about potions. She loved Anluan, but perhaps she hated him too; hated him for loving me, hated him for changing everything on the hill. Maybe she hadn’t cared which of us drank first. “Hurry,” I said, but Rioghan was already gone.
“Caitrin.” Eichri spoke quietly. “If it’s the same thing Irial took, we don’t have very long. An hour, maybe. We can’t wait for Muirne, even if you’re right.” I heard in his voice that he could not believe Muirne would turn on the object of her lifelong devotion. “We must do something now or we’ll lose him while they’re still trying to find her.”
“Irial,” I said, as a new idea came to me. If Muirne was prepared to kill her beloved Anluan out of jealousy, might she not have done the same thing to Irial, to whom it seemed she had been as devoted a companion? “Irial would have known the antidote. He wrote notes on everything he discovered; he’ll have recorded every plant that grew on the Tor, I’m sure of it. It will be in one of those little books. He’ll have written down the symptoms, every detail—we need to find the poison first, and he should have noted the antidote underneath.” An hour. A little less than an hour.And I was the only one in the house who could read, apart from
I took Anluan’s limp hand and brought it to my lips. He seemed already gone, but I had felt the blood still moving in his veins, weakly; I had felt the halting heartbeat. To release his hand and walk away was a little death. “I’m going to the library,” I said over my shoulder. “I need a safe lantern and a man to guard each door. If anyone finds Muirne, I want to see her straightaway. Gearrog, don’t let her anywhere near Anluan.”
I ran across the courtyard in my bare feet, with Gearrog’s cloak slung over the borrowed shirt.The news was spreading fast. By the time I reached Irial’s garden, folk of the host and folk from the settlement were gathering in huddled groups, faces somber. Cathair came running into Irial’s garden before I entered the house, a lantern in one hand, a long dagger in the other.
“I’ll take this door, my lady. Broc’s on the other, with the dog. Let me open up for you.” He pushed the library door and it swung open; the inner bolt had not been fastened. “Where do you want this light?”
“On the shelf, here in the corner. If Muirne comes into the garden, call me straightaway. She has the answer, I’m certain of it.”
“Muirne?” Cathair sounded less dubious than Eichri. “She did come in here a lot, while you were gone. Dusted shelves. Moved things about. Looked at the books.”
My heart was as cold as the grave. I swept an armful of Irial’s notebooks from their shelf and set them on a nearby table. Fumbling in my haste, I began to turn pages, not taking time to read anything fully, for there was no time—
One book, two books, three . . . There were poisons here, but not the one I wanted. There was blue-gray, but that was only the description of a leaf. My hands were sweating with fear; my body was clammy. My heart was knocking about in my breast. My stomach had tied itself in knots. Irial’s spidery writing blurred before my eyes. Five books, seven, nine . . .
“Any good?” Cathair had stepped inside the door.When I glanced up, pain lanced through my neck. I had barely moved for . . . how long? Too long.
“I can’t find it!” My voice cracked. “I can’t find anything! And it’s not just finding it, it’s making the cure and giving it to him, and I’m running out of time!” I seized another book, started to flick through the pages, knew I was close to losing the ability to understand the words before me.
“My lady,” Cathair said, his tone diffident, “they’re saying you think Muirne did this. Gave Lord Anluan the poison.”
“That’s what I think, yes.That she can read.That she knows plants and their uses.That she gave it to him, and that she’s hiding so I can’t make her tell me the antidote before he dies.” Herb of grace; comfrey; wormwood. Meadowsweet, mugwort, thyme. This was useless, useless. I should go back and hold him, cradle him. At least I would be there to say goodbye.
“It’s just that . . .” Cathair hesitated.
“Go on.”
“If it’s her, Muirne, you might want to look in the stillroom—you know, that little place next to the garden wall. That’s where she goes at night. Irial used to do his work in there, his brewing and concoction. Since he died, nobody’s gone in; nobody but her.And she loves those little books, the ones you have there.Those are the ones she looks at when she comes to the library. Holds them against her heart as if they were children.”
I was out in Irial’s garden before he had finished speaking.The door to the low stone outbuilding was bolted, as always.That would be no barrier to Muirne. She could probably walk through walls. “I need you to open this for me,” I said. “Quickly. And I need you to help me search. It’ll be a small book like those others.” Irial’s sad margin notes had been numbered up to five hundred and ninety-four. But he had outlived his wife by two years, and that was more than seven hundred days. Unless he had stopped writing them, unless he had lost the will to write at all, somewhere there was another journal.
Cathair set his boot to the stillroom door. The timbers parted, the chain fell loose, the bolt came tumbling out of the stone wall. I peered into the dim interior.“Hold up the lantern,” I said, stepping inside.There was a wrong feeling about the place, something I could not quite identify. I had expected old, musty things, tools stored and forgotten or the crumbling remnants of Irial’s long-ago botanical work. But the stillroom was perfectly tidy. A millet broom stood in a corner; a duster hung on a wall. Candles were ranked on a shelf. There was a workbench with crucibles and jars, some holding objects I could not identify.A mortar and pestle stood beside a rack of knives and other implements that gleamed darkly in the lantern light. Bunches of herbs hung from the roof. At one end of the immaculate room was a pallet, and on it lay a small lidded box.
No books in sight. “She must have it here somewhere,” I muttered. “Look everywhere, Cathair. It’s here, I know it. Here but hidden.” I grabbed the blanket that lay bunched at the end of the pallet, the only untidy note in the whole room. I shook it out; nothing there. I reached down the back of the bed. Nothing at all. I crouched to look underneath, while Cathair worked his way along the shelves, picking things up and setting them down. A bundle of rags lay on the floor, under the bed; I drew them out. Familiar somehow, but what were they?
“Baby!” The little voice spoke from the doorway, and a moment later the ghost girl was crouched beside me, gathering up the pathetic heap, trying to hold the pieces together, pieces that were white, like Roise’s face, and violet, like the little veil I had made to cover the doll’s ruined hair, and brown, like the skirt that had been shredded and destroyed in the quiet of my bedchamber. Threads of woollen hair; tattered fragments of a smiling mouth embroidered with love.The child stood clutching her violated treasure to her breast. “All right now, baby,” she whispered.
