Jasper Dallow's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

By morning the beast was still breathing. Jasper knelt beside the crate and lifted the linen off the shoulder. The stitches held, but the packing was brown with old blood, and the last clean roll of gauze in his satchel was already gone. He opened every drawer on the veranda. Flood water had ruined most of it. Two crusted bottles. A tin of salve gone rancid. Nothing he could put against an open wound. If he could not keep the shoulder clean for the next three days, infection would take the animal before the stitches ever came out. He walked into the village with an empty satchel. The apothecary shutters were still nailed closed from the flood. He tried the shrine road anyway, past the mud-brick shrine with its worn frog carvings, hoping someone had reopened a stall behind it. No one had. He stood there a long moment, then turned toward the sweet shop. Orla was sweeping flour off her step. She was the baker two lanes over, a quiet young woman he barely knew beyond a nod at market. He had never asked her for anything. He felt foolish before he spoke. "I need clean cloth," he said. "Any cloth. Boiled linen, sugar sacks. The beast on my porch will die without it." She looked at his face for a second longer than felt normal. Then she set the broom down. "Wait here." She came back with a stack of muslin flour sacks, folded tight, and a small paper twist. "Honey. For the packing. It keeps wounds from turning." He stared at her. "How did you—" "Take it." She pressed the bundle into his arms. Under the glass counter behind her, he saw a pair of green dragonfly wings pinned flat, catching the light. He was halfway home when Willa Emberstone stepped out of a doorway, tool belt clinking, her patched overalls stiff with dried mud. She was the woman who fixed every roof in the village. Jasper had watched her patch strangers' gates for years while her own porch sagged in the rain. She looked at the flour sacks under his arm. "Heard you lost your kit in the water," she said. "Who told you that?" "Everyone." She unclipped a wooden crate from the handcart behind her and set it at his feet. Inside: fresh bandage rolls, two brown bottles of iodine, a sealed pouch of sutures, a thermometer still in its paper. "Traveling healer came through last week. He owed me a roof. I took it in trade instead." Jasper opened his mouth. She waved him off. "Pay me when the beast walks." He carried the crate and the sacks back up the slope. He boiled water. He stripped the old packing, cleaned the shoulder with iodine, and pressed honey and fresh muslin into the wound. The beast's breathing steadied under his hands. For the first time in a week, he had enough to keep it alive. Then he heard the fledgling cough again, wetter than yesterday, and a second crate answered.