“I thought I’d find you here.” Lin looked up, shielding her eyes with one hand, to see Chana Dorin looming over her. She wore her usual frayed gray dress, a colorful apron tied around her waist. “I suppose you need to use the kitchen?”
Lin tucked her handful of foxglove leaves into her satchel and rose to her feet. Most physicians in the Sault simply placed orders with the Physicians’ House for the compounds they needed. Lin had discovered early that her requests were often seen to last, or ignored entirely, leaving her short of medicine. Chana had offered to let her use the kitchen in the Etse Kebeth, the largest in the Sault, to compound her own medicines.
Though she had been angry at first—most physicians did not have to also be their own apothecaries—Lin had discovered an advantage to her situation. It allowed her to experiment, to mix various ingredients together as she tried to create new medicines to treat Mariam. She often thought longingly of what it would be like to have her own laboratory, as the students at the Academie did—but that was impossible. The kitchen would need to do for now.
“I do,” Lin said. “I found a reference to an old Hindish compound for treating lung inflammation—”
Chana held up a hand. “No need to explain yourself.” She squinted against the sun. “The Goddess Festival is a month away.”
Lin raised her eyebrows. It was not like Chana to make idle observations. “Yes?”
“I hoped you would help me make the sachets for the girls.” The sachets were small bags of herbs, worn around the neck of those women young enough to be considered as potential vessels for the Goddess. The herbs were for love and luck. Silliness, in Lin’s opinion.
“Chana, I’m so busy already—”
Chana held up a hand. “Lin, you know perfectly well everyone in the Sault is meant to assist in preparing for the Tevath.”
“Not the physicians,” Lin said, though she knew many of them did, regardless. The Festival of the Goddess, called the Tevath, was the most important holiday of the year in the Sault. The Ashkar gathered in the Kathot, where the Maharam would recite the story of the Goddess, and of lost Aram. How Queen Adassa snatched life for her people from the jaws of defeat. How she saved for them the magic of gematry, so they could make their amulets and talismans. How she had promised she would one day return in the form of an Ashkari girl.
When she was younger, Lin had loved the Festival, as had Mariam. It was a chance to dress up, to be seen as special for a day—as any girl, and only a girl, might be the Goddess Returned. It was an opportunity to dance—the graceful dance taught to every Ashkari girl, performed only at the Festival. The Kathot would be alight with lanterns, magical as a forest from a Story-Spinner tale, and there would be laughter and wine, music and loukoum, honey cake and flirting.
Now, though, it was a reminder that the majority of the Sault looked at her as if she were peculiar. “But why would you want to be a physician?” was the question she heard most often from dancing partners. And the question under the question: Was she still planning on having a family? How could she be a physician and also raise children? Of course she was odd, they would murmur when they thought she couldn’t hear them. Terrible what had happened to her parents, but there must have been some reason Mayesh Bensimon hadn’t wanted to take the children in. Something wrong with them, perhaps; the girl at least had turned out awfully peculiar.
Lin sighed. “Chana, I wasn’t planning on going.”
“I knew it.” Chana pounced on this information like a pigeon on a breadcrumb. “Lin, that just won’t do. It’s the most important Festival of the year, and the last time you and Mariam will be eligible. The Sault is your home. You cannot withdraw from your people.”
They are the ones who have withdrawn from me. It was more than that, though. When Lin was young, she had always tensed during the part of the Festival when the Maharam spoke the words in the Old Language, words meant to call forth the Goddess. If you are among us, Adassa, show yourself.
She could not recall the moment when she realized that no one truly expected the Goddess to return. That the hush of expectation was only in her own heart. The Festival was in truth a marriage market, parading girls in their finest clothes past unmarried young men in the hope matches would be made.
“Besides,” Chana added, “Mariam has already started working on your dress.”
Lin felt a pang of guilt. She had forgotten to tell Mariam she wasn’t going—well, to be truthful, she’d been avoiding the issue. “I’m trying to get Mariam well,” she said, “which is more important.”
“I am not sure Mariam would agree with you,” Chana said. “She assumes you’re going. She’s even asked me if I think Josit might be back with the caravans by then.”
Josit. Mariam had come to see him off, months ago, when he’d departed with the Rhadanites for Hind. Lin recalled him leaning down from the waggon, tucking a curl of hair behind Mariam’s ear. Mariam smiling up at him. Telling him to bring her back fine cotton in every shade of blue. The way the smile had slipped from her face as the caravan disappeared through the gates. Lin had known what Mariam was thinking: Was this the last time she would ever see Josit?
“Don’t try to make me feel guilty about Mariam, Chana,” Lin said, wretched. “I’m working night and day trying to find a cure for her. That’s more important than a dress.”
Chana put her fists on her hips. “That’s the trouble with you, Lin. You’ve stopped seeing Mariam as your friend, your sister. You see her only as a patient. If there was one thing I learned from losing Irit, it is that our loved ones need more from us than doctoring. There are other physicians. Mariam needs her friend.”
The words cut, not least because Chana spoke of Irit so rarely. Lin had often wondered if Chana would seek love again, but she did not seem inclined to it. “Has she said that to you?”
“I know the Festival is important to her. I know she has been tirelessly working on dresses for a dozen girls, and a special one for you. All her energy and thought are going toward it. I know she worries this might be the last Festival she ever sees.”
“But don’t you see?” Lin cried. “Doesn’t that mean I should work even harder on a cure, a treatment?”
“I’m not saying you should stop trying to heal her.” Chana’s voice gentled. “But the mind and the spirit need care, as well as the body. It is good for Mariam to have something she is looking forward to. But if you do not go—” Chana shook her head. “Be her friend, not her healer, for a night. She will be so much happier if you are there.”
And with that, Chana turned on her heel and strode from the garden, her bearing as regal as any noble’s. Lin sat, feeling miserable, in the shadow of the dwarf mulberry tree. She knew what she ought to do: She ought to ask Mariam what she wanted.
Only she was frightened of the answer. What if Mariam wanted Lin to stop searching for a cure? What if she wanted to be left to die in her own time? Lin didn’t think she could bear that. Lin’s hand tightened at her side; she winced, and realized she was holding Petrov’s stone. She did not remember having taken it from her pocket, but there it was, cradled in her palm, the shape and feel of it peculiarly calming.