The drying week ran out the summer, and the yard's wall of cords was turned by hand, first light and last, at the pace the weather set the maker.
The week held fair, mostly. One day the wind came off the river with its hands full, and the cords' edges wanted weighting before the noon was out; Ren weighted them and turned the rows a third time that day, and wrote the wind nowhere, because weather that cost nothing but arms was the drying's ordinary wage. What the week owed the leaf, the week paid: time, and turning, and a maker's eye on the sky's face at the hours the sky changes its mind.
At the week's end the cords were emptied to the scales — dry, light, the bought weighed apart from the beds', as they had dried, batch by batch. The making followed at the long table, across two days of the counter's gaps: courses measured out, jars gone through the scalding water and the drying cloth and filled to the lip, and the wax poured and knifed smooth round the rims while it still shone. A jar went down only labelled, its writing done first, and the sources went into the book against the seals, in the book's plain hand.
That night the high shelf's count stood in the book for the second time that year.
Sealed and standing: eighty-four cures. Of the beds' leaf, thirty-five; of the bought leaf, forty-nine — on the high shelf, under their labels and their month. Below them the middle shelf kept the shop's ordinary stock, and the low shelf stood bare, by the rule.
The list stands at five. Their courses will come off the autumn making, in their order. The summer's making was spoken for twice over — by the hill, and by the shelf.
Eighty-four was not two hundred either. It was past a third of the year's plan, with the summer spent, and the book let the number stand without apology and without promise. It was the year's second answer in sealed jars — bigger than the first count, sourced the same way, and true the same way — and along the wall the racks stood empty in the dark, holding the year's smell of leaf, waiting for whatever the autumn asked of them.
The test came at the dusk of a sealing day. Toma arrived unannounced, the cabinet's box under his arm, and knocked when the light was going.
The boy set out the twelve jars this time in two rows of six, the way the sachet boxes went up the hill — a year of watching boxes had got into his hands. He stepped back, and his eye went along the rows end to end, and he said the rule aloud, for the first time since the ritual had begun, the way a rule is said when it has finished growing: "No word till the slate turns."
Ren worked by his teaching: the nose before the eye, and the eye before the tongue, and a grain tasted only where the herb was safe, and left to finish.
Camphor: right at the first breath — the slap of it unmistakable. Feverleaf, smelled twice over, nose-front and nose-back: right at both. Blood-stem, cut before it was named, the cut face speaking plain: right. Field mint — the jar held the stems this time, and he read the stems before he let the smell speak, and named it by what the jar could swear to: right. Woundwort: right. Yarrow: right. Ash bark, tasted and waited out to its finish: right.
The bark jar's strips had curled in the dark like letters no one had opened. This time his hands went to work before his mouth did. He took a strip out and uncurled it against the light, the way the spring's lesson had been written — uncurl the bark — and the strip turned against the sun as it dried, the way bitterroot turns. "Bitterroot." Right — the cross of the spring, and its lesson come home in his hand.
Willow, tasted, waited for, the late bitterness arriving slow and deep: right.
Nine stood in his favour as the row thinned. Three jars were left against him. The boy read the three out at the end, grave as a clerk, and that was all the ceremony they got.
The root jar had held greenheart, cut young. He had cut it — the habit held — and read the cut face the way the book's lessons ordered: the rings close together and pale, the heart of the wood barely darker than its rim. He had named it oldheart, for the rings had spoken to him of a heart. But the rings of a young root sit close because the root is young, not because it is old at the heart: greenheart and oldheart are one tree's root at two ages of its life, told apart by the rings' spacing read with the sample's age asked first. He had asked the sample its name. He had not asked it its age.
The leaf jar had held comfrey, dried. All summer his hands had known comfrey green — the salve bed's broad leaves, soft and rough at once, cut for the salve making at the counter's ordinary pace. Dried, the leaf went thin and hay-sweet, and the green plant's whole manner left it, and he had named it plantain — the other broad leaf of the salve shelf, whose dried face he did know. The jar had not lied. His summer had: a plant is two plants, the green one and the dry one, and his hands had spent the season learning the first and had answered for the second.
The last jar had held grey moss. It was a quiet thing, near smell-less, that his eyes had named in one look in the spring. This time he had smelled first — the day's order, after a day of sealing feverleaf cures with the leaf's smell standing in his nose like a tenant — and the nose, full of the day, had reported the day back to him: something dried, something leaf-like, something old. "Old feverleaf," he had said, "dried hard." The moss had worn its name on its grey face the whole while, in the sense he had not consulted. The witness he had trusted was a witness for the sealing table, not for the jar.
The three wrong jars he set out on the counter, in a row of their own, where he would have to look at them, unexcused, every time he passed. He set the test down in the book whole — the marks, the crosses, and the causes as far as he could read them.
The blind test, the summer's. Nine of twelve. The misses: greenheart, cut young, named oldheart — the rings read without the sample's age. Comfrey, dried, named plantain — the green known by the hands all summer; the dry a stranger. Grey moss, named old feverleaf — the nose full of the sealing day's leaf, and the answer in the looking, unconsulted.
Under it, the lessons, in the book's plain hand.
Ask the sample its age before its name. A plant is two plants, the green and the dry — learn the dry face of everything the beds grow, or the beds will keep secrets from the cabinet. A nose that has worked the day in one leaf is a witness for the day, not for the jar: the test is taken rested, at a clean morning, or it is not taken.
The three wrong samples he set at the cabinet's front, among the spring's teachers, each labelled in his own hand. Then he cut a bundle of the salve bed's comfrey — green, from the bed's edge — and hung it on a cord by the cabinet to dry in the shop's air, so that its dry face would be there to be learned against the jar's, leaf by leaf, as the autumn came on.
Toma took his coin and his dried plum — from the summer's batch this time — and went out sucking the plum, in no hurry at all.
That night he read the week's page over once before the book shut: three counts on it, the test's among them. Eighty-four sealed and standing, of two sources, under their labels. The cabinet had its nine of twelve; the three crosses were the autumn's lessons, still to learn — one of them already hung on a cord by the cabinet, drying into its second face. Five names standing on the list, in their order, waiting on the autumn making the way the racks waited on the autumn cutting.
Outside, the light went earlier than it had, and the air at the back door had the first thin edge of the year's turning in it. The summer's work stood counted on the shelf and in the book, and what was left of the year was the autumn — and the autumn, in that book, was where the counts would be asked their hardest questions.