What Made Oksana Ridina Dizzy Was Not the Fever

She came to the Guild Hall on her own feet, which I noted before anything else, because a woman a fever has decided about does not walk in unassisted. Dizzy on standing, she said, and her stool loose three days running, and a taste in her mouth she called bitter, like the bark itself, which turned out to be the most honest thing she told me and the last thing she thought to mention. No cough. No rash. Skin cool and dry under my hand, not the damp heat of a fever building toward its hour. Pulse steady, if anything a little slow — not the quick thread a true fever gives.

I asked what she had eaten. Bread, she said, the same fish the whole street eats, water from the well every neighbor drinks from and none of them dizzy. I asked what she had been drinking, and only then, and only because I asked twice, did she mention the crocks.

Nine days. Two a morning, steeped strong enough to darken near to black before she drank it — cassia, bought against a fever that has not arrived in any house I have examined, hers included. I wrote five days ago that the bark is correctly used thin, for a sour stomach or an aching joint, and not as a wall against a sickness with no face. She had not read that, or had read it and judged her own measure to be different, the way most people judge their own measure to be different right up until it isn’t.

I told her to stop the crocks and drink plain water for three days, and to send for me if the dizziness did not lift. I expect it will lift. The body took in more of something than it is built to carry, and is saying so, plainly, in the only language it has. She is inclined to call this the sickness finally arriving. It is easier to believe the fever found her than to believe the cup did — the fear that sent her to the bark in the first place is still standing in the room, and I have nothing in it that answers that.