Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,40

you with that.”

“Why would I mind?”

I shrugged. “My little brother thinks he should already be able to do things he doesn’t know how to do.”

Larkin frowned. “Why would he think that?”

To which I had no answer. I looked again at the book. “What does it say about fever?”

“I already know enough about fever.”

“But I don’t,” I replied.

So he turned the pages one by one, past drawings of how to bandage and carry a wounded person, to a section called “Inflammation.”

We read the section together. “We don’t have what they say to use,” he said. “But she taught me about willow bark, and there’s some in that jar there.” He pointed. “I’ll build up the fire. You fetch some water from the spring. We’ll make her a tea.”

“And what do we use instead of carbolic acid or . . . those other things in the book? In case the honey doesn’t work?”

He tipped his head again. “Why would you worry about what might not happen? The honey is good for now, and we can brew witch hazel for cleaning her. And if we need something else, we’ll try something else.”

I thought of my father. I thought of the elses I had tried and the others that were waiting their turn.

Larkin was reading more of the book, Captan watching Cate like a mother, while I went out into the night to tap the spring, so I was alone when I saw that the stars had also come to be with us. They leaned down as if they thought I might have something to say. Or as if they did.

But the wind had a louder voice, and it told me to hurry now. To heat some water for willow bark tea. To wake Cate so she could drink it. To make enough to take down the mountain for my father, though he had no fever.

Willow bark was one of the elses I would try.

“What else?” I asked the stars, but they were silent on the matter.

“Star Peak,” I said to them. “That’s what this mountaintop is called now.”

And I felt I had a perfect right to name it, as long as everyone else did, too. Like the river. Like the mountain itself, which someone else had named Echo, which was also Ellie’s Mountain. Which was also Larkin’s. Which was also Cate’s. And my father’s. And Samuel’s, too.

But I didn’t think my mother or Esther would want their names on any part of this mountain. And it made me sick and sad to think so.

We would need something else to bind us back to whole. All of us. To make them want to be where they were. To wake my father. To make me understand how I could be theirs and they mine and yet none of us the same, me least of all.

For all that, we would need another else.

And that was another else I meant to find.

Chapter Thirty-One

After we woke Cate and fed her the willow tea, I filled my honey jar with a cooled portion for my father and put it in my pack.

“Will you come back tomorrow?” Larkin asked.

But before I could answer, Cate said, “I’m grateful for your help, but I won’t need you now with Larkin here . . . and close by when he’s not.”

There was nothing rude about what she’d said. And it made sense that she wouldn’t need me, nearly a stranger, when she had this boy she’d taught how to read and how to make willow bark tea and how to pack a wound with honey. It made sense. But it also made me sad.

“I might need you, though,” I said. “My father is in a coma. That means—”

Cate’s eyes widened, bright with fever and . . . something else. “I know what that means,” she snapped.

Which of course was true: that she knew about medicines from the wild but also the sicknesses and cures in those books on her desk.

“What’s a coma?” Larkin asked, though if he’d been watching me these last months he surely knew that something had happened to my father, whether he’d seen the accident or not.

“It means he’s been unconscious for a long time,” Cate said impatiently. “And this is something you’re just now telling me?”

I took a step back. “I met you a few hours ago.” Though it seemed like days. “You’re sick and hurt. When was I supposed to tell you about my father?”

She flapped a hand tiredly. “Oh, well, all right then. But I know a