I swallowed a few times and then felt a pinch inside my heart. With that came the memory.
When I was five years old, my mother had gone out with me to collect thrushweed for a stew. Like many of my people, we enjoyed the leaves to chew on as a way to pass the time. So when I found a patch of it, I'd thought nothing of chewing on a couple of leaves.
Only seconds later, I was writhing on the ground, screaming for my mother to come. She ran to me and pulled the leaves from my mouth, then saw what I had thought was thrushweed.
"This is the wrong plant!" she'd said to me.
Immediately she found other leaves, which she forced down my throat. They caused me to vomit up everything I had swallowed, leaving a fierce burning sensation behind. But it also saved my life.
We called the plant fifeberry, so rare in the river country I'd never seen it again. But now that I looked more carefully, the spindlewill leaf was very similar to fifeberry. No, not similar. It was exactly the same plant.
Fifeberry leaves, also known as spindlewill, were poisonous.
Spindlewill was poison.
I spat out the leaves and nearly fell backward in the process.
"What's wrong?" Weevil asked, grabbing on to my arms to balance me.
"Are you sure?" I asked. "Are you sure that's what the wardens wanted you to get?"
"Yes! They checked it very carefully before asking where I had found it. They said they needed more because of the medicine shortage."
"Spindlewill is not medicine," I said. My head was swimming from what I had already ingested. I needed to get it out of me, but I didn't know how. Maybe diluted with other ingredients, it wasn't as strong, but I'd just chewed a full spindlewill leaf. "Weevil, it's poison! Why would the wardens want spindlewill?"
"I know where there's some thrushweed," he cried. "It's not far away. Hold on!"
He said other things, but I couldn't hear him anymore. Instead the world faded around me and turned to black.
I woke up inside the caves. Others were sleeping around us, so I knew it must be night, but Weevil was seated beside me. He had a bowl of cold water in his lap and a wet rag, which he was brushing across my forehead.
When he saw my eyes open, he whispered, "I just poisoned my best friend in the world. Can we agree now that I am the worse friend?"
I coughed out a giggle, which hurt, and I winced. "Unless you want to be even worse, don't make me laugh right now."
He wasn't laughing. "That leaf could have killed you," he said. "I shoved so much thrushweed down your throat after you collapsed, I'm surprised you didn't choke on it. I'm so sorry."
"You didn't know about spindlewill. I didn't recognize the leaf either. I haven't seen it since I was five, but I should have remembered." I took his hand. "Weevil, the medicine is a poison."
"All the time you've been asleep, I've been trying to figure this out. Why would the governor poison sick people? The Scourge will take them anyway, right?"
I swallowed hard. Weevil noticed and offered me a sip of water from a cup he also had nearby, which I gladly accepted.
"The medicine isn't meant to heal us," I said. "She never claimed that. Only that it would numb the symptoms."
"But it's also poisoning the people who are taking it," he said. "Killing them faster."
I nodded. That was why I had felt better after Della stole my medicine. I was stronger without it. I still had to recover from the Scourge, but the medicine only made the Scourge worse.
"We have to tell Della," I said. "We have to tell everyone."
"We'll tell Della. But think of what might happen if we try to tell the whole Colony at once."
"They're poisoning themselves! In smaller quantities than what I got last night, but if the spindlewill is in the medicine, then it's in them, accumulating more and more each day!"
"Everyone here has the Scourge. You know as well as anyone the kind of pain it can cause. For most of them, that medicine is all that gets them through each day. In small doses, it numbs the pain. Is it really better to take that away from them?"
"We can do better than numbing the pain," I whispered. "Jonas said that after he first came to the caves, a woman gave him some herbs that healed him. I'd guess that included thrushweed."