Audrieadea's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

By midmorning Audrieadea had brewed three failed pots and lost three more cuts' worth of blood to the ward. Her palm throbbed. Her arms felt hollow. The rune-marked cauldron sat in the corner of the reed-walled hut, steaming a dull green that told her nothing. She did not know which root, which bark, which powder from her aunt's crowded table would answer the blight. Every wrong guess cost her. She could not afford many more. She stood at the table and looked over the bottles and bundled herbs. Cinquefoil. Bog myrtle. A jar of pale root she could not name. Her aunt's book listed cures for fevers and boils and lung-rot, but nothing for a hereditary mark. Audrieadea pressed her cut hand against the table's edge and made herself think. Guessing was killing her. She needed someone who had seen the blight before. There was only one name her mother had ever spoken with fear. She wrapped her palm, took a lantern, and poled out through the reeds before the light failed. The old woman lived deeper in the swamp, past water no villager crossed. Audrieadea found the crooked shack on its low stilts near sunset. Baba Yaga stood in the doorway already, wild white hair lifting in the wet wind, yellow nails curled at her sides, as if she had been waiting an hour. "You brew too loud," Baba Yaga said. "I smelled you two days back." She looked Audrieadea over and stopped at the freckles climbing her wrist. Her mouth pulled tight. "Your grandmother came to me with those. Your mother did not." She stepped aside. "Come in before the frogs listen." Inside, a heavy timber hearth burned low. Baba Yaga sat Audrieadea down and turned her arm to the firelight. "There is no brew for this," she said. "Not with cinquefoil. Not with any root on your table. The blight feeds on the same blood your ward drinks. Every night you burn in that hut, you feed it twice." She spat into the fire. "You need marrow from a white heron taken alive, and you need it before the freckles reach your collar. Nothing else works. I watched your grandmother try everything else." Audrieadea rode back through the dark with the lantern low and her hand pressed to her chest. She had her answer. The wasted brews would stop. But the answer was worse than the question. White herons nested in the shallows the witch-hunters patrolled by day, and taking one alive meant hours in open water, in open sight, with a wound that would not close. She tied the boat to her stilts and climbed inside the warded hut. The cauldron waited. She banked the fire and began sharpening a snare.