“Ms. Vashchenko,” Derkach said, and when he looked at me his eyes narrowed like I was something imperceptibly small, “I appreciate your concern, but I am the one who is paid to fret over Sevas. Please return to your work and leave me to my charge.”
My cheeks were burning. Sevas still had not looked up from the floor.
Fedir coughed again, and with shaking fingers I opened the herbalist’s compendium. The parchment was as thin as onion skin, and Rose’s handwriting was smudged and tiny, like a hundred spiders had been squished onto the page. Some notes were accompanied by pressed samples of herbs or flower petals; others were merely illustrated with my sister’s drawings, which were as difficult to discern as her penmanship.
I flipped through the pages with mortified deliberation, trying to make it seem like I was looking for something particular. In truth, I had no idea where even to begin. I would’ve had just as much luck if it had been written in Ionik. Behind me, Derkach was speaking to Sevas in a hushed tone.
When I dared to glance over my shoulder I saw that he had one hand gripping the back of Sevas’s neck. I recognized the gesture: tenderness and cruelty both. Derkach’s voice was low in a way that Papa’s sometimes was, in a way that meant danger. I did not know Derkach well and I could not make out more than a few words, floating on the surface like specks of white cream in borscht, but I knew that they meant danger too.
I heard theater and practice and show and money. I heard ungrateful and impudent and careless. I heard drunk and indecent. I heard my name.
My head snapped up, but Papa’s voice curled its own vise around my throat. “What are you waiting for? Do you really want to keep me any longer in this wretched flat?”
Face hot, I returned to the book. On the first page was a table of contents, which I could mostly read. But just because I knew the words didn’t mean I could understand what they meant all put together. There were two sections, one for Diseases of the Body and one for Diseases of the Mind. Under Diseases of the Body I found more than a dozen subheadings: Diseases of the Skin and Diseases of the Liver and Diseases of the Gums.
Fedir moaned, his blue-white chest heaving. I flipped to the page marked Diseases of the Stomach.
I had to hold the book up to the meager sunlight cast through the single dingy window, squinting and squinting. I could scarcely tell where one letter ended and the other began, but even once I managed to separate them my prospects did not improve. Everything was written as if it were a riddle; I couldn’t fathom why my careful and clever sister did not better organize her book. Perhaps she didn’t want anyone else to be able to read it.
I pressed my thumb to the page so hard that my nail tore a small slit in the parchment, taking the time to swallow each word as I went along, turning them over on my tongue like they were sucking candies.
If the Patient is fair of Hair and gray-eyed, use double the Dose and check Appendix I–II.
If it is Sunday and there has been a Bout of Rain, only use Herbs that have been cut twice at the Stem.
If You are angry when You treat the Patient, lick your Thumb before delivering the Dose.
Moisture was gathering at the corners of my eyes and my stomach was as tight as a flower bud. As I scanned down the page, Derkach’s voice grew louder and drifted toward me.
“。 . . after everything that I’ve done for you, Sevas, at great personal cost, the least you could do in return is not make me look like a damned fool. Am I fool to you? Am I?”
“No,” Sevas said. I had never heard him sound so cowed. “I’m sorry.”
My heart gave a horrible lurch of hurt, as if I were the one who’d been scolded. Papa stepped closer to me until he was standing on the hem of my dress, the shiny toe of his boot crumpling the pink silk. I could not remember whether Fedir had gray eyes, so I had to hold my breath and lean closer and peel back one of his eyelids to check. His lips were bone-white and cracking like old plaster.
It occurred to me, quite suddenly, that if Fedir had consumed poison, he had vomited enough that it all should have been expelled. If he died of anything now, it would be only terrible thirst.
I turned back to the table of contents and perused the items listed under Diseases of the Mind. I remembered Papa saying that Titka Whiskers’s curse had its teeth in his head, too—that it had chewed up all the parts of him that remembered what it felt like to be full.
I flipped to another page of Rose’s compendium, then looked up at Niko and asked, “Do you have water here? Good water?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “From the bathroom down the hall.”