Mercy Sweetwell's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Mercy Sweetwell set her mother's recipe card on the oak table and knew, before she read a word, that the card was lying to her. Not on purpose. Twelve years of flour dust and thumbprints had eaten the middle line. Where a measure of honey should have been, there was only a smear and the ghost of her mother's hand. Mercy needed the true recipe tonight. Forty patients in the east ward were coughing black, and she had come to believe, without telling anyone, that her mother's honey cakes carried the thing that had once pulled her own family back from the same fever. Everything except her mother. She worked in the back room of the little bakery on the corner, the one that let her use the ovens after dark. The front windows still glowed with the day's leftover cakes and braided loaves. Behind her, the ovens ticked as they cooled. She lined up what she remembered: honey, oats, a spoon of something dark her mother had always added last, humming. The humming was gone. The spoon was gone with it. The back door opened without a knock. Matthias Corvus stepped in first, the beak of his mask tipped down. Behind him came the scarecrow from the pumpkin field, straw at his collar, hat in his hands. Mercy had hidden the doctor in the ward's linen room a week ago. She had not expected to see him again. "Guards passed the front," Matthias said. "We came the alley." "I can't finish this," Mercy said. She pushed the card toward him. "There's a line missing. She used to say it out loud. I never wrote it down." Matthias read the card the way he read a chart. "Honey. Oats. Then something." "Then something," Mercy said. Scyther leaned over the table. He touched the smear with one stitched finger and sniffed it. "Buckwheat," he said. "Dark honey. My field grows it. Your mother bought from us." Mercy looked up. "You knew her." "I knew the order. Every fall. One jar, buckwheat honey, ground with the comb." Mercy's hands went still on the table. Her mother had walked to the town's edge each autumn and come back with a jar wrapped in cloth. Mercy had carried it as a child. She had forgotten the color. "I have a jar at the field," Scyther said. "Sealed since last harvest." Matthias was already at the door. "Now. Before the shift change." Mercy folded the card into her apron. She banked the oven and took down her mother's mixing bowl. The missing line was not lost. It had a name, and the name had a field, and the field was a walk she could make before dawn. She followed the two of them into the alley with the bowl under her arm and a new fear settling in behind the old one: if the honey was right, then the cure was real, and the ward was waiting.