Elara Rootwhisper's Arc

Chapter 2 of 9

Elara walked home from the little graveyard with the cloth of Shadowmoss heavy in her basket. The mother's daisies stayed behind on the small headstone. Elara did not look back. She had the cure in her hands and eleven hours of daylight to brew it. She had one pot. She lit the fire in the tent before she set the basket down. The pot cracked when she lifted it onto the hook. A line ran from the rim to the base, thin as a hair. She pressed her thumb along it and felt the split move. She had used this pot for twenty years. Her grandmother's book said the cure-all must simmer without break for six hours. Water would seep out. The fire would find the crack. The brew would fail before the second hour. Elara sat down on the tent floor. Twelve people were shaking in their beds. The trembling man was already dead. She could walk to the potter at the far end of the valley and be back by dusk, and lose the day. She could try to seal the crack with clay and pray it held, and lose the batch. She had one more choice, and she did not want it. She pulled down the three flasks her grandmother had left her. The blue one glowed like clean water. The purple one held small bright stars. The green one banded in gold sat between them. Each was a finished remedy for something else. Her grandmother had said, when you have nothing, break what you have. Elara had never broken any of them. A knock came at the tent flap. A woman she knew from the low houses stood there with a girl behind her. The girl's hands were tucked under her arms to hide the shake. The woman said her name was Kate Bush and she had walked an hour to find the medicine woman. She said her neighbor's boy was worse. She said, please. Then she looked past Elara at the cracked pot and the cold hearth and said nothing else. She did not add anything. She waited. Elara took the blue flask down. She uncorked it and poured the serum into her largest clay bowl, the one she used for winter stores. The bowl was thick and whole. She set it directly in the coals and banked the fire around its sides. The serum thinned and steamed and turned the color her grandmother had drawn. She laid the Shadowmoss in strip by strip. The bowl held. The simmer began. She had given up a remedy she could never make again to save a brew she could. Two flasks stood on the shelf now instead of three. The cure-all darkened in the bowl and would need six hours of watching. Kate Bush sat down by the tent flap without being asked. Outside, the light was already tilting toward afternoon, and Elara counted the hours she had left before the first of the twelve stopped shaking for good.