Cringing, I knelt beside the bed.
The smell was so much worse up close. I could taste the foul air. It coated my mouth and left an unpleasant funk on my tongue. I looked to Merrick. “So I just…”
I fluttered my hands restlessly over Reynard’s face, unsure of exactly where to touch, uncertain of how much pressure to use.
With care, Merrick put his fingers atop mine, guiding them to the man’s cheeks. He held them in place for a moment before stepping aside to let me experience the full weight of his gift.
I couldn’t help my gasp.
“What do you see?” he whispered, pleased.
“It…it’s so beautiful,” I murmured.
Sprouting out of the farmer’s chest, there but not, were stalks of grain. They looked like the line drawings in my botany books, and the rendering shimmered and shone with an otherworldly sparkle, a holy glow that reminded me of Félicité’s pink starlight. The stalks swayed back and forth, dancing in a flickering light that reminded me of a bonfire. This was the cure needed to heal this man—shining forth like a beacon in the night. I didn’t understand it yet, how grain would help the farmer, but the answer would come, I was certainofit.
“Will it always look so wondrous?” I whispered.
I felt awestruck, weighted with a power most divine. I reached out to caress the image, but the moment I withdrew my fingers from the man’s face, it faded away.
“It will,” Merrick answered. “Exactly like that. On every patient who can be saved.”
I turned toward him, tearing my eyes from the farmer as I heard the words he hadn’t said. “What will happen when I come across someone who can’t?”
Silence spread between us, filling the room.
Merrick shook his head. “Save who you need to save today, and worry about those walking with death tomorrow. Do you know what this man needs? Here and now?” I shook my head. “Then look again,” he encouraged.
I cupped the farmer’s face once more. “I see stalks of grain. They’re waving in the breeze.” I glanced to my godfather. “There’s that field of rye we walked through….”
Merrick said nothing but watched me closely.
I frowned. The answer was close, so close I should have beenable to grab it, but it eluded me. I looked back at the shimmering stalks. “Something…something looks wrong with them,” I realized.
Poking from the stalks’ spikes were dark growths. They jutted out like the stamens of flowers, going against the orderly lay of the florets. The flickering light surrounded the wheat, consuming it until there was nothing left but a whisper of ash.
“What is it?” I murmured, asking myself more than Merrick. It felt familiar to me, something I’d once read or…
No.
The memory came to me in a rush. Back in Rouxbouillet there’d been a farmer’s wife who’d come to market, trying to sell flour at a steep discount. Mama, always looking for a cheap way to feed her burgeoning household, had wanted to buy as much of it as she could, but Papa had stopped her.
“Haven’t you heard, you idiot woman?” he’d hissed, slapping at her hands as she’d tried to pay. “The Duvals’ fields were too damp this year. That flour is contaminated with mold. Are you trying to kill us all?”
Without a word to Merrick, I stood up and raced out of the room, following my hunch. I ran past the bottles of rye spirits, past the rye bread festering in the kitchen, and out to the field we’d seen earlier.
As I ran, I ticked through every one of the man’s symptoms: Nausea. Convulsions. Stomach cramps and diarrhea. A prickling, burning sensation in the feet and hands, caused by a dying circulatory system. Gangrene. Hallucinations.
“Ergot poisoning,” I whispered with triumph, stopping in the middle of the rye field. Purple tubular growths hung off nearly everybit of grain I could see. I could feel Merrick’s approach, and I turned to him, my face bright with understanding and pride. “It’s ergot poisoning! He’s been ingesting contaminated rye.”
I felt breathless and giddy as my godfather smiled at me, approval coloring his expression.
“It’s too late to save his toes, but I know how to treat the other symptoms.”
Merrick nodded. “And then?”
I let out a deep breath, remembering the flickering flames that had consumed my vision. The cure. “And then we burn the field.”
Chapter 15
