Elara Rootwhisper's Arc

Chapter 4 of 9

Elara walked back from the ruined castle with the empty basket knocking her hip. The moon rode high over the valley. Her tent sat dark at the end of the path. She lit the small lamp and knelt by her shelf. The clay jars stood in a row. She lifted each one and set it down. Yarrow gone. Feverbark gone. Willow strips gone. Bone-knit powder, one pinch left. Twelve brews had emptied her. She had given the sickness her whole stock, and now she had nothing to hand the next person who ducked through her flap. The next person came before dawn. A man carried his wife in his arms. Her ankle was swollen and blue. Behind him a boy waited with a burned hand wrapped in a rag. Elara sat them on the mat and looked at her empty shelf. She had a pot, a fire, and clean water. She had no leaf, no root, no salve. She told the man to wait. She stepped outside into the cold. Kate Bush stood at the pole with her daughter asleep against her shoulder. The girl's breathing was even. The trembling had stopped. Kate said the low houses had all held through the night. She said she had come to help. Elara told her the shelf was bare. Kate looked past her at the man and the boy on the mat. Kate said, "I know a hill." She said her brother had walked it. She said things grew there that grew nowhere else. Elara knew the hill. Everyone in the valley knew it. She had never climbed it. She took her basket and her knife. Kate walked beside her to the foot of the slope and stopped there. Kate said she would stay with the man's wife and the boy. She said her brother would not want her on the hill again. The climb was short and steep. A boy in a grey hoodie stepped out from behind a stone. He glowed faintly at the edges. He said his name was Ollie, and then he said it again, louder, as if to be sure. He said the lady had sent him. A tall silhouette moved along the ridge above, long ears against the sky. Behind Ollie stood a small girl in a white dress, and behind her, further up, a woman with long hair and a pale face waited in the grass. The woman did not come closer. She only pointed. Ollie led Elara to a patch under a leaning stone. Comfrey grew there in thick green mats. Beside it, silverleaf. Beside that, a low bush of feverbark she had never seen this fat. The ghost girl knelt and pressed her small hand flat over one plant, then another, showing which to cut and which to leave for next moon. Elara cut until her basket was full and her knife was dull. She climbed down at first light with more medicine than her shelf had held in a year. Kate met her at the bottom and took half the load without a word. The debt to the hill had grown again. Elara would owe it, and pay it, and owe it again. For now, she had enough to treat the man's wife, and the boy's hand, and whoever walked in next.