Inside the bolted garden sick room, the air was so thick with trapped charcoal heat and boiled bitter-root vapor that moisture beaded along the cedar ceiling beams and dripped onto the reed floor mats. In the center of the room, propped at a forty-five-degree angle on three damp horsehair bolsters because lying flat made him choke, lay nineteen-year-old Joren.
Two months ago on the winter check dais, Joren had been the picture of an inner-court prodigy. Broad-chested, ruddy-cheeked, wearing a newly stitched silk belt with his fancy Bronze token hanging bright at his hip. Now that same fancy Bronze token hung by a tangled cord from the corner bedpost like a tin toy. Meanwhile, the young man on the mattress looked hollowed out from the ribs inward.
His linen under-robe was soaked dark down the chest bone with yellowish-brown sweat. The whites of his closed eyes were jaundiced with trapped liver-fire. And every third breath in ended in a sharp, double-beat clockwork hitch that shook his collarbones.
Mina knelt at Joren’s right side with her satchel open on the mat, three fingers of her left hand resting with feather-light care along his scorching wrist blood vessel. Meanwhile, her right thumb depressed the skin below his collar bone to check tissue fluid swelling. She didn’t look up at the Bronze token on the bedpost, nor did she waste a breath commenting on the irony that her brother’s taken away herb share had gone to pay for this room.
