This ritual was repeated every day for weeks to come, the old man having quickly realized her benevolent intent; and it soon proved so effective that he was able to turn his attention to the task of locating wild ingredients that might be blended into a remedy more powerful than cold water. With his well-practiced eye, he had immediately noted severaclass="underline" mountain hops, the bitter juices of wild fruits, willow bark, flowers and roots that often proved poisonous, in other men’s less educated hands, and those same limitless sources of honey; all these did he gather, in order to produce medicines that would not only reduce pain, but prevent festering and control fever.† Eventually, this humble regimen — in the forms of both poultices and infusions — would bring the old man back to something that resembled, if not his former self, at least a welcome companion, and even a watchman when she slumbered through the daylight hours. This duty would prove especially important, the old man knew, should the rulers of Broken ever discover, not only that he had survived the ordeal of the Halap-stahla, but that he had taken up residence in her cave, and that the two now had what the priests of Kafra would have denounced as an “unholy alliance,” a demoniacal threat whose whole was more dangerous than the sum of its brutalized parts.
Yet there seemed little chance of such discovery: no Broken cartographers, and only a few Bane, had ever reached the remote mountains that were now home to the old man and his protector. His anxiousness relieved by this knowledge, and his wounds in the last stages of closing (his poultices, medicines, and cotton bandages, boiled first in stone and then iron cauldrons, having done their work), the old man soon cleared and established a garden outside the cave. Here, he cultivated the wild plants and herbs that he collected along the ridgeline; and the collections of dried medicinal flowers, roots, barks, and leaves that he amassed in the cave, along with the generally pleasing stenches of the various concoctions that he created from them, indicated even to his companion that he was not only returning to something like full health, but was also imagining a new way of life for the pair, the details of which she could not guess at, but the effects of which she soon learned to appreciate fully:
It came to pass, one evening, that she had difficulty tracking a stag that she had wounded; and that, when she finally did find the creature, the proud beast managed to pierce the skin of her chest with the point of an antler before she finished him. When she returned with the carcass, the old man proved more interested in the wound than the meat, releasing exclamations of concern in one of the several languages that he was prone to speak, none of which were entirely comprehensible to her, and at least one of which she suspected of being sheer gibberish, so guttural were its sounds.† From out of his now-thriving garden, as well as from his stores of prepared ingredients, the old man produced newly blended medicines, balms that had seemed strange and disturbing, to her — until they reduced the pain and sped the healing of her wound.
To the old man, of course, such cures were comparatively rudimentary, especially in comparison to what he might have achieved, were he in possession of his proper instruments, as well as the far more potent ingredients that he had been accustomed to cultivating in and harvesting from his storied garden in the Inner City of Broken, where he grew strange and precious plants brought by foreign traders. But in order for him to proceed past such rudimentary preparations and aspire to the creation of what he was certain would be dramatically new treatments — medicines that would blend the forest remedies of which he had learned during his exile with those he had grown and formulated in Broken — he would need to create a new sort of laboratorium‡ in the cave, one that would be unlike anything that any scholar, even in Alexandria, had ever seen or imagined.
He would require his instruments, and plant seeds and cuttings, of course, along with his vials of tinctures and jars of crystals, minerals, and drugs, all of which, he was certain, remained in his former sanctum high in the tower of Broken’s royal palace. The God-King Izairn, whose life the old man had more than once saved and extended, had not only raised the foreign-born healer to the rank of Second Minister, but had given him leave to come and go as he pleased from the Inner City through those hidden passageways formerly known only to the priests and priestesses of Kafra, as well as rooms in which to live and work, grounds in which to grow his garden, and his two royal children to tutor. Surely Izairn’s son, Saylal, when he was persuaded by his own jealous Grand Layzin and the then-newly-invested Merchant Lord that his father’s Second Minister sought supreme power for himself and ought to be ritually banished to the Wood, had been clever enough to realize that he must preserve the “sorcerer’s” materials and books, and had ordered the accused traitor’s acolytes to gain mastery over those countless ingredients and concoctions, rather than disposing of it all. And if the minister’s acolytes had complied, then the things that the old man needed to create his forest laboratorium were yet, if plants, still being cultivated, and, if devices, being kept in good working order. But how to secure them?
III:
Their Separate Torments, Their Consolation Together
There was but one way:
Although the old man’s most trusted students had not reached the edge of Davon Wood on the evening of the Halap-stahla before he had received salvation from an entirely unexpected quarter, he had many good reasons — rooted in years of loyal service — to believe that they had eventually arrived: after all, during the affront to justice that the Kafrans had called his trial, the old man had never so much as hinted that they were complicit in his activities. He even insisted that he had carried out his “sorcerous” experiments without the assistance of the first among his followers, the man known in Broken as Visimar. (And, although this had been a far more difficult claim to uphold, uphold it the old man did.)
And yet, in the event, the acolytes had apparently been unable to repay the old man’s protection by coming to the Wood as soon as the members of the ritual party were well on their way back to the gates of Broken. If they had simply been delayed by caution, as the old man believed, they must have conjectured, on their eventual arrival, that their master had somehow frustrated the desires of the Grand Layzin, the temple priests, and Kafra himself by surviving the Halap-stahla without them. And, if they had so conjectured, then the old man might now allow himself to hope that, if he could somehow contact them, they might be all the more willing to bring many of the things that he required out of the Inner City and the metropolis and down the mountain to the edge of Davon Wood. But how to get word to them?
It was a measure of the old man’s essential decency that he finally decided that, where once he would have employed only guile, now he would attempt trust — not in the power of his own mind, but, rather, in the loyalty, first, of his companion, and, then, of those young people who had sworn allegiance to him. Yet the risks of these gambles paled in comparison to the last exercise in trust he would have to undertake: he would be forced to hazard the return of those instruments, medicines, and plants that he had left behind in Broken, as well as the safe obscurity of the far more precious life he had made for himself with his warrior queen, on the integrity of the tribe of exiles that he knew lived far to the northeast of the cave that was now his home.