Elara Rootwhisper's Arc

Chapter 3 of 9

The cure-all darkened in the clay bowl. Elara stirred it once and sat back on her heels. Six hours of simmer, then one hour to cool, then it lost strength fast. She had a map in her head of the twelve sick beds. Three lay past the ridge. Two sat by the ruined castle at the valley's north edge. The rest were spread along the low houses and the hill road. She could not walk to them all before the brew went flat. Kate Bush watched her from the tent flap and saw the count on her face. Kate said her girl could carry two doses to the low houses. She said she knew a woman with a mule who owed the medicine woman a kindness. Elara nodded. It was not enough. Four doses at best, and eight beds still waiting. A knock came at the pole. A boy stood there with a plum in his hand, held out flat, like a token. He did not speak. Behind him, half in the doorway light and half not, stood a pale girl in a white dress. Her feet did not press the dirt. Elara had seen her once before, at the child's grave, standing behind the mother where the mother could not see. The buried girl. The one who had given up the moss. Elara set the spoon down. She spoke to the boy first because he was solid. She asked who sent him. He said a woman on the hill had told him to come. She wore blue and had long hair and a face like the moon behind cloud. He said she was waiting at the broken castle with others. He said they would carry the flasks. He said the dead knew every door in the valley and would walk beside the living carriers so no one got lost in the dark. Elara looked at the ghost girl in the doorway. The girl nodded once. Elara understood the trade being offered. The moss had come from a grave. The debt ran both ways. She counted her small bottles on the shelf. Twelve. She had exactly twelve. At the sixth hour she pulled the bowl from the coals. She strained the cure-all through cloth and filled each bottle to the neck. Kate took two and her girl took two and left at a run for the low houses. The boy took four in a padded sack for the hill road. Elara wrapped the last four for the ridge and the castle beds herself and stepped out into the falling light. The ghost girl walked ahead of her without sound. A tall shape with long ears moved along the tree line, matching their pace. Elara did not ask what it was. By full dark, twelve doses sat in twelve hands. Elara stood at the broken gate of the ruined castle with an empty basket. The pale woman on the hill was gone. The ghost girl was gone. The trembling would stop by morning in eleven beds. In the twelfth, a small cough had already turned wet, and Elara knew the cure had come one day too late for that one.