The tincture was in a brown glass bottle on the shelf above Dessa's bed, with a paper label tied around its neck.Rael had seen it the afternoon before. He had seen it again in the dark, a small shape against the yellow-lit window, and again at dawn when the night staff gave her the morning drops. He had not thought about it once. It was one more bottle on one more shelf in a room full of them.He thought about it now.He stood at the foot of her bed, where she slept with her face turned to the window, and read the label. A healer's abbreviation he did not know. A dose: twelve drops, morning and night. A supplier's mark from a southern house, the kind whose seal appeared only on the medicines the healers kept in a locked cupboard and spoke of in lowered voices.He had been paying forty marks an allotment for as long as he had been able to pay anything. It was the number that had been in his head on the low wall outside, the night of his Ceremony, with fourteen in his hand. Since he ha