I smiled. Behind my back, I scraped a spoon across the edge of the inside of the tureen. “The Credo is lucky to have you. Thank you for the sample. My uncle will be delighted.”
“Please thank Credo Etan for the compliment. I’ve the recipes, too, if that would assist.” She turned to find the papers and I slipped an empty kori bottle into the folds of my paluma. Then, sample and recipes in hand, I excused myself and returned up the road to my family apartments, where the dessert sample, kori bottle, spoonful of soup, and handful of fish cake crumbs joined Etan’s saliva and vomit. However unlikely, I would test it all for poison.
Some basic things I could do immediately. I made a solution from a lichen powder and tested the food samples; the presence of some corrosive poisons would turn the solution red. Etan’s saliva generated an extremely pale pink, which was to be expected, but there was no response with any of the food. I examined his partly digested stomach contents; the color and smell, while unpleasant, seemed normal. Thendra had taken blood and urine from him and I would need to do the same.
After a thorough visual examination under Etan’s best glass—nothing looked abnormal—I tasted the food samples myself. The soup was a well-made but simple root affair, the only detectable additives salt and two seed-based spices. The dessert was crushed nuts and bindie egg, whipped with goa berry syrup. Only crumbs remained of the fish cakes, but the ingredients list provided by Lazar’s cook matched the smell, texture, and taste of the sample I had. The kori was standard cloudy liquor from the southern Losi region, with no additives that I could detect.
Replacing the sliding panel in the kitchen wall that hid Etan’s workroom, I shook my head. Etan had trained me too well. There was no call for me to be more worried than my uncle. But then the front doors thrust open and Kalina darted in, sweat sticking her hair to her face and her eyes wide. I stopped, unable to take my next breath.
“Jov,” she said, and before she could say another word, I knew my sister’s news.
* * *
My uncle was dying, and so was the Chancellor. For all that my entire life had been built around this very scenario, faced with it I now felt incompetent. Unprepared. Unworthy.
When the Chancellor fell ill, the physics shifted their attention from Etan to Caslav, and Kalina and I made it through the burgeoning chaos in the Manor without difficulty. Half the Council flocked about and the Manor staff looked fearful. No one paid us any heed as we were escorted to the suite adjoining Caslav’s.
We sat there now, silent, trying to get fluid through our uncle’s puffy lips. The physic Thendra darted in occasionally, her voice sharp as she barked instructions at her apprentices. Tain broke from his uncle’s bedside only once, to briefly check on the three of us. None of us spoke of poison, but with the physics feeding both men purgatives and emetics it must have been suspected. All we knew for certain, though, was that with every moment that passed, they grew worse.
“Home,” Etan murmured. “Go home.”
“Shh, Tashi.” Kalina patted his hand gently. “Just rest. We’ll take you home when you’re well.”
“You…” His lips worked silently, then he slumped back again. “Home. So—sorry.”
I could not bear to make eye contact with my sister. My sense of failure was so intense I could barely breathe.
Our family’s great proofing tome lay under the bed, hidden from immediate sight, and the satchel of antidotes we’d brought earlier now bulged with every remedy we had. We had tried ingested antidotes and absorbing creams, sometimes the same ones in powder, liquid, or raw plant form. When Etan could no longer swallow, Kalina propped his weak body up against her while I poured teas down his throat. While the physics were occupied with the Chancellor, she stood guard by the door as I used a hollow needle to inject our only blood-borne antidote.
Nothing stemmed the tide against him.
As evening deepened, Etan was conscious less and less, his breathing weakening. Earlier, he had detailed his day for us as best he could while Kalina took notes. Even then he had struggled to force the words from his thickened tongue. Having spent much of my life drawing calm from my Tashi when the compulsions seized my body and my brain, the sight of unflappable Etan swearing in frustration at his lack of control over his own body set me off.
My problems were manageable in everyday life if I kept things in order, stuck to a routine, stayed calm. But in times of high stress, a storm of panic and fear and speculation built in my head. My usual physical calming exercises—breathing, pacing—themselves became part of the problem, and I ended up stuck in a recurring pattern. After we’d tried the last of our antidote options, I’d paced in sets of eight until my legs wobbled with exhaustion. I’d never resented my weakness so much as today, when my uncle and my sister needed me the most.
Thendra, too, grew visibly frustrated as the hours passed. “Both men say they were in perfect health this morning, yes,” she had told us. “Their symptoms are the same. Credo Etan’s manifested sooner, but the Chancellor’s are escalating faster. I fear their bodies cannot continue with this pressure, no, but since I do not understand what ails them, I cannot treat it.”
She had suggested maidenbane as a possible poison and Kalina and I feigned ignorance, but the antidote had had no effect; we knew it would not, not only because Etan would never have missed such a basic poison, but because we had already tried it, just in case. Nor did any other remedy offer any improvement in either man. In private, we had attempted every antidote for the greater and lesser poisons in our secret stores, to no effect. Ideas thinned, as did our hope.
Kalina leaned against me now, her frail form a light, even weight against my back and her hair a dark shroud between us. “What are we going to do?” she asked, her voice bleak, and though I wanted to reassure her, no words came to me. The weight of my failure crushed me.
“We’ll manage it together,” I assured her.
She stayed silent.
Etan stirred and we both started. Kalina rose and leaned over our uncle, touching his hand with hesitant fingers. “Tashi, can you hear us?”
I stared at Etan, mute. What could I say to the man who had raised us? Something lighthearted, to take his mind off the inevitable, or something sincere and thoughtful that represented all we had shared? Instead, my mind cranked through its usual gears, noting pointless details, counting breaths, evaluating symptoms.
We are who we are, I told myself. It wasn’t a comfort.
Etan coughed, making a sound like water sucking down a drain, and blinked furiously. His lips moved.
“Tashi?” I leaned close. He was trying to say something.
Etan’s gaze moved between us and he clutched at his chest. I turned to grab the cup of water from the table but, at Kalina’s gasp, the cup fell out of my hand and spilled water over my lap.
Etan’s dark eyes were still open, his lips parted, but some spark, an animation that had been there before, was gone.
Whatever knowledge our uncle had wanted to impart, he’d taken it with him.
Zarnika
DESCRIPTION: Naturally occurring mineral, brittle and gray, often with a colorless, odorless crystalline coating, soluble in water. Poisonous to ingest directly or through plants or water supplies in high concentration areas. Poison can also be absorbed through skin.