Chương 338: 6.5

Leo Haeborne was still not sure what to think of his new position. It was ostensibly a very esteemed station to hold, to be the court diviner of the entire county. The counselor in matters of the heavens to the lady countess herself! He had been told by Keeper Bitta that he was explicitly chosen for his expertise in the care of the body's humors and his extensive study of the texts on miracles pertaining to healing. She said it was because he was best suited to the Countess' request. Leo snorted at the thought.

Here he was in a decadently furnished chamber within the very Palace Keep of Kaeketeh, surrounded by an even more outrageous wealth of temple records in scrolls and bound leather miracle ledgers. But if there was any hope that his assignment was based on his merit, that had been dashed in the days following his joining the Countess' entourage. It was rapidly obvious who was actually trusted council among the people in the teeming parade of soldiers, animals and support staff. Leo was not among them.

The cook had more of the Countess' ear then Leo did! No, Leo was more than certain of the real reason he had been given such a prestigious position. It was to get rid of him. Well that and apparently he'd left a good impression on the Countess' incredibly precocious daughter. Which brought him to the other occupant of the room. A finely dressed child with the serpentine snout, horns and tail of her mother.

"And this miracle? The one called on by Galen to intercede in the illness of a senator?" Leo put on the patient smile that he remembered his own teachers seemed to wear so effortlessly when he was still a child.

"An entreaty to Asclepius, that is another dangerous one, you read the longer account in the temple?" Despite her age (barely over twelve?!) The Countess' daughter Gem was incredibly well read and had a memory to match her enthusiasm! She answered him with a sharp nod and a little birdlike chirp. He'd underestimated her a year ago, but never again. She'd tricked him into thinking she was a scaly but otherwise normal child. Since then he was yet to be disappointed in the girl.

Honestly, for a banishment from his home and every one and thing he'd ever known this was not the worst. Tutoring the girl was mostly a delight! Although strange, even for him.

"Then you recall that it was following the Antonine plague that the temple prohibitions against healing the fully dead were enacted. If the body breathes not, if the subject does not flinch from pain or they are incapable of speech or other response to question?" Gem huffed and gave a toss of her head in a manner not unlike a horse. It was so curious what mannerisms were like a human and what were from her mother's ancestry.

"Then ' Thou shall not call upon the divine to heal what is already laid to rest.' Yes I read it, but what about if one has used mortal sorcery to keep the body breathing, the heart beating. Is it not safe then to call upon the heavens for healing?" Leo sighed, a very intelligent child she might be but like most people outside the temples she had the shallowest understanding of the forces waiting among the stars to answer their prayers.

"From Asclepius? For a plague? Absolutely not!" The puzzled frown was a familiar one, the look almost exactly one Leo remembered very distinctly feeling on his own face when he was just an acolyte and assistant in the temple. As was the expected complaint.

"But he's a god of healing! Surely there is no better star among the heavens to call on for a plague than a god of healing!" Leo sighed, his smile growing sad.

"You read about the Antonine plague, Lady Gem? The loss of life? If it was so simple that a ritual and a sacrifice could have stopped its progress, do you think it would have swept through all the territories of Old Cantor and left barely one in ten of its peoples unafflicted? Less than half of them still living?" Leo's stated position was to offer advice to his Countess. But she had ignored him for the better part of four days beyond their initial introductions and a few feasts.

She had not asked his council on anything regarding the divines. Which was all kinds of wrong! A heavenly counselor was a vital position in any mortal court! Even if the ruler was some divinely sanctioned wyrm which the stars themselves bent to avoid touching. There was always terrible peril in the stars and Lords and Ladies especially were the worst about inviting the worst of them.

The temple's locked archives under Bitta alone were full of hundreds of examples of why the carelessness of kings with the heavens had spelled ruin. Leo's position was important! And he was being ignored, treated as nothing but an unofficial tutor for a child? Well! Maybe if he could impart some wisdom on the countess' daughter he could fulfill his role anyway? Or at least perhaps impress her enough she'd actually talk with him?

The precocious scaled child nodded to him while remaining silent, those pitch black eyes waiting expectantly for him to explain. Ah he'd gotten lost in his thoughts! Leo cleared his throat to cover for his pause, calling up to mind the lecture he had been given on this very subject. How had it gone? Right!

"According to our texts they did ask for Asclepius to save them. To cure their loved ones, alive and dead, the heavens were asked to intervene and bring health. And in Old Cantor and in richer villas where many of the afflicted were rich enough to afford the sacrifices? Intervention and 'healing' did come." He drew on the memory of texts he read which were kept away from any enterprising lord, alongside the rituals and names which were forbidden to be shared. Not destroyed, No absolutely not!

For without the knowledge disasters could not be averted. Offerings and wording might yet again drift or be guided by the heavens back to old forms! No, although utterly forbidden to ever enact, the temples could not dare to forget how those acts were done!

"The dead and the infirm were raised back to `apparent` health, to movement, to thought and speech. But the plague was not undone in the blessed!" He fixed the child with what he hoped was a serious enough expression to convey the gravity of the mistake made by the Old Cantoran diviners. To inspire even a fraction of the necessary fear for what ill formed pleas to the heavens had wrought.

"The dead walked lady Gem, The dead and the dying walked and felt and lived happily, and they rotted and spread the curse of the plague farther and wider than if they had been put to rest." Leo was met with nothing but firm attention and wide black eyes fixed staring at his face. Horselike ears perked forward to swallow his every word as those eyes seemed to be trying to pull the knowledge through their gaze directly. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

He coughed again as if he needed to clear his throat.

"The blessing of Asclepius healed the pain and suffering, the weakness and infirmity, but the curse of the Antonine plague was not undone, Its spirit remained. Despite how the rituals or prayers were made it always remained!" She nodded along to him, an intensity to her gaze that was disquieting on one so young. Was this what Leo was like as a child? Was this why he had been sent away at last? He could almost accept Keeper Bitta's decision if she had felt half as unsettled by him as he was by this child.

"When beseeched why it was so directly by the healer Galen? Asclepius' reply is one that I know you have read, Lady Gem. It is passed down as a lesson for all diviners and workers who would ask the stars for care and healing." He tried to take on the tone as it had been said to him. To speak the words that would shake this child the way it shook him when he was young." Of All that was asked, So have I given."

He waited for the questions, for the prying, for all the misunderstanding that would foster further explanation and discussion on the nature of the divine and the importance of clarity and forethought in dealings with them. Just as he had asked and demanded and hounded his elders in the temple. Leo braced for the flood of challenge to this statement, but Gem of Rochford, child of the Countess of Viznove and half wyrm did none of that. She seemed saddened, almost disappointed somehow.

But that faded to a sudden shifting resolve. And a whisper under her breath that he thought for sure he must have misheard." So even the gods struggled with it." Leo stared at the precocious child, whose gaze had now turned away from him and back to her book. He watched the sudden intensity in her gaze as she glared down at the page, the thrashing tail swishing the split skirts of her diminutive attire. She was careful with the pages, but there was a tension to every delicate flip.

He was left practically alone with the strange creature that looked like a child, a serpent, a wyrm and so many other things. Who had acted the lost infant in the temple that night last year and then spouted off a litany of obscure and specific minutia of diviner history and heavenly case records. Who had devoured those books with a similar curiosity but nowhere near the sheer focus as she did now. A girl that was ostensibly at least thirteen winters old but at a glance hardly seemed tall enough to be six.

Leo tried to find his words, to collect his thoughts. Get back around to the lesson he had intended to impart about the importance of clear and exact language when making a request upon the divine. How procedure, ritual and prior precedent of results was the armor that protected a diviner and his charges. But she had gone completely off the script he expected! He was still struggling to try and find something to say to the daughter of his liege and countess when she filled the silence herself.

Turning back up to him from the book recording divine interventions and their consequences.

"What of this case of the intervention by Artemis with the Manvarg?" Leo stared and blinked, a moment of confusion before walking over to check which date and other notations was on the intervention his bizarrely precocious student was bringing up now. Hmm, it seemed a very standard miraculous intervention. Thankfully a predictable one compared to the more unpredictable and dangerous acts she had interrogated him over so far. Practically safe. Which made him rather suspicious, earning her a raised brow.

"What of it? This looks like a normal case of a woodsbane being cleansed from a man. He was well and sound of spirit and body after the ritual as expected." Her diminutive finger with its sharp claw lightly tapped a portion of the text.

"He was fine for a year, then he fell into infirmity and died!" There was that intensity again. Leo squinted down at the densely written and abbreviated text, it was a copy of a copy of a letter sent by a rural shrine keeper. But there were no signs of the usual oversight or mistakes you might expect from that.

"That's hardly out of the ordinary. People grow ill for all sorts of reasons, curses and whims of stars and spirits. Men do simply die eventually Lady Gem, he was thirty-five winters old, hardly entirely unusual an age to perish." Gem tapped another line in the text, speaking quickly with a sharp whistling tone of excitement.

"Before he was fully bedridden it says he had developed a great fear of drink of all kinds in spite of exclaimed thirst!" Leo mulled over that but failed to see the pattern.

"I can read the same words as you Lady Gem but what is the logic you are following? A woodsbane can drive men to rave and strike out like a feral beast. He was restrained, A miracle was called for, the offerings made precisely as they should be and his curse was lifted as promised." The wyrmish girl looked down at the words then took a breath to center herself, to calm some youthful tumult of emotions? Leo was not certain, he was not trained as a teacher. Not considered old or wise enough yet.

His place was in the records, archives and grunt work of preparing rituals! His new position was not supposed to be a teaching post! He was supposed to be the advisor to the Countess, not a tutor for her child! When she turned back up to him her pitch dark and glistening eyes were stern. Her mouth was set in a thin line that did not suit her features or size.

"How does one suffer from a woodsbane?" Leo could not stop a slight bark of surprised laughter, which got the youth to pout. What were these leaps of logic she was having? He had no idea but that at least was a question he could answer easily. He knew it by rote." Woodsbane are a many and varied curse of untamed land, they can come from abrasion, puncture or other injury whilst out in wilderness traveling, hunting or performing forestry.

Their symptoms can depending on the specific disruption to the humors be anything from a swelling of the injured tissue to an ill stomach, loose bowels or acute fever." Again those dark eyes and attentive ears were on him, drinking in his every word. He settled into familiar and known knowledge instead of random esoteric records. His tone gained confidence as he recited what he had read and been taught to act on." Woodsbane are especially common in the case of a wild beast or lairspawn bite which breaks the skin.

In rare cases the curse upon the spirit can be so great that the wilderness takes root in the soul of a man or woman and brings them to rave, flail, assault or murder." He finished with the proscribed rituals for such cases." In the event of the less severe Woodsbane a prayer for health and wellness from any local deity will suffice along with a cleansing of the afflicted wound in a strong beer or wine, and wrapping in a smoking wreath of purifying sage." There was a nod from the child.

Leo let the words carry him onward." As in the case mentioned here such as cases of Manvarg or other forms, a god or goddess of the hunt should be called upon to draw out the wilderness that has taken root in the man. In the event that a murder or injury by bite has occurred both the Manvarg and the victims must be treated." He stumbled a moment on the next bit, then waved a hand.

He was not going to spend the rest of the day on the nuance of choosing which divine and the litmus of dozens upon dozens of conditions and situations one was supposed to consider before invoking a particular god over another let alone how to enact the ritual! That was far too much for a child no matter how precocious. Also he'd strain his throat!"

The precise ritual will vary with the divine being called on but if the woods or beast that caused the affliction is known a suitable associated heavenly patron should be selected. In many cases a vessel to take in the wildness curse being drawn out is a good addition, to be slaughtered after and then not eaten. But buried out beyond the fields of the community." Those wide eyes felt like they were somehow draining something from him.

But Leo continued, trying to find a way to get back on track to demonstrating the lesson he had wanted to teach the child. But he could not find the words. After his silence lingered long enough she must have concluded he was done, and Gem simply nodded and went back to her reading. He yearned to ask the heaven's for aid in this new trial. But like any diviner trained in even the most basic of proper dealings with the stars, he knew better than to do more than think about it.

He only just held in a sigh of relief when the wyrm child had finally gone back to poring over the incredibly dry records of divine interventions, Leo considered just what star he must have insulted with his curiosity that they had sought to punish him with a mind as eager as the Lady Gem. It was far too short a time before her voice chirped up again!