Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,38

those qualities in a person.

“Oh, now, you know better than that. There are things still to be tried,” Cate said. She turned to me. “I’ve been teaching Larkin about healing. This and that. Now and then. Else it will all be wasted when I go.”

She closed her eyes, clearly worn out by all the talk.

“First we clean it,” Larkin said, swallowing. “Then the honey. Then we take care of the fever.”

I was glad to have an order to things.

It had been just hours since I’d found this place, this woman, her wound. If I’d had an order to this day, it might have sent me back to bed instead of out into such a surprising world:

Eat breakfast.

Feed Maisie.

Find bee-gift on trail.

See wild dog on path to river.

Go fishing with Samuel.

Build fire.

Get bee stung.

Learn that Quiet isn’t mine anymore.

Put snake in Daddy’s bed.

Climb mountain.

Find dog again.

Find the hag.

Make fire.

Cook rabbit and trout.

Feed Cate and Captan.

Go back down-mountain.

Look for Samuel and Quiet.

Feed potion to Daddy.

Get honey.

Get stung some more.

Climb mountain again.

Meet Larkin.

And now there was more to come, all in this one same day:

Clean terrible wound.

Pack with honey.

And surely other things I could not predict.

But it all felt oddly perfect, so we lit the lamps as the day went dark and washed our hands with tallow soap and spring water. Then we pulled Cate’s blanket down to her feet and stood staring at her poor leg.

My mother had taught me not to say the Lord’s name in vain, so I didn’t. But I did send a prayer skyward before I took up my spoon, and Larkin his, and we began to carefully scrape the maggots off Cate’s ruined skin, tapping our spoons against the lip of the jar so the maggots would fall, like dollops of oatmeal, to collect in the bottom.

We breathed through our mouths as we worked, the smell of her leg sweet and sour both.

Even Captan retreated to a far corner, though he watched us steadily from there, his eyes like small moons in the lamplight.

When we had removed the last of the maggots, I used my spoon to scrape away the pus welling up out of the holes that the fisher cat had made.

I decided that I would never again be able to eat custard without thinking of that pus.

“What does it look like?” Cate asked through her clenched teeth.

Larkin held the lantern close and peered at it.

“I need to cut you to get the honey in there.”

She nodded. “Clean the knife first,” she said, her whole body rigid, her feet arching with pain and the thought of more to come.

It didn’t make much sense to clean the knife when her leg was already festering, but I didn’t want to add insult to injury, and being clean was almost never a bad thing.

I took out my knife. “I’ll put it in the fire.”

Which I did, all of us quiet while the flames burned it clean.

Then Cate turned her face to the wall, tucked her little doll up between her shoulder and her ear, and waited for us to begin.

I handed the knife to Larkin. I could have done the cutting. I thought I could have done the cutting. But she had told him to do it, not me, and I confess that I was happy to let him do it. And not happy at the same time.

Larkin held the knife over the wound for a long moment, blinking and breathing hard, and then he made the cut with one hard, slow sweep, Cate jerking only a little, groaning only a little, the blood sweeping down as if Larkin had pulled a set of long red curtains across her leg.

When we pulled apart the edges of the wound, we could see that the infection had worked its way down into her muscle but not too far. I hoped not too far.

I took the honey jar from my pack and went out into the clearing, unscrewed the lid, tipped it quickly off, and waited, at a safe distance, for the trapped bees to fly away. When they did, I took the jar back inside.

Then, while Larkin held the wound open, I squeezed the comb like a wax sponge until the wound was full of honey. Then we pushed the wound closed with our fingers, the honey oozing up and gluing the seam mostly shut. For bandages, I cut the sleeves from my shirt—which my father had made for me with his own hands, which I hated to ruin,