To her huge relief, Seoyeon did not have to interact with Captain Park again over the upcoming days.  She saw him a few times and had to quash an instantaneous feeling of anger on each occasion, but that was it.  For the most part, her days were spent getting up to eat breakfast with her father, going out for a ride before Jongdae arrived, lessons, and then she was at a loose end again before and after dinner.  Seoyeon got through the next of the books that she was reading in the space of just one day and was left wondering to herself how she could find some other way to find out more about the ghost fires.

The weather continued to be poor, though the rain usually started in the late evening and continued on into the night rather than torrential all-day downpours.  Seoyeon was still unsure whether it had been the storm or the Neuma or both that had wrecked her room, and she couldn’t distinguish which one it was howling outside her room at night, but there were thankfully no more occasions where the shutters burst open again.  Still, the second night after Captain Park had interrupted her trip to the library, she found herself shifting her bed away from the window and about a metre or so further towards the secret servant door, which always felt the warmest and least-likely-to-be-affected place in the room no matter what time of night it was.

She did ask Jongdae about the whirtlewort when she presented him with her first antidote for the rasaki snake.  He pursed his lips, frowning, and looked down her list of plants and the tentative instructions she’d jotted down.

“It’s not a plant I’ve used or know,” he admitted.  “It crops up in nursery rhymes and old wives’ tales, though, so maybe there’s some merit to it.  According to them, it’s a base from which you can make any antidote, though I’ve never once seen one that actually uses it.”  He paused.  “I’m not wholly sure the plant even exists.”

“What about the rasaki snake, then?” Seoyeon asked.  “I thought that was one of the mythical creatures from the Neuma.”

He gave her an odd look.  “Where did you hear that?”

With hesitation, Seoyeon told him about her first trip to the library.  Jongdae nodded along thoughtfully as she described the details she could remember from the various books.

“That makes a lot of sense,” he mused, cutting her off before she got to Captain Park interrupting her.  “I’d always just assumed the rasaki snake was native to the Borderlands, but if they live in the Neuma, I suppose it’s not impossible for them to end up here from time to time, especially given how weak the veil is here.”

“Wait.”  Seoyeon could feel the blood draining out of her face as she thought back over all the other monsters she’d seen in the books.  “If the rasaki snakes can cross over, does that mean all the other things can do too?”

Jongdae shrugged.  “I’d assumed so.”

Seoyeon hoped he was wrong.

The next day, Jongdae had a new task for her.  He only introduced it after lunch, when they normally did intellectual subjects and a bit of sewing (sometimes both together, since Jongdae considered it an important skill to be able to converse with somebody while simultaneously and efficiently carrying out another task), and so Seoyeon was rather surprised when he told her to gather up her things and follow him.  They wound their way through the building and down to the infirmary.  Seoyeon had a few short seconds to wonder if he was planning to unleash her on some of the patients, and to be horrified at the potentially disastrous results that would come of that, before he turned to her and presented her with a large spool of thread.  She recognised it instantly as catgut, but accepted it with a grimace.

It was obvious where this was going to go even before Jongdae opened the door, and Seoyeon swallowed back nausea.

“Why do you want me to sew people up?” she objected.  “Doesn’t Ximo have a physician who can do this?”

“He’s incapacitated,” Jongdae told her, before adding as an afterthought, “genuinely incapacitated — there was no foul play.  There were a couple of accidents in the training yard for the soldiers just before lunch and you sew well and with a steady hand.  This will be good practice for you.”

Just the thought of trying to stitch somebody’s flesh together made Seoyeon feel queasy.

“I’m going to be sick,” she protested.

Jongdae propelled her through the door so that he could close it behind her.  “No you won’t.”

Sadly, he was right.  Seoyeon wanted him not to be, because then she would have had a decent excuse to bail as soon as possible, but it turned out that her stomach was significantly stronger than she’d thought.

It probably helped that neither of the injuries were life-threatening, and that the wounds had been cleaned before she’d arrived, because she suspected that a lot of blood might have set her stomach heaving.  One had a nasty gash on the back of his hand and the other a deep cut in his biceps muscle, and both men were joking with each other when Jongdae introduced Seoyeon to them.  Neither injury was terribly complex to stitch back together, and that did leave her feeling a little more confident.  Jongdae helped her to calm herself by asking her to direct him on the kinds of painkillers they would need to administer, and Seoyeon immediately fell into the routine of outlining which herbs were needed and what quantity of them.  Jongdae did up the lacing of poppy that he put into them, since both men were substantially better built than either Seoyeon or he were and also because they both said that they’d been given poppy a number of times before, which Jon