Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,90

I stood there with dusk coming on.

“What’s wrong, Ellie?”

I didn’t want to think about losing Quiet. Losing anything. “Nothing. Go on in to supper now or you’ll get no pie.”

But I almost called him back as he scampered off toward the cabin.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

“This first part shouldn’t hurt a bit,” I told Cate as I settled a lantern and the glue pot next to the bed, “but I brought some willow tea down from your cabin and never used it. Would you like some now . . . for what’s coming?”

“No,” she said, after a moment. “It will lower my fever, and I need that fever right now, to fight the germ.” She nodded at the glue pot. “It’s cool enough?”

I nodded. “I think so.”

It felt odd to be sitting with Cate, intent on her instead of my father, who lay just there, on the other side of her, without a sound or any suggestion of life except the slow bellows of his lungs, the heart that I could hear somewhere inside my own chest.

I turned all my attention back to Cate.

I untied the bandages again and gently unwrapped her leg.

“We should thank those bees,” I said, leaning close to study the wound. It didn’t smell as bad as it had before, but it was still foul enough.

“No should about it,” Cate said. “Do. Every day. Them and the trees and the flowers and every other kind of doctor to be had.”

Which was all true. And more besides.

“Now don’t move. I want the glue to stay put.”

Cate huffed. “Isn’t that the whole point of glue? And why go to so much trouble? Why not clean things out and wrap me up again?”

She looked like she already knew the answer to that, but I sat back, the pot poised in my hand, and gave her one anyway. “I thought of just pouring the vinegar again and again, over the bandages so they’d keep the cut good and wet for a day or two. But I think the cut needs to be drenched. I think the vinegar needs to seep all the way in to keep the honey soft and sink down deep to the bottom of the wound. I think we need to clean it out from the bottom up, else we might not get at all the corruption.” I leaned again toward the wound. “I don’t want it to spread any more than it already has.”

Cate smiled tiredly. “That’s a lot of thinking.”

I remembered what she’d said to me on the mountaintop. About whether a hag was the kind of person who would read books.

“A lot of thinking for a twelve-year-old girl?”

Which earned me her customary snort. “A lot of thinking for anyone.”

Slowly, bit by bit, I spooned the glue in a ring around Cate’s wound, then stirred what was in the pot while I waited for the stuff on her leg to firm up a bit.

In the lull, I wondered where Larkin was and hoped he would come back soon . . . and with no rancor.

It was more important that Cate got well than who got her there.

Captan, who had stayed as close to Cate as he could, climbed to his feet and stretched his front legs out before him, his tail in the air, threw his head back, and yawned a mighty yawn. Then he shook himself all over and looked at me expectantly.

“Do you need to go out, boy?”

“He’ll go to the door if he does,” Cate muttered without opening her eyes. “And he’ll ask for some supper after you’ve had yours.”

I spooned another ring of glue above the first, using the smooth side of the stick to nudge it back to neat, though I can’t say it was a pretty business.

“None of this should feel good,” Cate said. “But it does.”

I smiled. “When I’m sick, I love how my mother takes care of me. The sound of her moving around my bed while I lie with my eyes closed. How it feels when she lays a cloth on my forehead.” I began another ring of glue atop the last. “Almost worth being sick.”

Cate sighed. “I’d like to think I made someone feel that way when I was a nurse.”

Which astonished me. “Ask Esther,” I said.

She smiled. “I can smell the hot vinegar.”

I could smell it, too, sharp as broken glass.

She opened her eyes. “Won’t it melt the glue away?”

“It might, a bit. But maybe not too much. And if it does, it does.”

I didn’t care what