DAWN SEIZURE

The scream woke Tamsin at five o'clock in the morning, in the black, bitter hour before the first gray light.

She had been dreaming of the creek. In the dream she stood waist-deep in water that ran clear and cold over the stones, with Jonah laughing on the bank, and the sound that tore through it was so harsh and so alien that for a moment she lay in the darkness of her new room with her heart hammering, unable to remember where she was. Then she heard it again, a thin high keening, followed by a crash of furniture, and she was out of bed with her shawl clutched round her shoulders before she had drawn her next breath.

The suite that the Duke had assigned her in the main wing was small, but it opened directly onto the nursery corridor, and she covered the distance in seconds. The door of the Princess's bedroom stood wide. Lamplight burned within, wild and yellow, and Nurse Crowe's voice was rising in a panicked, tearful babble that she could not make out.

She stopped on the threshold, and every drop of blood in her body turned to ice.

Lila lay on the floor at the foot of the great canopy bed, tangled in her nightdress and a trailing sheet, with her back arched like a bow. Her eyes had rolled up until only the whites showed. Her small limbs jerked and thrashed in rhythmic spasms, her heels drumming on the boards, and a thick froth of white foam bubbled from the corners of her mouth. Her face was the color of candle wax. When Tamsin dropped to her knees and caught the child's wrist, the skin under her fingers was as cold as a stone drawn out of a well.

"It's the fit, miss, it's the nerve fit again," sobbed Nurse Crowe, wringing her hands. "She's had them before, but never like this. Oh, Lord, oh, my poor lamb. Dr. Pell said if it ever came on this bad, she must have her dose at once." She snatched a brown bottle from the bedside table and fumbled at the stopper with shaking fingers. "She needs her dose! If she doesn't have it, she'll die!"

…

Tamsin rose and took two steps toward the nurse.

She did not decide to do it. Something in her, cold and clear and furious, simply moved, as a hand moves to catch a falling glass. She seized the bottle by its neck, wrenched it out of Crowe's grasp, and flung it with all her strength against the opposite wall.

It burst with a crack like a pistol shot. Glass flew in every direction. A dark, oily stain spread over the wallpaper and began to drip down onto the skirting board, and the room filled at once with that bitter metallic smell, ashes and silverweed and cold coin, that she had first noticed on the tiles of the Winter Garden.

"That is what's killing her," said Tamsin.

The nurse stared at her, her mouth open, her brown eyes round with horror.

"Don't touch her. Don't go near that stain." She turned her back and went down on her knees again, gathered the convulsing child into her arms, and laid her flat on the carpet with her head cradled in her lap. "I need quiet, Nurse Crowe, and I need nobody to come in until I say. Do you understand?"

She did not wait for the answer. She pressed her left palm against the Princess's breastbone, over the thin fluttering heart, and set her right hand on the child's forehead. Then she closed her eyes and dove.

…

It was like plunging into a frozen river.

Nothing in the Hollows had prepared her for it. She had healed a hundred burns and fevers and broken bones, and she had held back Jonah's cough for months on end, and she had thought she knew what it was to enter a body. But Lila was not like any body she had known. She was a house with every door barred. Beneath the bright fretful pulse of the heart she felt a vast, locked power, deep and green and old as the roots of a mountain, straining against a thing that held it down. A weight lay on it. A cold, gray, glittering layer of something, like frost on a windowpane, pressed on every vein, every nerve, every pore, and where it touched the green, the green recoiled and shuddered, as though in pain.

Quicksilver, she thought. Silverweed and quicksilver. They've been laying it over her like a lid on a pot.

The power was waking. She could feel it. For years it had slept, soothed and drugged into obedience, and now it was rising, in answer to the Conservatory and the Row, to the song and the laughter and the soil beneath her fingernails. It was rising against the weight, and the weight was crushing it back, and the child's whole frail body had become the battlefield. The spasms were not an illness. They were the sound of a door being broken from both sides at once.

Let it through, she begged, in the wordless language of the green. Let it through, little one. I'll hold the lid.

She gave everything she had.

The warmth poured out of her in a flood, farther and faster than she had ever allowed it, down her arms and out through her palms. She felt it burn along her veins. She felt the light climb past her wrists, bright green and veined with gold, and spread through the sleeves of her nightdress and up the sides of her throat, so brilliant that the whole bedroom was drowned in a pale shimmering radiance, and every shadow in the room leaned away. She felt the gray frost crack and begin to melt. She felt Lila's heart stumble, steady, and catch a deeper rhythm.

Behind her, somebody drew a breath so sharply that it sounded like a sob.

Under her hands, Lila's back relaxed. The jerking stopped. The foam ceased to well at her lips, and the stiffened limbs went slack, one by one, as a clenched fist slowly opens. The terrible whites of her eyes rolled down, and a pair of pale golden irises slid into view, dazed and bewildered, and blinked up at Tamsin out of a face that was already beginning to pink.

"Miss Reed, I had such a strange dream," whispered Lila. "The roots were so loud."

"I know, my darling." Tamsin's own voice was thin and cracked. A hot thread of blood ran over her lip and dripped from her chin onto the Princess's nightdress, bright against the white. "It's finished now. You are perfectly all right."

…

The door slammed.

It was not an accident. It was a deliberate, heavy, final sound, the closing of a door by someone who wished to be quite sure that it stayed closed, and Tamsin raised her head to see Soren Aldridge standing just inside the room with his hand on the key.

He was in his shirtsleeves, with his collar open and his black hair wildly disordered, and he looked as though he had run the length of the east wing. Behind him stood Dorian, who had drawn his sword and now held it forgotten at his side, with his mouth slightly open. They must have heard the crash from the end of the corridor. They had come in just in time to see the whole of it: the child on the floor, the broken bottle, the pale green fire still fading along Tamsin's arms and throat, the glimmering threads of root-pattern that ran beneath her skin from her wrists to her collarbone. She could not have concealed it if she had tried.

For a long moment no one spoke.

Soren turned the key in the lock. The click rang through the room like a gunshot. He drew it from the keyhole, put it in his pocket, and crossed the carpet to where they knelt, and his face, in the light of the single lamp, was as white as paper.

"Is she alive?" he said, and his voice cracked in the middle of it.

"She is alive." Tamsin could hardly hold up her head. "She is breathing on her own, and the seizure has passed."

He dropped to his knees beside his sister. His hands, one gloved and one bare, hovered over her face for a moment without touching, shaking visibly. Lila blinked up at him in sleepy confusion. "Soren," she said, in her small clear voice. "Don't be cross with Miss Reed. She was singing to the roots."

He bent his head so low that his forehead nearly touched hers. His shoulders shook once, hard, and then went still.

…

Nurse Crowe fell to her knees.

She did it abruptly, like a puppet whose strings had been cut, in the middle of the floor with her hands pressed to her face, and the sound that came out of her was a thin, broken wail that was nothing at all like the stout, bustling nurse of the past weeks. Her cap had fallen off. Her gray braid had come undone, and her shoulders were heaving.

"I'm sorry," she gasped. "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I never meant her harm, I swear before God I never did. The Chancellor's physician ordered it. He said it was for her nerves, he said she'd die without it, and I was told, I was told if I breathed a word..." She dragged her hands from her face, and her eyes were swollen and red. "I put the note under your door, miss. I tried to warn you, I tried to make you go. I didn't know what else to do."

"The note," said Tamsin slowly. "Leave before the first frost."

"I thought if you left, they'd only send another, and she'd be no worse off." Crowe's face crumpled. "But you didn't leave. You stayed, and you sang, and you made her laugh, and I've watched it for a month and I thought, God forgive me, that perhaps there was a chance." She pressed her knuckles to her mouth. "I cannot stay in this house a moment longer, because they will kill me."

She scrambled up and tore at the door handle, found it locked, and turned a stricken face toward the Duke. He drew the key from his pocket without a word and tossed it to Dorian, who opened the door. The nurse fled out into the corridor, and her sobbing receded rapidly down the passage and was gone.

"Shall I go after her?" said Dorian.

"Do not follow her." Soren had not looked up. "Let her go. She will not get far, and we will need her later. Fetch Dr. Pell. Tell him that the Princess has had a seizure, and that I require him at once."

Dorian saluted, with an air of grim anticipation, and went out.

…

Dr. Mortimer Pell arrived within ten minutes, in a dressing gown thrown hastily over his nightshirt, with a black bag in one hand and his scanty gray hair standing on end. He was a plump, pink, soft-voiced man of sixty with small bright eyes and a mouth like a purse, and he swept into the room with the brisk authority of a physician who has never been contradicted. His gaze flickered across the shattered glass, the dark stain on the wall, the Princess lying wrapped in a blanket in her brother's arms, and Tamsin, who sat on the floor with her back against the bed, with blood on her chin and her eyes closed.

"Your Grace, this is most irregular," he said. "I must insist that the child be placed in bed at once. She has been exposed to a considerable shock. And that bottle, good heavens, that was her prescribed tonic. You have no idea how dangerous it is to interrupt a course of treatment. Without her regular dose, the nervous system is liable to a catastrophic collapse."

"A catastrophic collapse," said Tamsin, opening her eyes. "That is an interesting way of describing what I have just prevented."

Pell's small eyes shifted toward her, and a faint curl of distaste touched his mouth. "Miss Reed, I'm afraid this is a matter for a qualified physician, not for a tutor with a rudimentary education and a talent for meddling. The tonic is the Princess's lifeline. It is a carefully calibrated preparation of silverweed, designed to regulate the excitability of the nerves. Without it, as you have seen for yourself, she is subject to violent seizures."

"She is subject to violent seizures with it." Tamsin got slowly to her feet, steadying herself against the bedpost. Her voice shook with exhaustion, but it was perfectly clear. "Silverweed is a mild sedative at best, Doctor. The standard dose for an adult is one drachm of the dried leaf in a pint of infusion. What she has been given three times a day is a concentrated extract with a mercury compound in suspension. I can smell the quicksilver from here."

"That is absurd..."

"The third edition of the Pharmacopoeia of the Hollows, page two hundred and twelve, gives the signs of chronic mercurial poisoning in a child. Tremor, pallor, cold extremities, recurrent fits, and a sudden failure of the nerves in response to any strong emotion." She took a step toward him. "It also describes the effect of silverweed taken with quicksilver on a certain class of patients, which the older physicians called the damping of the sap, and which was used for centuries in the Quarantine Wards to subdue the Blighted. You are an educated man. I am sure you have read it."

The room went very still. Dr. Pell's face had drained of color, so that the pink was left in blotches high on each cheek. His mouth opened, shut, and opened again. He glanced at the Duke, whose gold eyes had narrowed to slits, and then at the dark stain on the wall, and his lips worked soundlessly.

"The Chancellor," he said faintly, "has complete confidence in my methods."

"I am sure that he has," said Soren.

He rose with the Princess in his arms. He did it slowly, and when he stood upright, he seemed to fill the room. In the lamplight his face was a mask of frozen gold, and his voice, when it came, was so quiet and so level that Tamsin felt the hair rise on her arms.

"Dr. Pell, you will leave this room. You will not speak to the Chancellor, or to anyone in this household, about what has passed here this morning. Captain Pike will escort you to your chambers and will remain outside your door until I send for you." He did not raise his voice at all. "If any further dose of that preparation is administered to my sister by any hand, I will hold you personally responsible, and I think you will find that I am a far less patient man than I seem."

The doctor went, with Dorian at his elbow, and he did not look back. The door closed on his stumbling footsteps.

…

Silence settled over the nursery, slow and heavy as snow.

Soren laid Lila on her bed and tucked the quilt carefully around her. The Princess was already half asleep, with one hand curled loosely under her chin, and the color had returned to her cheeks. He stood looking down at her for some time. Then he turned, and Tamsin met his eyes across the width of the room.

She had never seen him look like this. All the cold and polish had been stripped from his face, and what was left was terrible in its nakedness, a grief and rage so huge that it seemed to have no bottom. His left hand was clenched at his side. His chest rose and fell. He was looking at her as though she were the only fixed point in a world that had begun to spin.

"Tell me," he said hoarsely. "Tell me everything."

Tamsin pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, felt the dried blood crack under her knuckles, and lowered it again. She was so tired that the room swayed. She thought of the gray frost lying over the green, of the locked doors, of the Chancellor's stamp on a clerk's endorsement, and of the child's thin voice murmuring, the roots were so loud.

"I don't know what's wrong with her yet," she said quietly. "I can't tell you the whole of it, not tonight. But someone has been hurting your sister for years, Soren, and they have done it with a spoon."