Painstakingly, Illya scratched each shape into the mud that covered the wall beside his bed with a sharp twig.
His letters came out wobbly and large, very different than the neat little shapes on the page. Some of them seemed to just be bigger versions of the same thing. He put the big C under the smaller one, and the same with M, U, and O. Then he decided to take the big ones away from his list altogether, guessing that all of them were bigger versions of the others, even though they weren’t all obvious. He counted the letters, stumbling a few times when he got past ten but eventually getting what he felt was a good estimate. There were about 30 of them. That wasn’t so many.
The list was actually simple, condensed out of something impossibly huge.
When he realized the audacity of what he had done, cold sweat broke out across his forehead. Holding himself perfectly quiet, he listened to the wind whistling through the cracks in the walls and waited for a sign that he had lost the gift, and his mind with it: the first whispers coming from the things around him. Slowly, he shifted his eyes from the ceiling to the center of the room, and the blackened clay pot over the fire pit, wondering if it would start speaking and what it would have to say.
No voices came.
He let his breath out. From outside came the patter of rain. He squinted up at the window, trying to see the drops through it. Firelight glinted off the jars and bounced into his eye, making him blink.
Mason jars.
That was a word: their name. It was something everyone knew, although no one could have said why or where the name had come from. And he remembered an oddity that had always puzzled him. He got up and crossed the room to run his fingers across the familiar bumps on the side of a jar.
He had always wondered why they were there. Until now, he had thought that the bumps were a decoration. But now he saw that they looked just like the letters in the book. He whispered the word.
“Mason.”
It had been right in front of him all along!
The bumps had warped with age, but they were the same on all five jars. Five letters and five sounds. Illya wiped at his forehead with his hand, trembling. The letters were sounds. That was the answer.
Not only that, he knew what five of them were.
CHAPTER FIVE
ILLYA WORKED IN the dim light of Samuel’s hut, retrieving bunches of herbs from the rafters and grinding them into powders.
“What is this?” Samuel held up a dry sprig with oval leaves, gray with age but still giving off a pungent scent.
“Bayberry,” Illya said.
“Uses?”
“To fight the small calamities, to bring sweat, and to start the upchuck.”
“Yes, that’s right. Now, when you have its bark, it works well as a poultice for sores, and when you have the fruits, you can boil them to get wax for candles or to seal cloth against water.”
Illya nodded. He focused on his work, relaxing in the rhythm of the grinding and the cadences of the Healer’s words. He wondered if he would ever know enough to trace the shapes for all of them.
He had squinted at the book by the light of his family’s fire late into the night, until his mother had woken up and scolded him for piling logs on. The light had died away gradually after that, but by then it didn’t matter. The letters he knew were all through the book, and by the time he had to put it away, he had read “man,” “son,” “on,” “an,” and “am”. It was like a doorway had broken open and light from beyond was shining through the crack.
Illya had done something that no one else had in living memory, but the scope of what remained to the mystery was still daunting. Samuel’s words hummed and drifted in and out of his ears; each one made up of different sounds, each sound with a letter that he could find, if only he could push the door open a little wider.
“Stoneroot will have to be replaced next, though you won’t like grinding it,” Samuel said. “Still, it’s worth the effort. There are many uses for the stoneroot. Most important, it is good to calm the cough that comes with the small Calamities,” Samuel continued, and Illya put the information into his mind, next to the qualities for bayberry.
“They’ll come soon now. Cold time is shifting into the damp time. Best thing we can do to keep them from spreading is to stop the cough,” Samuel said.
Germes, tiny spirits that flew on the wind, went into wet places and brought Calamities and the ’fection. Everyone knew that. They would get into a nose with a drip or uncovered eyes. The cough made stronger winds for them to sail on.
Calamities. Stoneroot. Grind. Written words had different lengths. He had seen that quickly enough. Hearing them, it made sense. Spoken words were made of different numbers of sounds too. Now he had a new idea.
There weren’t very many words with only one sound or even two.
There was “I,” and “a.” Illya tried and couldn’t think of any others that only had one sound. He halted in his work when he realized that he already knew a. It was part of mason. That meant he would be able to find I, another letter.
Six.
The two-sound words would help too. Many of them could be the key to new letters, and, if he could work out enough of them, he might be able to fill in the gaps in the longer words.
Samuel took in a sharp breath. Illya heard a jabbering, like a flock of crows, distant but growing louder.
There was a shriek and what sounded like someone crying.
The sounds grew closer and closer. Illya and Samuel held perfectly still, as if moving could attract the attention of the crowd outside, despite the walls that surrounded them. Samuel snapped the bayberry twig in half in his fingers but seemed not to notice. His face was white.
Then there was a whoop, and the voices began to recede.
“Something’s happened,” Illya said, rising to his feet to look outside. Samuel held up his hand.
“I have to see,” Illya said. He turned back to the door and eased it open.
There was a crowd, but it had moved past them, towards the central fire. Where the day before the men had been a mob, full of rage and desperation, this was a very different scene. They were laughing. It was the first laughter Illya had seen on their faces in months. Happiness shone in their eyes like rising sunlight and spread across the hills of their cheeks.
Laughter. That was why they had sounded like cackling birds. It had been so long since Illya had heard it that he hadn’t recognized the sound.
Two of the same men who had smashed up the Healer’s hut just the day before had linked arms and were dancing in a frenzied circle in the middle of it all. Julian Reyes, one of the Patrollers, was kneeling on the ground in the midst of the crowd with both hands over his face. Illya couldn’t be sure from the distance, but he thought he saw tears running down the boy’s cheeks.
“I think it’s okay,” he said to Samuel. Together they left the hut.
Charlie was standing a little way out of the crowd with his arms folded across his chest.
“What’s happened?” Illya asked.
“Shoots,” Charlie said. “The melt’s started and the shoots have come back.”
On the ground in front of Julian was a pile of wet earth. From it, a tiny green spike with a curled end was pushing its way towards the sky. Illya couldn’t hold back a grin at the sight. The shoot was a small thing, but its promise meant everything. Charlie smiled in return, but there was still a tinge of worry in his eyes.