When the song ended, he walked home through the mud, and his right hand shook, and he did not try to hide it from the rain.
The knocking came at midnight, and it was wrong in a way that pulled Tala out of sleep before she knew why. Not the wind — the wind had a rhythm, and this had none. Three knocks, a pause, two more. A woman's hand, shaking.
She was on her feet before her eyes were fully open, her shawl already over her shoulders, the medicine bag in her hand before she remembered picking it up. Six years of traveling the mining camps had taught her body things her mind never had to approve. When the sick come at night, you go. Everything else is a detail.
Rosa stood in the doorway with rain in her hair, though the sky had been clear at sundown. No — not rain. Tears, or sweat. Her apron was on inside out.
"You have to come," Rosa said. "The sick room. Please. They'll know I came to you, but — please."
Tala's mule was already half-saddled in her mind. "How many?"
"Six. Maybe seven. They said fever, but it's not fever, señora. I wash their sheets. I know fever. Their breath smells sweet and wrong, like the medicine cupboard, and their eyes won't wake up." Rosa's voice cracked. "The little one, Marta — she keeps saying Mama in her sleep, over and over, and she won't stop, and I can't — I can't stand it anymore."
Tala was already moving, tying her bag shut with quick fingers. "Where's Jonah?"
"His shop. He said if anyone from the Home came —" Rosa stopped. "He said he'd walk with you. He said you shouldn't go alone at night. He said men like Caul —"
"I'm not going alone at night," Tala said. "I'm going to a sick room, in the open, where a healer belongs. Let anyone try to stop a curandera going to dying children. Let them." She pushed past Rosa into the street and raised her voice, loud enough for the sleeping houses. "JONAH MERCER."
Windows stayed dark. But two streets over, a lantern bloomed in the wheelwright's shop window, and a moment later Jonah came down the street at a half-run, his coat over his nightshirt, his bad hand already curled the way it did when he was bracing for something.
"How many?" he asked, the same as she had.
"Six or seven. Drugged, not fever. I need your shoulders and your name, wheelwright. Nobody touches a woman walking beside Jonah Mercer."
He looked at Rosa, at the inside-out apron, at Tala's set face. Then he nodded once and fell in beside her, and the three of them walked through the sleeping town toward the white house on the hill with its flower garden and its clean curtains and its lie of a name: the Ashford Foundling Home.
The night nurse met them at the kitchen door with her mouth already open to refuse, and Tala walked through the refusal the way you walk through smoke.
"Children are dying in your sick room," Tala said. "You can let the town's healer in, or you can explain to Reverend Oates at Sunday service why you turned her away. Your choice. Make it fast."
It was Rosa who led them up the back stairs, Rosa who knew which floorboard sang and which stayed silent, Rosa whose hands shook so badly on the sick-room doorknob that Tala had to cover them with her own and turn it for her.
The smell hit first. Sweet, thick, wrong. Laudanum and unwashed linen and the particular sourness of small bodies shutting down.
Six cots. Six children, none of them older than ten, laid out in a row like cordwood, their faces slack, their breathing shallow and slow — too slow. A seventh cot stood empty, its blanket folded with terrible neatness. Tala crossed to the nearest child, a boy, and lifted his eyelid. The pupil was a pinprick. She bent close to his mouth and breathed in.
"Laudanum," she said. "A massive dose. They're not sick. They're poisoned."
Jonah stood in the doorway with his face gone white under the lantern light. "The transfer," he said quietly. "Thursday. They dose them the night before a move. Keeps them quiet on the road. Keeps them from running." His voice was flat with the particular horror of a man watching his own old handwriting come to life. "God forgive me. I wrote the dosage schedule myself. Four years ago. 'For the comfort of the children during transit.'"
"Then you can help me undo it," Tala said, already working. "Cold water, Rosa. As much as you can carry. Jonah — keep them on their sides. If one of them vomits on his back, he drowns. Move."
What followed was the longest hour of Tala's life, and she had lived through a cholera camp and a mine collapse. She worked down the row of cots with her bag open beside her, and her hands remembered everything her heart wanted to forget. Salt water, a spoonful at a time, to bring it back up. Wet cloths on the wrists and the back of the neck. Talking — always talking, because her grandmother had taught her that a voice can hold a door open when the body wants to close it.
"Stay with me, little one. That's it. Breathe with me. In — out — in — out —"
The boy vomited, a thin bitter stream, and his breathing hitched and deepened. Tala moved to the next cot. A girl, maybe eight, her hair in a lopsided braid someone had done in a hurry.
"What's her name?" Tala asked Rosa.
Rosa's eyes filled. "They don't — we're not supposed to use names in the sick room. Mrs. Quill says it makes them harder to —" She stopped. "Marta. The little one who calls for her mama is Marta."
"Marta," Tala said, loud and clear, bending over the girl. "Marta, can you hear me? Your mama would want you to wake up now. Can you do that for her?"