Lilith Blackwood's Arc

Chapter 7 of 21

The healed goat slept in a warm pen the next morning. Lilith watched it breathe and felt no comfort. Liko had saved that goat, not her. She still did not know the willow bark from the lye on her own. If a harder case came while Liko slept or roamed, she would guess. Guessing had a cost, and it was measured in dead animals. She found Liko on the warm shelves near the door. He lay curled on a folded blanket among the animal beds, tail over his nose. Lilith knelt beside him. "Teach me every jar," she said. "All of them. Before the next one comes." Liko opened one amber eye. "You cannot hold a hundred remedies in your head. No one can." He stretched and stood. "I have known you since you were small, and I know your memory. You will forget the honey water at the worst hour." "Then what do I do?" Her voice cracked. "You cannot sit at every bed." "No. I cannot." He hopped down and crossed the floor. He stopped at a low shelf below the dusty jars and pawed at a heavy shape wrapped in cloth. "So we do not trust your head. We trust ink." Lilith pulled the bundle free and unwrapped it. A thick book lay in her hands. Brass corners bound its brown cover. Gold letters named it a medical guide. She opened it. Inside were drawings of leaves, bones, and bottles, each one labeled in a careful hand. Doses. Warnings. A page on which cures could poison. "This was here all along," she said. "On the shelf you never searched." Liko sat. "It holds more than I care to speak aloud. But it is only paper. It cannot tell the willow from the lye when both jars are unlabeled." Lilith understood. The book named remedies. It did not name what filled her brown and green jars. She carried it to the shelves of tinctures. Liko walked the row beside her. "Green jar," he said. "Boiled willow bark. Write it." Lilith took a pen. On a blank page at the back she wrote the jar's color, its place, its use. Liko named the next. She wrote again. Bottle by bottle they went, his knowledge and her ink, until every jar on the shelf had a line. She marked the lye with a black cross and the word BURN. By dusk she closed the book. Her hand ached. The page held forty remedies in her own writing. She did not need to hold them in her memory now. She did not need Liko awake at every hour. "Now you can work alone," Liko said. He climbed back onto the blanket and settled. Lilith set the book beside the jars where she could reach it fast. A record existed that no forgotten hour could erase. The next hard case would find her ready. But readiness meant the creatures could send worse than a broken leg, and now they would.