes you and the doctor. Don’t overstep your freedoms––at least, not where I can see you.” Then, her riddle spoken, she disappeared inside.
Julius chose to ignore this strange omen for the time being, retrieving his sword and returning to the edge of the garden, where, sure enough, Fido still waited by the boulder and bush. He jogged out to meet the canine, who patiently allowed a few seconds of patting before taking to the woods again, confident in his way. Julius followed close behind, wondering if this was the reward for his faith.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE POLITICS OF FAITH. MOONLIGHT INTERLUDE.
The First Adherent reaches out to you––you do not reach out to him.
It was Netsa’s voice that Mel remembered when she found herself across from the Meditation Hall, hand hovering over the heavy wood of the monk’s chamber door. It seemed to glow unnaturally in the narrow moonbeams, a red menace in a backdrop of greys and blues. For a fraction of a second, rationality bled into her world, cutting through the fog of reckless determination that clouded her thoughts. Her hand almost fell away to her side. She almost turned and went back to her dorm.
Then her hand fell, and the knock was thunderous against the still night, splintering the dark quiet that fell over the Monastery. She imagined a giant, rolling over in his sleep; she imagined a monolithic worm, parting the bedrock of the world; she imagined the hollow chamber behind the door, and the robed figure waiting for her inside, his clay statue face yielding nothing.
The door slowly swung open, its weight lending grace to its movement. The chamber behind was lit by candle, b
ut only those surrounding the rough mats at the far end of the room; the candles about the walls were dark. The First Adherent watched her from his place in the ring of wax, lit from beneath, casting few shadows. Because of his solitary light, he had the strange appearance of floating in a void, untouchable from the ground––only reachable by a walk of faith; a trust that the dark held no hostile cliffs. With only the slightest hesitation, she entered the gloom.
She kneeled in front of the halo of flickering heat, head bowed. Not unlike the candles, she could feel her conviction wavering––with Julius and Netsa, she felt like part of a congregation; but now the burden of his fearsome authority was hers alone, like a child locking eyes with the devil in their closet.
“You may speak.”
Mel looked up at him. “You say you know where Calcifer is.”
He took no great haste to respond. “And so do you. The mountains, east of the Monastery. I can show you on a map, if you require.”
“And if I went there myself, walked the whole way; would I find him?”
Another grand pause. “I find that likely.”
“I know Calcifer has been gone longer than you’re letting on,” She said, steadying as time went on, focusing her intent. “How long ago did he leave?”
“You have reason to distrust me. Why is that?” He returned. Mel felt the tone of his voice, smooth and confident, began to inch towards annoyance. She took that––and his misdirection––as signs that she was nearing the root of the issue.
“I know you let the Lhord soldiers go. You were seen. You went down to the cells in the middle of the night, and you opened the doors. You watched them leave.” Mel felt righteous anger churn in her stomach, and wondered absurdly if the First Adherent was a large man under those robes. “Perhaps I am speaking out of turn, but I find that reason to distrust you.”
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