Linnea's Arc

Chapter 4 of 14

By dawn the strangers had come. They stood in the yard, along the fence, down the lane. Not the neighbors Linnea knew. These faces were new, drawn by word of the healer in the cellar. The winged creature still trembled in Linnea's hands. One door, one stool, and a crowd that stretched out of sight. The borrowed cellar could not hold this. Soraya climbed down the steps and shut the curtain behind them. "They've trampled the garden," they said. "A woman fainted by the well. I sent her son for water." Soraya had cleared crowds before, had built this small room with their own hands. Now their voice shook. "This isn't a cellar problem anymore, Linnea. We need a real place. Walls. A door people can knock on and wait behind." Linnea set the creature on the shelf beside the plants. "There's no such place here." "There is," a voice said from the stairs. Mia came down in her dark suit, pearls at her throat, stepping over crates like she owned them. She had offered fame once, and Linnea had refused it. Now she smiled as if the refusal had never happened. "The old barn past the field. Empty for years. Big enough for a hundred people to wait out of the rain." She held up a folded paper. "I already spoke to the owner. It's yours, if you want it." Linnea studied her. "And what do you take?" "Nothing today." Mia laid the paper on the stool. "Call it a gift. Like the little flying one. I only want you working somewhere that fits the crowds I'm sending." Linnea looked at the paper. Then at Soraya, whose hands still trembled. Then up the steps toward the swelling noise. The cellar held one person. The barn held a hundred. Every sick face outside needed calm, and calm needed room. "I'll take the barn," Linnea said. "But not from you. I'll speak to the owner myself. I'll pay for it with cures, not with my name." Mia's smile stayed fixed. "You think there's a difference." She climbed the stairs. "There isn't. But go and see." That afternoon Linnea walked to the barn with Soraya and the owner, an old farmer leaning on a cane, his breath rattling. Linnea sat him on a hay bale and drew the sickness from his chest. He breathed clean and wept. "The barn's yours," he said. "For as long as you heal here." Soraya carried the plants across the field. They set the blue and purple blossoms on a long shelf, the soft-leaved bloom by the door. Linnea swept the floor and hung a curtain. A real place at last. Room for the waiting, room for the sick, room to work in peace. But through the open door Linnea saw the crowd already turning toward the barn. Mia stood among them, counting heads. She had wanted them here all along.