The Bark They Are Buying Against a Fever That Has Not Arrived

Cassia bark is in every stall this week that sells spice at all, priced by the Oru weight the Weighing Hall has watched climb three market days running into an eighth. I have no explanation for the price and will not invent one; that is the Weighing Hall’s arithmetic, not the body’s. What I have is three households on Guild Row and one off Ulev Street who have bought more of it in a week than their kitchens have used in a season, steeped it strong, and given it to children who show no fever, no flush, no complaint beyond the taste.

Correctly used: a weak steep of cassia, taken warm, eases a stomach gone stagnant and sour after a heavy meal — bread and fat, the kind Harvestmonth’s harder labor calls for and the body sometimes cannot keep pace with. It warms a joint that aches when the mornings turn damp before the day’s heat arrives, which they have started to do. This is what my mother’s mother used it for, and what I use it for, and it is sound.

It is not a fever preventative. Bark taken before a fever exists does not stop one from arriving; I have watched fevers arrive in bodies steeped in cassia for a week straight, and I have watched them stay away from bodies that never touched it. The confusion is not new — every district finds a plant and decides it is a wall rather than a poultice — but I have not before watched people spend Oru-weight coin building a wall against nothing they can name. I corrected the three households I know of. I expect there are others I don’t, and a fourth market day of the price climbing regardless of what I tell them.