JANE Snake's Arc

Chapter 6 of 8

Jane walked back toward the graveyard in the early light. The council would block her no matter what she offered them now. The youngest member had chosen safety over risk, procedure over principle. She couldn't build the hospital on their terms and she wouldn't build it on the church's land. Nathan met her at the temple ruins where the daughter's brothers had been sheltering. One of them stood near the broken stone archway, holding a leather pelt the size of a man. The fur showed patterns of brown and gold, thick enough to have come from something that survived winters in high country. He'd found it beneath the alcove where J.F.'s journal had been hidden, wrapped in oilcloth that had kept it dry for forty years. The other brother knelt by the opening, pulling out what looked like physician's tools—bone saws, suture needles, scalpels with handles carved from antler. Jane recognized the marks of field surgery equipment, the kind hunters carried when they worked far from settlements. The first brother set the pelt down and lifted a small object from his pocket. An amber sphere, smooth and polished, with a rose preserved inside. Someone had carved a heart into the amber's surface. Jane took it and turned it over. The rose looked fresh despite being frozen in time, its petals still holding their shape. J.F. had been a hunter and a healer both, working in the mountains where people got hurt far from help. She'd funded the church's care for the poor with what she earned from both trades. The deacon's family had buried that history along with the thirty fever victims because admitting J.F.'s work would have meant admitting the church owed everything to a woman who killed and healed in equal measure. Jane handed the amber back to the brother and looked at Nathan. She'd been trying to convince council members with journals and leverage, offering them legacy and principle. But the hospital didn't need the council's permission or the church's land. It needed teachers who'd actually kept people alive, and students desperate enough to learn from anyone willing to teach them. The daughter's brothers had no home and no future on land the church wanted back. Jane had forty years of a dead healer's knowledge and two living boys who'd just uncovered proof that the best physician this region had ever known had learned her trade outside any official institution. She told Nathan to help them carry everything up to the house. They'd start classes tomorrow.