Fennel Thistledown's Arc

Chapter 6 of 21

The next morning Fennel gathered her students to teach a burn salve. She reached for the recipe in her head and found a gap. Two parts crushed leaf, or three? She stood at the table, hands still, mouth open. Lily watched her. The traveling girl waited with her pestle raised. Fennel guessed at two parts and moved on. But the doubt gnawed at her. If she guessed wrong on feverbloom next time, a child would die. "Stop," Fennel said. "Put the pestle down." Both girls looked up. "I have carried these remedies in my head for fifty years. My head is getting old. Just now I forgot a dose. If I forget the wrong one while you watch, you learn it wrong. Then you kill someone." The traveling girl went pale. Lily set down her tools. "Then write them down," Lily said. "All of them." "With what?" Fennel snapped. "I have no book fit for it. Scraps of bark won't last." Lily crossed the room to a shelf and pulled down a heavy thing wrapped in cloth. She had bought it, she said, from a merchant weeks ago, meaning to keep her own notes. She unwrapped it. An old book lay in her hands, its covers dark and cracked, its edges bound in worn brass. Inside, blank pages waited, thick and yellowed. A red ribbon marked the front. Fennel touched the cover. Her fingers shook. "This is worth more than my cottage." "It's worth nothing empty," Lily said. "Fill it." So they began. Fennel spoke each remedy slow. The traveling girl wrote in a careful hand, since her letters were neatest. Lily checked every dose against what she had read in her own books, and twice she caught Fennel misremembering a step. Each catch stung. But each catch proved the point. Alone, Fennel would have taught it wrong. They worked till dusk. Feverbloom first, three flowers, no more. Then the burn salve, two parts leaf, which Fennel now recalled clear. Page by page, her life passed into ink. The girls asked questions. Fennel answered, and the answers went into the book too. By dark the front pages were full. Fennel closed the cover and pressed her hand flat on it. For the first time in years, her knowledge did not live only in her tired skull. If her memory slipped now, the book would hold the truth. A knock came at the door. Fennel opened it to an empty step. On the ground sat flowers, deep purple with black centers, tied in a black ribbon. A folded note lay beneath. She read it by candlelight. It came from the farmwife whose son she had saved. The note thanked her and warned her: the coughing sickness had spread. Whole families were coming. They would arrive within days. Fennel looked back at the book on the table. She had the remedies safe in ink now. But writing them was one thing. Her students had never treated a crowd alone.