Delia Prance's Arc

Chapter 20 of 59

Arden's plans stayed rolled in Delia's cottage, but the wet catch in his breath stayed in her ears. She had heard many sick chests. Never one like his. She could not name it, and she could not treat what she could not name. A wrong guess would kill the king's first son. So at dawn she rode to the palace and climbed the wide stone steps to the great archive library. The doors were carved and gilded, taller than three men. Inside, shelves rose past the light. Glowing marks curled along the stone between them. Delia had been here once before, to name her strange plants. Now she came for a sickness. She told a clerk she needed records of chest illness, coughs, wet lungs. He led her to a corner and left her with a stack. She read all morning. Books listed fevers, winter coughs, the lung-rot that came from mines. None matched what she had heard. Arden's breath had a wet click low in the chest, and a smell she knew but could not place. She pressed her memory. Not smoke. Not rot. Something green. By noon her eyes burned. She carried a book to a tall window for better light. Outside stood a maple with copper leaves, its canopy full and bright against the gray stone. She watched it a moment and let her mind rest. Then the smell came back to her. It was the smell of her own field. Of a plant she had crushed by accident and thrown away. She turned pages faster now. Not sickness books. Plant books. She found it near the back of a thick catalog: a marsh plant whose pollen and dust, breathed in over weeks, coated the lungs and made them weep. The book named the source. It named the cure too, a root that dried the lungs. Both grew in wet ground. Both grew in her field. Delia sat back. Arden was not sick from within. Something he breathed had done this. The wet ground near the palace, or near his own hunts. She had walked past the cause a hundred times without knowing. Now she knew the name. She knew the root that answered it. She copied the page into her own hand, closed the book, and returned it to the clerk. Her ride home was fast. She had a plant to find and a dose to measure, and the measure had to be exact. Too little would do nothing. Too much of the drying root would stop his breath as surely as the illness. She reached her field by dusk and knelt at the wet edge she had always avoided. The root was there, pale and thick. She dug three and carried them to her table. The naming was done. The killing part was just beginning.