the treeline for movement, a flash of chain mail or a blue sash, the covered face of a raider, or whoever attacked Silas’s friend. I wait, counting heartbeats, until sixty have passed and I’ve seen nothing else. Then I run, as fast as I can back into the hut, closing and bolting the door behind me and leaning against it, taking a moment to calm down before I head back to my patient.
Silas is standing at the table, staring blindly at the vials and mess on it, and I hold the stick out to him, telling him to strip the bark. He startles and begins to do as I’ve asked, and I set about cutting the man’s trousers away, lamenting because the fabric is fine, tightly woven and sewn with small, neat stitches. Whoever this man is, he’s come from somewhere with money. I peel and tear the fabric, stiff with dried blood and muck, away from his skin.
“Can you save him?” Silas asks, so quietly that I have to look at him to be sure he’s spoken.
“I don’t know.” I begin to splint the man’s leg, binding the stick to it with the bandages Silas made.
“Please try. I’ll do anything. Anything.” Silas’s gold eyes fix on mine, too bright, and I nod, once, before turning back to my patient.
I’ve always been good with plants. On our old farm there was a small patch of land that my father gave to me for my thirteenth birthday, good, fertile ground; he marked the plot out with a tiny fence he made himself.
“That’s for our Errin,” he announced to us all as we looked at the bare earth. “So she can grow her herbs and save us a fortune at the apothecary.”
That was a joke; the four of us were rudely healthy. Until the day my father fell we’d never called on the apothecary for any reason other than for me to request an apprenticeship.
The first I knew of his accident was when my brother raced on to the village green. I was sitting with Lirys, half listening to her telling me some story about Kirin when Lief arrived, bone-white and shaking.
“Come,” he said, and terror stabbed at my heart as I lifted my skirts and followed him.
We raced all the way home in silence.
At the farm he ran through the kitchen, leaving a trail of muddy prints across the stone floor. I remember thinking how cross Mama would be when she saw it; how she’d scold us both and make us clean it up. I didn’t know she’d already cleaned it once, washing Papa’s blood away.
I followed the trail through the farmhouse to my mother and father’s room.
“What happened?” I gasped, bracing myself against the door frame. Mama sat beside my father, holding a cloth to his leg. The room smelt of metal and alcohol and fear.
“Bloody bull,” Papa said, trying to raise a smile on his ashen face. “I was moving him from the east paddock and he went for me.”
“He gored you?” I asked.
“No,” Lief said. “Father outran him. But he went over the fence too fast and landed on a pitchfork. It gouged his leg.”
“Show me,” I said, walking towards the bed and gently pulling my mother’s hand away.
The blood didn’t gush out like a fountain, or pulse with the beat of my father’s heart, and relief flooded me. Nothing vital had been ruptured. It pooled in the wound instead, the gash becoming a reservoir.
“We need to clean it.”
Mama nodded and took a deep breath. “What must I do?”
“We need fresh water,” I said. “Lief, boil the kettle, keep it boiling. Wash one of the copper bowls out with boiled water, then fill it, add salt, and bring it here. Mama, if you bring the brandy and clean cloths, and fetch your sewing kit. Clean the wound, clean it thoroughly with the water. Only the saltwater.”
“And the brandy?”
“Give it to Papa. As much as he wants.”
“What will you do?” she asked.
“I’ll be in my garden.”
I’d been learning under the apothecary for two years. Five days a week I entered his fragranced rooms and learned about herbs and plants and cures. More than once I’d argued good-naturedly with him over advice written in the Materia Medica and some of the methods he used to treat patients, but Master Pendie was a kind man, and he’d forgotten more about medicine than anyone else knew.
Papa was so proud of me. “You have my grandmother’s brains,” he’d say. “She was clever enough