Irina Jace's Arc

Chapter 6 of 9

Irina stood in the clearing at dawn the next morning, looking at the wagon she'd spent three days building and one night fixing. The hearing was tomorrow, and she had four vials on a reinforced shelf that wouldn't slide. It should have felt like enough, but when she tried to picture herself presenting it to the guild, all she could see was their representative pointing at the empty spaces where more remedies should be. She opened her journal and counted the stars on remedy pages—feverfew, yarrow, birch bark mixture, creek moss paste, and elderberry steep. Five proven treatments, but she'd only bottled four. The elderberry page made her stop. She'd marked it with a star after watching Maren's neighbor recover from a cold, then watched the same result with a trader two weeks later. It met her standard. But elderberries were dangerous if harvested wrong, and she'd made that mistake before. She walked to the purple and white stall she'd set up at the clearing's edge, where she kept her working supply of dried herbs and empty vials. The elderberries sat in a wooden box at the back, each one dried at exactly the right ripeness—dusty bloom still visible on the skin, picked during that four-day window she'd learned to recognize after her first failure. She could make the tincture in an hour and add it to the wagon's shelf, giving her five remedies instead of four. But if she rushed it now, if she made even a small mistake because she was thinking about the hearing instead of the work, she'd be doing exactly what the guild expected—cutting corners to look more impressive. She picked up one of the dried berries and rolled it between her fingers, feeling the slight give that meant it had been harvested correctly. Then she put it back in the box and closed the lid. Maren found her an hour later, sitting beside the wagon with her journal open to the elderberry page. She looked at the closed box of berries on the stall, then at Irina, and asked why she wasn't adding a fifth vial. Irina said she could make the tincture, and it would probably be fine, but "probably" wasn't the same as "certain." She'd rather show up with four remedies she trusted completely than five remedies where one might be rushed. Maren sat down and tapped the elderberry drawing in the journal. She said the page already had two stars, which meant Irina had already proven it worked. Making one more batch from properly harvested berries wasn't rushing—it was using what she already knew. Irina looked at the drawing and realized Maren was right. She'd been so worried about appearing overconfident that she'd stopped trusting her own documentation. She made the elderberry tincture that afternoon, following the exact process she'd written in her journal two months ago. When it was done, she held the vial up to the light and saw the pale amber color that meant the chemistry was right. She labeled it with the same careful symbols she'd used for the others, then added it to the wagon's shelf between the yarrow and the birch bark mixture. Five vials now, each one representing something she'd tested, documented, and verified. The wagon still looked simple compared to a guild shop, but it was hers, and it was honest. She rolled it back and forth one more time to make sure the shelf held, then covered it with canvas for the night. Tomorrow she'd take it to the hearing and let them see exactly what she'd built—not a promise of what she might do someday, but proof of what she'd already done. And if they said it wasn't enough, she'd know they were wrong.