Linnea's Arc

Chapter 9 of 14

By morning the barn stood open to the road. Linnea saw it the way the lord's men would. The wide doors. The shelf packed with pale blooms. The panther asleep in the straw. Nothing hid the plants that healed the whole province. Soraya paced the doorway. "They'll be here by midday," they said. "We can't fight soldiers. We can't outrun them either." Linnea grabbed cuttings and tried to stack crates across the doors. The purple panther watched, uninterested. The barn was too big to hide. Every board they nailed still showed the shelf behind it. Halfway through, Linnea stopped, hands full of splinters. "This won't work. They'll take one look and know." A cart rattled up the lane. Linnea's stomach dropped. But it wasn't soldiers. It was Mia, in her pressed dark suit and pearls, stepping down like she owned the ground. She had built a fair out of Linnea's name, then fled when the beasts appeared. Now she was back. "You look terrible," Mia said, smiling. "I heard the castle sent men. I came to save you." "You came to sell me again," Linnea said. "I came to make a deal." Mia walked the shelf, touching a bloom. A large tan dog padded at her heel, broad-chested, muscles moving under short fur. It stopped and stared at the panther. Neither moved. "That lord pays well for wonders," Mia went on. "Give me the plants. I'll tell him the healer already left. He gets his marvel. You keep your skin." Linnea looked at the shelf. At the blooms that cured for free. Handing them to Mia meant a locked castle and a price on every cure. The whole reason for the apothecary would die. "No," Linnea said. "The medicine goes to the sick. Not to a lord's shelf." Mia's smile thinned. "Then they'll burn it all." That was the answer. Linnea turned to Soraya. "We give it away. All of it. Now. Every plant, every cutting. To every person still in the field." They raised their voice to the waiting crowd beyond the trees. "Come take a plant! One each! Take them home! Grow your own!" People surged in. Hands reached for the shelf. Linnea pressed cuttings into arms, seed pods into pockets. Soraya loaded a child's basket. In minutes the shelf emptied. The blooms scattered across the whole province in a hundred hands. Mia stood in the stripped barn, her dog tense beside the panther. "You just gave away a fortune," she said. "I gave away a target," Linnea answered. When the lord's men arrived, they'd find bare shelves and a healer with nothing to seize. But Linnea watched the crowd carry the plants off in every direction. No one knew how to store the brew. No one knew the guardians. The cure was loose now, and Linnea had no way to protect a single plant of it.