It only took a day of not being allowed to ride out in the evenings before Seoyeon took up her father’s suggestion of riding in the mornings after breakfast instead.  Even though Jongdae regularly took her outside for at least half an hour every day, the furthest they ever went was the apothecary garden, and she found being limited to the fortress walls absolutely suffocating.  Distrustful of Lieutenant Do, she didn’t want to ask anybody else about the ghost fires, just in case Captain Park decided to take away another of her freedoms, but she couldn’t help chafing at the bit.  If she couldn’t explore the ghost fires for herself, then she had to find some other way of getting the information that she wanted and then slipping out at exactly the right time to the right place so that she could speak to her mother, and quickly, so that she’d actually have a little time with her before she was caught.  The only place that was likely to hold that information, however, was the library.  She hadn’t yet managed to ask her father about letting her go in there, and she knew that she was going to need some time there in order to find the right books, and she didn’t trust herself to be fast enough to do it without Captain Park catching her in there again.  If she had permission, it was going to be fine.  If she didn’t, then it wouldn’t be, and if she complained to her father again, he would probably decide that Captain Park was once again in the right since the library was officially off limits.  He already seemed to like Captain Park, and Seoyeon didn’t want to fuel that any further than necessary.  Not just that, but she strongly suspected that Captain Park would be less than impressed if he discovered she was still actively seeking knowledge about the ghost fires.

There was another thing that contributed to the feeling of suffocation, and that was the candles in her room.  Unable to ride, Seoyeon had retreated to her bedroom once Jongdae was gone, and had been almost overwhelmed by the cloying smell from the perfumed candles in the chandelier.  Choking, she had had to flag down Baekhyun to find somebody tall enough to snuff them all out, and then she had gone down with the pageboy to the storerooms on the underground level to find herself some normal candles that weren’t so pungent.  Part of her wondered how she’d put up with the candles before, but she suspected it was in part due to the fact that the room hadn’t been aired properly that day, since it had been raining hard, and in part due to the fact that normally she only went back to her room during the day either to fetch books to read or to sleep.

The rain persisted through the night and by morning had become a full on storm.  Initially, Seoyeon had thought it was the Neuma, but it continued well past daybreak and her father commented on it over breakfast, and so she concluded that this time round it actually was there.

The ghost fires were completely unaffected by it.  They were hard to see with the heavy downpour, but when Seoyeon went down with Jongdae to check the carts that had come to the fortress with supplies shortly before lunch, she saw two medium-sized ghost fires burning just beyond the gates.  As Sehun had said, they were much closer towards the fortress than they had been recently.  Seoyeon wondered vaguely about the reason for that.

“You’re daydreaming,” Jongdae told her blandly as he rummaged through a box of things he’d specifically requested.  He handed her a notebook and stuck his nose back in the box.

Seoyeon was so taken aback she almost forgot to thank him.  He waved it away, also passing her an inkwell, and told her she’d better be diligent in her note-taking.  That made her smile, because she knew it wasn’t an admonition: he’d told her just a day or so before that her notes were neat and ordered and that it would benefit her in the long run.  The new book to write them in was timely, since she’d almost run out of space in her current one.  Presumably that was why Jongdae had got it for her.  Still, it was a significantly nicer one than the old one she’d been going through before.  The leather cover was new, and the pages were thick, creamy parchment, not to mention of higher quality than in her current book.  The ink wouldn’t blot nearly so much.

Once everything was tallied and accounted for, Seoyeon and Jongdae thanked the merchant who had driven the carts all the way to Ximo in such terrible weather, and Jongdae nudged Seoyeon to invite the man in for a quick meal before venturing back out again.  He refused, since the weather was making the journey difficult enough and he had places to be that evening that were going to take longer to get to that they would in fair conditions, and so they stood and waved him off instead.

“He has a fair point,” said Jongdae, peering into the rain as the guards closed the gates.  “However, I think we’re better off staying inside today.”

“Are we not going to be doing apothecary, then?”

“Don’t get too excited.  I have another antidote for you to figure out.  You can do it for homework and we’ll collect the ingredients necessary to make it when Mother Nature isn’t trying to punish us.”

The one he gave her was a type of snakebite, and for some reason it sounded familiar.  Seoyeon spent some time in her room by the fire that evening, having dined with her father rather than in the mess, puzzling over the character of the venom that Jongdae had given her.  Since it wasn’t a concocted poison, he wanted her to look at the plant characters that would best counter it, and he had said that she wasn’t necessarily going to get the recipe right the first time.

She agreed with him on that one: for some reason, the first ingredient that sprang to mind was a prickly little plant with orange petals called whirtlewort, and she had no idea why.  It wasn’t in her notes, and she knew that she would have recorded any plants they’d worked with or that Jongdae had told her about, and since she hadn’t really had much interest in plants before arriving at Ximo, she couldn’t think where she’d come across it before.  It was also very unlike Jongdae to set her an impossible task, so in all likelihood whirtlewort wasn’t actually needed at all, so she didn’t even know why the plant was bugging her so much.

It was only when Jieun came in to check that the room was ready for Seoyeon to go to bed that she realised what it was.  The maid slamming the shutters of her window and locking them drew her attention, and she nibbled at the end of her quill as she watched Jieun flitting about the room.  When Jieun lit the lantern by her bedside table, it struck, and she gaped down at the name of