Book One – Chapter 18

“These are the potions in storage,” the shaman said, opening one cupboard. “Those most commonly used.”

Her voice was steady and instructive. Patience lingered in her tone. Yet underneath, Yu felt the same splinters that he had heard when she had first spoken to him. They were almost perfectly cut, and almost perfectly aligned; those distorted fractures of sounds that should have long fallen apart, and yet they formed all of her almost perfect words.

The shaman’s fingers moved with deliberate care as she revealed the potions within the cupboard. There were rows of different vessels, some of clay darkened with age, others of glass faintly tinted by the light. Many were corked and stained, a few still sealed in wax. All of them were labelled. Some had writing in Teh, others in a script Yu could not read. Though, even the Teh failed him. The strokes slipped as he looked, their edges refusing to take shape. He blinked, but they would not return to place. The letters swam like insects across water, scattering when he tried to pin them. There was no magic behind it, no trick. Yu simply could not hold his gaze. He could not focus. Or rather, all of his focus was on his hearing. Not on the bottles in front, but on the shaman’s body right next to him. On the maw. Yu strained to hear the maw. Her voice did not come from there. It came only from beneath her mask. The maw did not move. It was still. For now. Yu strained for the silence from within. For the first betrayal; the ripple of it unsealing, the tear of wet flesh parting.

“This one, Bermillion,” the shaman lifted a squat bottle of clouded liquid, “to clean and close shallow wounds. Not for broken or frozen flesh. Not for bone.”

Yu stared in the general direction of the bottle. The glass shifted at the edges.

She set it down and lifted another.

“This, tona bark syrup. To lower fever and to still the restlessness of the body. It is highly concentrated. A fina child, a mianid, even a selder would take only a single drop on the tongue. More, and the heart slows.”

Yu’s talons scraped the stone.