IV) Io: Where the Water Was Warm

Io’s invitation arrived with a list of things she was not expected to bring.

No council papers.

No infirmary rosters.

No requests that Evelyn examine something quickly while they were together.

At the bottom, Adriana had written: This applies to all three of us.

Io read it over breakfast.

Lexander watched her expression.

“What have they done?”

“Invited me away for four days.”

“That sounds threatening.”

“There are conditions.”

He held out his hand. She gave him the letter.

Halfway through it, he began smiling.

“I support this.”

“You would.”

“I’m prepared to put that in writing.”

She took the page back. “Brenna may need—”

“Brenna has managed the infirmary through three winter illnesses and a collapsed granary. She can manage four days.”

“I know that.”

“Then tell her you know.”

Io looked at him.

He lifted his cup before she could find a sufficiently pointed answer.

The place was called Seven Wells, though the guidebook admitted that two had dried up and one had never been a well. Warm water rose through pale stone above a valley of vineyards. The old bathhouse had reopened after years of repairs. Evelyn had heard about it from a woman who supplied herbs to Greykeep.

“She said the rooms were clean,” Evelyn explained on the road, “the food was good, and nobody asked her to resolve a dispute.”

“A remarkable establishment,” Adriana said.

Io rode beside them with a small bag, practical boots, and a sense of having forgotten something important.

By the second milestone she realized she had forgotten to feel guilty.

She decided not to go back for it.

The bathhouse stood among terraces cut into the hill. Vines climbed its lower walls. Water ran through open channels beneath little wooden bridges, warming the air with mineral steam. Their host, Dema, met them at the door and asked whether they preferred rooms facing the valley or the garden.

She did not bow.

Io nearly embraced her.

“The valley,” Adriana said.

“The garden,” Evelyn said at the same time.

They looked at each other.

Io smiled. “Excellent. Our first diplomatic crisis.”

They took three adjoining rooms on the corner.

For the first afternoon, nothing happened.

Io sat with her feet in warm water and waited for someone to bring her a question. Nobody did. Evelyn leaned back with her eyes closed. Adriana was reading a book whose cover she refused to show them.

After a while, Io asked, “Is it good?”

“Ridiculous.”

“You haven’t put it down.”

“I want to see how much worse it becomes.”

Evelyn opened one eye. “That sounds like a recommendation.”

At supper, they talked about bread, travel, and a woman at Greykeep who had taught a dragon to wait until washing was taken indoors before choosing a roof. They spoke of the children when they wanted to, then allowed the conversation to go elsewhere.

Io slept with the window open.

In the morning, she woke before dawn and did not get up.

That was the first adventure.

The second began when she saw the flowers.

They grew on the upper terrace, white petals streaked with violet, their leaves thick and glossy. Dema called them warmbells. Io knew a related plant from the old herbals, but these bloomed out of season and held their scent after the petals fell.

“May I look more closely?”

“As long as you don’t dig them up. Everyone wants to take them home, and then everyone complains when they die.”

Io crouched beside the bed.

The soil was warm beneath her fingers. A narrow channel carried mineral water along the roots.

“Do they grow by the other springs?”

“Above the fifth. The old garden’s full of them.”

“There’s another garden?”

Dema looked uphill. “There used to be a glasshouse. The path washed out years ago. We don’t send guests there.”

Io stood slowly.

Behind her, Evelyn said, “I know that expression.”

“What expression?”

“The one Lexander has immediately before you tell him to be sensible.”

Adriana looked toward the hill.

“How far?”

“You’re supposed to discourage her,” Evelyn said.

“I’m gathering information.”

They gathered a guide as well: Dema’s brother Noll, who maintained the water channels and had opinions about guests who thought boots made them mountaineers. He insisted on ropes, food, and an early start. Io agreed to everything.

Evelyn examined her.

“You are being suspiciously cooperative.”

“I want to see the flowers.”

“That is what worries me.”

They climbed the following morning. Two attendants remained at the bathhouse with their expected route and return time. Io had proposed that arrangement herself, which would have pleased Lexander so much that she decided not to mention it in her next letter.

The path passed beneath chestnut trees and emerged onto a slope patterned with old stone walls. Between them grew tangled roses, young birches, and plants that had survived generations of neglect by ceasing to resemble anything a gardener intended.

Io loved it at once.

Noll cut back a branch across the trail.

“That’s the fifth spring ahead.”

Steam lifted through the trees.

Beyond it stood the glasshouse.

Most of its panes had gone. Iron ribs curved above a wilderness of leaves. A stone trough ran down the center, its sides white with mineral deposits. Warmbells grew everywhere, their petals bright against the ruins.

Evelyn stopped beside Io.

“Oh.”

Io nodded.

For a while, that was sufficient conversation.

Adriana found a door beneath climbing branches. It opened into a gardener’s room with a tiled floor and cupboards raised above the damp. Inside one cupboard lay three books wrapped in waxed cloth.

Io touched the first with the care she usually reserved for a sleeping child.

“We should show Dema.”

“Open it,” Adriana said. “She can be shown something legible.”

The pages held planting notes. Weather. Temperatures. Failures described with increasingly irritated handwriting. The gardener had tried to grow warmbells in ordinary soil for eleven years before accepting that the water mattered more than the heat.

Io smiled.

“Someone else refused to be sensible.”

“Did it work?” Evelyn asked.

Io turned the page.

There was a drawing of a divided trough.

“Eventually.”

The gardener had learned to catch the fine pale sediment that settled beneath the spring water and mix it into the soil. Plants moved with that sediment survived away from the valley. Beneath the drawing was a recipe for a salve and a firm warning that the petals were to be steeped, never boiled.

Io read it twice.

She knew exactly which old formulation it resembled. The difference was small enough to have been missed in a copy, large enough to explain why later versions had been unreliable.

“I want to test this,” she said.

Evelyn smiled at the sound of her voice.

“I thought you might.”

Then the trough stopped running.

Noll looked up.

The silence was abrupt. Water had accompanied them since dawn, so constant that Io had ceased to hear it. Now leaves moved and a bird called outside, and beneath both came a low knocking in the stone.

Noll put down his pack.

“Out.”

Nobody argued.

They had reached the outer wall when the floor of the gardener’s room cracked.

Steam hissed through the opening.

Io caught Evelyn’s arm. Adriana pulled Noll clear of the door as a section of tile dropped into the channel beneath it.

The books remained inside.

For one instant, Io looked back.

Evelyn tightened her grip.

“No.”

“I know.”

She did know. The wanting remained, sharp and unreasonable, but she moved with the others into the open air.

Noll was examining the ground.

“The lower channel’s blocked. Pressure’s coming back through the old feed.”

“Can we release it?” Adriana asked.

He pointed toward the bank above the ruin. “There’s an overflow gate. If its lever still turns.”

They found the lever beneath brambles. Rust had joined it to the housing. Noll tried it with both hands and made no progress.

Io studied the pipe disappearing into the hillside.

Once, her first answer would have been to summon more power than the problem seemed likely to resist. She had done it successfully often enough to learn the wrong lesson from success.

“Which way should the water go?” she asked.

Noll showed her a dry ditch leading toward bare rock beyond the garden.

Adriana walked its length and returned.

“There’s a fallen tree across the bottom.”

They cleared it before touching the gate again.

Evelyn kept watch over the cracking floor from a safe distance. Noll braced the housing. Io warmed the rusted joint carefully, little by little, while Adriana worked the lever with a timber extension.

Steam rose from the metal.

“Enough,” Noll said.

Io stopped at once.

The lever moved.

Hot water burst into the ditch and struck the bare rock with a noise like applause. They stepped back together.

The knocking beneath the glasshouse faded.

Io realized she was grinning.

Evelyn looked at her muddy knees.

“You’ve enjoyed yourself.”

“A little.”

“Your husband is going to be unbearable.”

“Only if someone tells him.”

Adriana lifted an eyebrow.

Io sighed. “Yes. I know.”

They did not return for the books that day. Noll marked the unsafe ground. Io copied what she remembered while they ate lunch on the hillside. She could remember the drawing clearly, the gardener’s indignation even more clearly, but not the quantity of sediment in the mixture.

She left a space.

That evening, she wrote to Dema’s council about the damaged channel. She wrote to Brenna about the warmbells, carefully distinguishing what the old book claimed from what anyone had actually tested. Then she wrote to Lexander.

I found a garden. There was a modest difficulty with hot water. Everyone is well. Before you ask, yes, we had a guide, and no, I did not go back inside for the books.

She read it aloud.

Evelyn laughed so hard she had to put down her cup.

They stayed an extra day, after sending word home. Dema’s workers made the room safe enough to retrieve the books through its outer window. The gardener’s notes returned with wet corners but readable pages. Dema allowed Io to copy them and accepted her offer to pay for careful propagation trials at the bathhouse.

“If the flowers become useful,” Dema said, “people here ought to have work growing them.”

“Yes,” Io answered. “They ought.”

On their last afternoon, the three women sat beside the warm pool again. Io’s notebook rested closed on the bench. Adriana had finished the ridiculous book and was recommending it to Evelyn in the strongest possible terms.

Io watched sunlight move through the steam.

“I had forgotten something,” she said.

Both women looked at her.

“I like finding things out before anyone needs me to know the answer.”

Evelyn rested her hand beside Io’s.

“Then do more of it.”

It sounded so easy that Io almost objected.

Instead she nodded.

At home, Lexander waited in the courtyard. She kissed him before he could ask about hot water, then placed a small pot in his hands. Two warmbell seedlings rose from pale, damp soil.

“These need somewhere sunny.”

He inspected them gravely.

“Are they dangerous?”

“Only if overwatered.”

“That seems manageable.”

He took her bag with his free hand. They walked inside while she told him about Dema, the glasshouse, and a gardener who had spent eleven years being wrong without giving up.

“Will you go back?” he asked.

“In autumn.”

The answer surprised her by already existing.

Lexander smiled.

“Good.”