summer weather. He turned his head away peevishly and tried to strike at the spoon. Anything that was forced into his mouth, he did not swallow, but merely let run out the sides of his mouth, or down his throat to his lungs, the last and gravest sign.
The fever raged in him. Like a disloyal servant, it had fought on his side till it saw the turning of the battle, then had deserted to the enemies’ banner. His hair and face were wet with cooling water, but no water would do him good, now.
Kallan stood up from beside him, and spoke to Andiene. “We cannot travel today,” he said, and she nodded. “Lenane, you gave us seven days, five days now. Is that still true?”
It was still true. They had enough time to escape. They would be able to travel more quickly the next day, with one less in their company. I was so proud of my healing skill. We could have waited another day. Kallan tried to turn his mind from regrets, and think of more practical things, of how they could dig a grave in the sunbaked earth.
That would be necessary. Lenane would agree, though the two city-trained ones would fear blasphemy. The worst terror comes when the hunters turn and show you a friend’s face in their company.
The grief was plain to be read on Andiene’s face. “He saved me. He sheltered me. I brought him and his family nothing but death and destruction, then and now.” She spoke as though she quoted something heard once and remembered bitterly. “No seed or root of healing in me … nor could seed grow … ”
“Where is the child?” Kallan asked. She had vanished from his side. He looked around the safehold stupidly, as though she could have hidden herself in its open emptiness. Then he saw her, a little figure out near the edge of the meadow, where the grass grew low as it neared the forest’s edge. He ran out of the safehold. Andiene followed him.
“I tell you, I will have no more foolish daringness among my people!”
“My lady, the grievers will not hunt now,” Kallan said, but still he was glad of the words and of her presence, although he saw that Kare had made no move to go into the forest. She quartered the ground, head down like a hound sniffing for a fresh trail. She stopped and gathered plants, leaves and seeds, kinds that Kallan had never noticed. Her hands were full of motley branches, springs of greenery. Perhaps three, but no more, were on the long lists of the lesser gifts.
“Kare?”
“Wait,” she said, and dropped to her knees to lean far under a bush and pull up a little hairy-leaved plant. Then she ran to Kallan.
“What do you have there?”
“Leaves. For people. I learned it … ” and she gave him a little sidelong look and was silent. Kallan understood that silence. In the time that they had traveled together, he had seen her learn, without one word being spoken by Ilbran, that it was not wise to speak of her mother.
“What are their names, those plants you have?”
She shook her head and muttered something; she did not know their names. When they returned, she stripped the leaves from her garnerings, and ground them to a pulp on the safehold step, for lack of a better mortar. At last, she scraped up the green paste, and stirred it into a bowl of cold water.
Kallan was willing enough to give it to her father—there was no medicine that would harm him now—but he had no hope. This that Kare did was child’s play, some imaginative pretense of wisdom, like boys playing with blaggorn-stem swords.
But he fed the brew to Ilbran, spoonful by spoonful. Sometimes the fisherman spat it out, and sometimes he choked and tried to cough, a sign that it had gone to his lungs. Sometimes his teeth clenched tight on the spoon, and more often than not, he fought, and the brew splashed on his clothes and on the floor.
As he took it, he seemed to become stronger. He babbled words, fragments of ideas. As for his talk of dragons, that was something that haunted them all. Kallan understood his raving talk of poison, of lindel trees, also. One night when Kare was asleep, and there was nothing to do but sit and listen to the song of the dark ones through the woods, he had finally drawn the story of Malesa