Rowan Ashfield's Arc

Chapter 4 of 5

By noon Elara's color had turned. She sat propped against a squared stone pillar at the edge of the clearing, one of the old markers Rowan had never dug out. Iron rings still clung to its base. Rowan had dragged a folded blanket behind her back and set the herb crate at her knee. She was going through it again, slower this time, and her hand shook when she lifted the clay jar of comfrey. "It's not enough," Elara said. She set the jar down. "The cut went deep. It needs a drawing poultice, not just a dressing. Willow bark, boiled soft. Bog moss, fresh. Wrapped hot." She touched her own forehead with the back of her wrist. "Fever's coming back by dark. If I'm burning, I can't walk. If I can't walk, he finds me here." Rowan crouched in front of her. "How much willow." "A double handful of green bark. Young branches. Not old wood." Her eyes closed a moment, then opened. "There's a tree by slow water. Long branches, hanging. Sap beads on the trunk like tears. You'll know it." Rowan took the empty coat and a small hatchet and went south along the track, where the ground softened and the reeds began. They found the tree standing alone at a bend in the shallow creek. Long branches trailed in the water. Beads of sap ran down the bark in dark lines. Rowan cut four young limbs low on the trunk, peeled the green inner bark in long strips, and folded them into the coat. On the way back they stopped at a wet hollow and scraped up two fists of soft moss from a fallen log. They kept moving. They did not know how far sound carried out here, and they were not going to stand still to find out. At the tent Rowan boiled the bark strips in the small pot until the water went the color of tea. Elara talked them through it from the pillar, voice thinner than before. Rowan mashed the softened bark with the flat of the dagger, layered it with the moss, and rolled the whole thing into a strip of clean cloth from her kit. Hot, wrapped, damp. Elara took it in both hands and pressed it to her side under the bandage herself. She breathed out once, hard, and leaned back against the stone. "An hour," she said. "Maybe two. Then I can stand." She looked at Rowan without softening it. "He's closer than I said. I lost a day to the fever. He could be here tomorrow." Rowan sat down in the dirt beside the pillar and rested the dagger across their knees. The fever would break. The hunter would not. They had bought her legs back and lost a day doing it, and now there was one night left to decide where two hunted people went from here.