Lily Brightbloom's Arc

Chapter 3 of 8

By dawn the hollow smelled wrong. The hare's leg had swollen tight. The jay's torn wing wept a yellow crust. The squirrel would not open its eyes. Lily had cleaned the surface cuts with water and moss, but the deeper wounds needed things she did not have and did not know how to make. She had watched creatures die alone in the woods for three winters. Now they would die in her arms instead. That was not the sanctuary she had promised. She left the sparrow watching the others and flew for help. She went to the badger first. Retired physician. Forty years of patients. Morna had once said his name like a debt she wouldn't pay. She found him in a sett dug into a hillside, sorting dried roots on a slab. Round glasses. Leather vest with a brass chain. He did not look up when she landed. "I have four wounded animals," Lily said. "Deep wounds. I don't know what to use." "Then you shouldn't have taken them," the badger said. "They came to me." He set down a root. "Fever?" "Two of them." "Yarrow for the bleeding. Willow bark for the fever. Boil the bark, don't steep it. Honey on the open wound, not sap. Sap will rot the flesh." He spoke without pause, as if reading. "Change the dressing twice a day. If the leg smells sweet, the leg comes off." Lily wrote nothing. She was memorizing his mouth. "I don't have yarrow or willow," she said. "Then you have three dead animals by tomorrow." He looked at her for the first time. His eyes were tired behind the glasses. "I don't travel anymore. I gave that up." "I'm not asking you to travel." "You're asking me to care." He turned back to his roots. "Fairy healing was better than any of this. Your kind forgot it. Ask the old wood what you lost." "What old wood?" "The one that remembers." She found the tree spirit at the edge of a stand of grandfather pines, half sunk into the ground like it had grown out of the roots and forgotten how to leave. Bark skin. Leaves at the shoulders. Two lit coals for eyes. It watched her without moving. "A badger sent me," Lily said. "He said your kind remembers fairy healing." "We remember," the spirit said. Its voice came from under the ground. "Your kind stopped asking. That is not the same as forgetting." "Three animals in my hollow will die tonight." "Then tonight you learn one thing. Not more. Come." It lifted a hand. In its palm lay a ring of pale petals, layered like a small crown, faintly warm. "Press this to the worst wound. Speak the animal's fear aloud. The petals take what the body cannot hold." Lily took the crown. It weighed almost nothing. "One wound," the spirit said. "Choose."