Delia Prance's Arc

Chapter 37 of 59

The princes stopped coming after that day. Word of Delia's free healing spread instead. Travelers walked in from far roads, some for a whole day, drawn by the promise of a healer who took no coin. Her flower-draped house filled from dawn to dusk. She set broken fingers, cooled fevers, and stitched a woodcutter's leg. She loved every hour of it. This was the work she had built her whole life to do. The last patient left at dusk, a mother with a mending child. Delia locked the door and climbed to her hidden office. Her healing gift came from elf blood, but she still did not understand it. She could grow any plant by touching the ground. She wanted to know how far that reach went, and where it stopped. She took two books from the shelf. One was her herbal reference, thick with plant lore. The other was her family record, its pages tracing her line back to an elf named Elira. She read the family book by candlelight. Beneath the drawing of Elira, a note said the gift ran strongest down the mother's line, and grew with each use. Nick came up the stairs. He set a cup of tea beside her. "You should be sleeping," he said. "I need to understand it," she said. "Every day more people come. I heal them, but the gift only makes plants. It can't do more than that yet." He looked at the two books. "So test it." Delia knelt and pressed her palm to the office floorboards. She thought of the willow that gave her the fruit. A shoot of green pushed up through the wood grain, then a second, thicker one. She had never grown two at once before. Her hands shook, but not from fear. Something in her had opened wider. She checked the reference book against the second sprout. It was not a plant she had named. She flipped pages until she found it. A rare root, one that eased a failing heart. She had never grown it before, never even seen it living. The gift had reached for what her patients needed most. "It's growing," she whispered. "Not just what I know. What they need." Nick crouched beside her. "Then it isn't only healing plants. It's finding cures." Delia sat back on the floor, the family book open in her lap. Her gift was no longer a trick for stocking shelves. It answered need. Every traveler on every road could be met, not with what she happened to have, but with the exact thing that would save them. She closed the book. Her sanctuary garden was no longer a dream of beds and walls. It could grow anything a wounded soul required. But a gift that could cure the dying was a gift the crown would kill to own. She had just made her secret far more dangerous to keep. With each use it gets stronger and that is what scared Delia more. How strong could it get? And does it change as it grows??