“So now you notice,” was all Chana said.
“Isn’t there something you could give her?” Lin had demanded. “Some kind of medicine?”
Chana had sat back on her heels, her patched skirt spreading around her in the dirt. “Don’t you imagine I’ve tried everything?” she snapped. “If the physicians could help her, Lin, they would.”
Something about her tone made Lin realize that Chana was angry because she, too, felt impotent, powerless to help the girl in her care. Whatever had killed Mariam’s father, it seemed, was going to kill her, too, unless someone did something about it.
Lin decided that someone would have to be her. She had gone to Chana and told her that she wanted to study healing. The boys her age who planned to be physicians had already begun their training. She would need to catch up if she was to learn everything there was to know about medicine and cure Mariam.
“Please,” Mariam said now, snapping her out of her reverie. “You look half dead from tiredness. Go take a nap. I’ll be fine, Linnet.”
Hardly anyone ever called Lin by her full name. When Mariam did, though, it sounded like family in Lin’s ears. A mother’s sternness, a sister’s exasperation. She touched Mariam’s thin cheek. “I’m not tired.”
“Well, I am,” Mariam said. “But I can’t settle. Some hot milk and honey—”
“Of course. I’ll get it.” Lin set the old book down on the nightstand and headed to the kitchen. She was already thinking about what else she could put in the milk that would be covered by the flavor of honey. Her mind ticked through remedies for inflammation. Pine bark, frankincense, cat’s claw—
“How is she?” Chana’s voice brought Lin out of her reverie. The older woman was seated at Lin’s scrubbed pinewood table with a mug of karak. Her iron-gray hair hung long and straight about her shoulders; her dark eyes, set in a nest of fine, raying wrinkles, were sharp as needle tips.
Several pots were boiling away on the stove behind her. Like most houses in the Sault, Lin’s had a single main room that combined the functions of sitting room, dining room, and kitchen. All houses in the Sault were small—square, whitewashed boxes, a function of the limited space within the walls.
Inside, Lin had done what she could to make the space hers, using items Josit brought back from the Gold Roads on his infrequent visits. A painted mirror from Hanse, wooden toys from Detmarch, a chunk of striped marble from Sarthe, a celadon horse from Geumjoseon. The curtains were Hindish fabric, a fine linen with a multicolored woven border. Lin did not like to think of her brother out on the Roads, but the fever for traveling had been in his blood since he was born. She had learned to accept his absences, his wandering, the way you accepted things you had no choice about.
She turned back now to glance into his room. She was not surprised to see Mariam already asleep, her arm flung across her face. She closed the door quietly and came to sit with Chana at the table.
“She’s dying,” Lin said. The words tasted as bitter as failure. “Not quickly, but she’s dying.”
Chana got up from the table and went into the kitchen. Lin stared unseeingly ahead as Chana clanked about with the kettle.
“I’ve tried everything,” Lin said. “Every talisman, every tisane, every remedy in every book I could find. She was better for a while—a long while. But now nothing is working.”
Chana returned to the table with a dented mug of steaming tea. She pushed it across the scrubbed wood toward Lin before folding her hands—big, capable hands, strong looking, with knobbed knuckles. But Lin knew those hands were capable of incredibly delicate gematry work; Chana Dorin made the best talismans in the Sault.
“Do you remember?” Chana asked, watching as Lin took a sip of the hot liquid. It burned a pathway into her stomach that reminded her how long it had been since she’d eaten. “When I first brought you to the Maharam and told him he must allow you to study medicine?”
Lin nodded. It had been the first time she had been inside the Shulamat. Every Sault had its heart: the Kathot, its main square, and in the Kathot, the Shulamat. A combination of temple, library, and courthouse, the Shulamat was where the Maharam presided over religious ceremonies and heard small cases brought before him: a dispute between two neighbors, perhaps, or an argument among scholars over the interpretation of a passage in the Book of Makabi.
She had always thought the Shulamat was the most beautiful building in the Sault by far, with a domed roof covered in shimmering blue tesserae and walls of creamy marble. One could see the roof even from outside the gates, like a piece of sky fallen to earth.
Lin could remember how small she had felt climbing the stairs of the Shulamat. How tightly she had held Chana Dorin’s hand as they passed through, and how her heart had soared once they stood in the main room, beneath the inverted bowl of the golden dome. Here the mosaic-work stunned with its beauty. The floor was tiled in patterns of green vines and fat red pomegranates; the walls were deep blue, against which patterns of stars were picked out in golden tesserae—the constellations as seen from Aram, she would learn years later. A great chest of silver held the hand-copied scrolls of the Book of Makabi; a thick cloth of gold draped the Almenor, the great altar. Woven into the cloth were the words of the first Great Question, the same words etched into the charm around Lin’s throat:
How shall we sing our Lady’s song in a strange land?
On a raised dais beneath the dome sat the Maharam. He had been younger then, though to Lin he had always seemed old. His beard and hair were pure white, his pale hands swollen at the joints. His shoulders were bent beneath his dark-blue sillon, the ceremonial robe of the Ashkar. Around his neck gleamed a large circular pendant that bore the Lady’s Prayer. The Book of Makabi instructed all Ashkar to bear some version of the Prayer with them wherever they went: Some embroidered it into their clothes, while many others preferred to wear the words as a charm: a bracelet or a pendant. Something that kept it always close to their skin.
The Maharam had greeted Chana Dorin with an expression of sympathy for the recent death of her wife, Irit, which Chana waved away with her usual stubborn refusal to hear anything that smacked to her of pity. It seemed clear the Maharam had known Chana was coming and even what she would ask, though he heard her out patiently enough. Lin’s ears burned as Chana told him how clever she was, how quick-minded, and what a ready student of medicine she would make. She had not been so praised in years.
When she was done, the Maharam had sighed. “I do not believe it is a good idea, Chana.”
Chana stuck her jaw out. “I don’t see why not. The Goddess was a woman, before she ascended. She was also a healer.”
“That was in the time before the Sundering,” the Maharam had said. “We had magic then, and Aram, and freedom. Now we are without a home, guests in the city of Castellane. And not always welcome guests.” His gaze came to rest on Lin. “If you were a physician, my girl, you would have to traverse this city alone, often at night. And men of the malbushim are not like men in the Sault. They are not bound to respect you.”
“I can protect myself,” Lin had said. “All the boys in the Dāsu Kebeth are afraid of me.”