Mercy Sweetwell's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

They came back from the pumpkin field before the bells rang. Mercy carried the sealed jar of buckwheat honey against her chest. Matthias walked a step behind her, mask down, cure vials wrapped in cloth at his belt. In the bakery's back room, she set the jar on the oak table and finished her mother's recipe at last. She folded the dark honey into the batter. She spoke the missing line aloud, the way her mother had. The cakes came out of the oven the color of wet bark. She cut one open. It steamed. She had the cure in her hands. Then she thought of the ward. "They can't chew this," she said. Matthias looked up from the vials. "Forty beds," Mercy said. "Half of them can't lift their heads. The last man I fed bread to choked on it. If I bring a tray of cake, they'll turn their faces to the wall. Or worse." "Then don't bring cake," Matthias said. "It has to be the recipe. Exactly. She made it this way." "The recipe is the ingredients." He set a vial down. "Not the shape." Mercy stared at the loaf. Her hands wanted to argue. Twelve years of doing it her mother's way pressed against her ribs. But her mother had fed her honey cake when she was small and sick, and her mother had done it with a spoon, warm, thinned with milk. She remembered the spoon. She took the second cake off the rack while it was still hot. She crumbled it into her mother's mixing bowl. She poured milk from the bakery's jug and set the bowl over the banked oven. She stirred until the crumb dissolved and the buckwheat honey went dark through the milk. It thickened into a pudding the color of tea. She lifted a spoonful. It slid off the spoon in a slow ribbon. Matthias watched her stir. "That will go down," he said. "It's still the recipe," Mercy said, more to the bowl than to him. "Every grain of it." She made the rest in a stockpot. Forty portions. She ladled the warm pudding into a covered crock and wrapped it in a towel. Matthias tucked the cloth of vials inside his coat. They left through the alley before the guards came around again. At the ward, she went bed to bed with a small spoon. She did not ask names. She lifted each head, tipped the spoon, waited for the swallow. No one choked. A woman in the corner opened her eyes at the taste and held Mercy's wrist for a moment before letting go. By the time the crock was empty, every patient had taken the dose. Mercy stood at the door and counted the beds. Forty. All breathing. Then she heard boots in the corridor, and a guard's voice asking the matron who had come in with her.