Aldric Thornwood's Arc

Chapter 7 of 11

Sylvana pulled the dark leaves down and crushed one between her fingers. She smelled it, then set it aside. She reached for a second jar, a third, a fourth. Her hands moved without pause until she stopped at a low shelf and stared. "Empty," she said. She turned the jar upside down. A single flake fell out. "I used the last on a bee sting three days ago and forgot to restock." "What is it," Aldric said. "Bindweed root. Without it the tincture won't hold. The poison in your jar will boil off before it touches your sister's blood." She set the empty jar on the table. "I can grow it in a season. You don't have a season." Aldric felt the wolf lean against his knee. He pushed the feeling down and made himself think. Bindweed root. He knew the words. He had heard them, or seen them, somewhere he couldn't place. Then he did place it. Not a memory. A dream. Two nights on the skiff he had dreamed of a hill above a lake, and a woman in glasses kneeling on a slope pulling white flowers out of the grass. She had complained about the roots. She had said the word twice. "The potter," Aldric said. "Red hair. Glasses. She had a hill above the lake covered in white flowers. She was digging them out because they choked her paint plants." Sylvana looked up. "Roswyn." "I dreamed it on the water. Two nights running." "Moonflowers grow with bindweed. She'd pull the bindweed to save the moonflowers." Sylvana was already reaching for a satchel. "How far." "A day if I run. Less if I don't sleep." "Then don't sleep." She pressed a folded paper into his hand. "Draw the root for her. Three fingers thick. White inside, not yellow. Yellow is a different plant and it will kill your sister faster than the poison." He ran. The wolf ran with him. He crossed the creek and the mill and the village and the road back the way he had come. The sun dropped. He kept going. He reached the lake road in gray light before dawn and found the kiln smoking and the potter asleep in a chair beside it with a notebook open on her lap. He woke her. She blinked behind her glasses and pushed hair off her face. "Bindweed," he said. "On your hill. I need root, three fingers thick, white inside." Roswyn stared at him a moment. Then she stood. "The whole hill's crawling with it. Take what you need. Take a shovel." She walked him to the slope. He dug. The wolf sat and watched. He pulled six roots as thick as his thumb and one as thick as three fingers, white all the way through. He wrapped them in the cloth from his coat and turned back east. Two days left. He had the root. He had to run it back before his sister ran out.