Elara Rootwhisper's Arc

Chapter 1 of 9

Elara Rootwhisper carried a dead man's satchel home and found the root pouch inside still knotted shut. She had brought it to him three weeks ago. He had smiled and taken it and set it down. Now his hands would never open anything again. She sat on the floor of her tent and untied the pouch herself, because someone had to, and the dried root smelled the same as it had the day she cut it. She had watched his hands the last time. The fingers curled inward like a fern before it opens. The tremor moved up the wrist. She knew the sickness then. She had seen it twice before in her grandmother's notebooks, and her grandmother had left a cure for it, and the cure needed Shadowmoss. Shadowmoss only grows where the dead are buried. Elara knew three places it grew in the valley of Copsefire. She walked to the first at dawn and found the stones stripped bare. She walked to the second by noon and found the same. Someone else was sick. Someone else was gathering. She stood in the second graveyard with her empty basket and counted the villagers she had treated this month. Eleven. The trembling man made twelve. The third place was a child's grave. A six-year-old girl, fever, four springs gone. Her mother still came with flowers. Elara had seen the fresh blooms herself last week, laid at the small headstone among the lanterns of the little burial ground where the valley's children rested. She went home and pulled down her grandmother's book. On the shelf beside it stood the three flasks her grandmother had left her, the blue one, the purple one, the green one banded in gold. Each held a finished remedy for something else. None of them touched this sickness. Only the cure-all in the book's last pages did, and the cure-all needed Shadowmoss, and the Shadowmoss grew on a dead child. Elara walked to the little graveyard before the light failed. She knelt at the small headstone. The moss grew thick along the base, dark green, the color her grandmother had drawn in the margin. She had brought a knife and a clean cloth. She had brought nothing to say. She was cutting the first strip when she heard the gate. The mother stood at the entrance with a bundle of wild daisies in her hand. She looked at Elara. She looked at the knife. She looked at the moss in the cloth. Elara did not lie. She said the name of the sickness and the number twelve and held out the strip she had cut. The mother set the daisies down on her daughter's grave and said, take the rest. Take all of it. Do not come back here for anything but to tell me it worked.