Chapter 43
Chapter
Forty-Three
The floor of Hazel’s practice groans as I step through the door. I wince, hoping no one is near enough to hear it.
“Cedar?” Elara’s whisper floats down the hall, and my shoulders relax.
“We are both here,” Cedar says.
Elara sighs as she steps out from around the corner that leads to the kitchen. “Thank the gods,” she says. “I’ve been going mad waiting for you, jumping at every noise.”
My eyes roam over the space. A cart is knocked on its side, linens and instruments strewn across the floor. My mind does me the favour of providing the image of Hazel knocking it over as she was dragged out of here. My stomach churns at the mere thought of her.
Yet aside from that, everything looks exactly as she left it, like she just left to go to the town square and never came back.
“It feels wrong being here,” Cedar says. I can’t bring myself to disagree. It feels as if we are stepping into a place we shouldn’t be. It reminds me of the way I felt when I thought about those old caves as a child, like it’s somewhere that should stay untouched.
Elara looks around the space hopelessly. “You two will know better than I if she had any special trinkets, anything precious to her.”
My mind goes straight to her father’s pocket watch. It was the one thing she always held close. I would be surprised if it wasn’t on her person even at the end.
“Yes, okay,” Cedar mutters before slowly heading down the hall. It’s as if all of us can feel it, that sense that we shouldn’t be here. But I begin moving through the house, regardless.
I feel sick looking at all the things Hazel has touched, all the things that were hers.
Her notebooks lay across her table, a dried-up quill lying beside them as if she was in the middle of writing patient notes. A teacup sits on the edge of the table, still half full. “What happened to her patients, Elara?”
Elara shakes her head. “I saw a few of them at Thorley’s earlier. She’s overwhelmed. I tried to help her, but she was getting frustrated, talking nonsense…”
I bite the inside of my lip. “She gets like that when she’s tired.” The new influx of patients won’t help. “What are you going to do with this place?”
She rears back. “Me? I’m not going to do anything with this place. It’s Hazel’s.”
“It was,” I nod. “But if anyone is Hazel’s successor, it’s you. She would want her legacy to live on, not for this place to become a ruin.”
Elara shakes her head. “I can’t—”
“Help!” a voice rasps through the front door. I instinctively pull my dagger from my skirts as the both of us swing around to see a man slumped over in the doorway. His hands gripping the frame are the only thing holding him up.
“Gods.” I slide my dagger back in my pocket and move to slip my shoulder under his arm. Elara does the same, and we drag him into the kitchen.
“What happened?” Cedar rushes in, pulling out a chair for him.
I just shake my head before crouching in front of him. “Sir?” His head lulls against his chest.
I stand up, checking his pulse. It’s thready, but it’s there. “Sir?” no response.
“Elara,” I say, “keep trying to wake him.”
She does as I say, rounding his head to pat him lightly on the cheek. “Sir, we need you to wake up.”
I crouch down again, trying to pull the leg of his pants up, but they won’t budge. His skin is pink and swollen.
“What can I do?” Cedar asks.
“Scissors,” I say. She nods before heading towards the toppled cart.
The man groans as Elara slaps him slightly harder. “That’s it, welcome back,” she says. He winces in pain as I press down on his leg, his eyes still closed.
“Here.” Cedar appears beside me with a pair of scissors in hand.
“Thanks,” I say, taking them and cutting straight through the man's pants, revealing a large, infected wound on the front of his leg. The site is all different shades of purple and red, with yellow pus seeping from beneath his skin.
“Oh,” Cedar gags, taking a step back. “Librarians aren’t supposed to see this kind of thing,” she mutters.
“See if you can find some vinegar,” I say. “We’ll need it to clean the wound.”
“In the storage closet down the hall,” Elara adds.
“I can do that,” Cedar mutters as she quickly turns to head down the hall.
Elara pulls her hand from the man's forehead. “He’s running a fever.”
“He needs fluids,” we say at the same time. A small smile appears on Elara’s face.
“Ginger and peppermint,” I say. “She should have some here.”
“I’ll do it,” she says before she zips through the kitchen.
“Oh, and cold—”
“Cloths,” she finishes. “I’ll get them.”
I can’t help the way my ears lift, even as I stare at a seeping wound in front of me.
As I look closer, I notice multiple punctures along the side of his tibia.
The sound of the faucet turning on and off sounds far away as I inspect the wound, the size of the punctures and their distance from each other, the curved shape hiding beneath the oozing infection.
Elara appears once more, placing wet cloths on the man's forehead and around his neck.
“I think it’s a bite,” I murmur.
I look up to see her brows drawn together. She comes around the table to look at the wound once more. “What in the world could leave a bite that big? A wild dog?”
“Maybe,” I say. “But a dog would have torn at the flesh, and the puncture wounds wouldn’t be so clean…”
“What would leave a wound like that?” she asks. “A snake?”
“Too many punctures. A snake would only leave two where its fangs were.”
Elara moves uneasily beside me, crossing her arms over her chest. “What? So something with fanglike teeth all across its jaw?” My stomach churns at the image forming in my mind.
I shake my head. “I can’t think of anything like—”
“Uh, guys,” Cedar’s voice is wary. I turn around to see her standing in the hall, vinegar in hand but her eyes wide. “I think we have a problem.”
She backs up until she’s in the kitchen with us before a man in all black steps into the room. But when I see his light eyes, I recognise him immediately.
The young shield doesn’t have his sword drawn, but my hand still gravitates towards my pocket.
His eyes jump around the room, landing on the man and the putrid wound on his leg. His jaw goes slack, and I can see in his eyes that he won’t hurt us, not right this moment anyway.
“Cedar,” I murmur, holding out my hand to her. “Pass me the vinegar.”
She does so without taking her eyes off the shield. Elara has her eyes locked on the boy all the same, all of us aware of the situation we are in.
“Are you alone?” I ask.
His eyes jump to mine. “Y-yes,” he stumbles out. “I was sent to check for looters.” He clenches and unclenches his fists, and his eyes keep flitting to the man who groans in the chair beside me.
“Do we look like looters?” I ask.
He just shakes his head. “Is he…” he gestures to the man. “Is he okay?”
“He won’t be if we don’t treat his infection now.”
He nods now. “Can I... can I help at all?”
I remember the way he was in the woods that day, when we buried Alice. He wasn’t there to scare people, or to assert his authority as a shield. He just wanted to be there, to pay his respects to the woman who had died by his captain's hand.
“You can help by protecting this place from looters.” I raise my brows as I dip my chin, hoping he’ll catch my meaning.
He nods tersely. “No one will get in here, miss.” And then he disappears out the door.
I see the tension escape Cedar’s body in a breath.
“He doesn’t seem like much of a shield,” Elara mutters, leaning to look out the window at where he now stands guard.
“That’s because he’s not,” I say, kneeling down in front of the patient and unscrewing the cap on the bottle of vinegar. “Not in his heart, anyway.”
The man in front of me yells out as I tip the liquid over his leg, lurching forward in the chair, his eyes flying open.
Elara grabs onto his shoulders, holding him back as the vinegar spills over his wound, washing away the loose flesh, blood, and pus.
“Should’ve given him a bit,” I mutter, but it’s too late now. He hisses as the vinegar sinks into his wound, but at least he’s awake.
I pick up the cloth that fell from his forehead, using it to clean around the site, wiping away the liquid from below the wound.
“Everything okay in there?” A male voice calls from outside.
“We’re fine!” The three of us call back.
“Can you find some honey, Cedar?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says before I hear her rummaging through the cupboards.
“What is your name?” I ask the man, who is now panting in front of me. “Sir?” He’s still breathing harshly.
“Water,” I say, and Elara quickly fills a cup, coming back to tip it down the man's throat. He swallows it down, gripping Elara’s wrist to tip faster as he gulps it down.
She moves to refill the cup, and he opens his eyes once more to look down at where I’m cleaning the area of the wound. “Jasper.”
“Jasper,” I breathe. Simply hearing his name is a relief. “I’m Everleigh,” I say. “This is Elara, and Cedar,” I gesture to them as Elara comes back with more water, gently handing him the cup.
“We will get you some tea to help with the fever soon,” I say. “But for now, drink as much as you can. Can you tell me what happened?”
He shakes his head, placing the cup on the table. “I don’t remember much,” he says, his brows furrowing as he tries to remember. “I was out by the well, just filling up my bucket so I could boil my wife a tea.”
“How long ago was this?” Elara asks, sitting down at the table.
“Here.” Cedar passes me a jar of honey.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“I don’t know how long it has been,” Jasper says. “I tried to crawl back to my house, but I must have been going the wrong way because I ended up in the forest.” He shakes his head once more, his words shaky. “This is the first place I’ve come across in days.”
I don’t know what to say. I couldn’t imagine stumbling my way through the forest with an infection like this for days, there’s no doubt in my mind about how confused he would be, the sickness getting to his head.
“I’m going to put some honey on the wound, okay?” I say. Jasper nods. “It should help calm the wound and stop anymore bacteria growth at the site.”
Jasper simply nods, and when I begin spreading the honey over the wound, he closes his eyes. I am reminded of Iris and her burns. I wonder how she is, how all of them are. If Imogen has been teaching the women like I did.
Before I’m finishing up and washing my hands in the sink, Jasper’s head lulls in sleep.
“Is it okay that he’s sleeping?” Cedar asks.
“It’s fine,” I say. “He just needs to have that tea when he wakes up.”
I pick up the cloth thrown on the countertop, drying my hands when Elara says, “Why did you never become a healer?” I place the cloth back down. “I mean, you know enough. Look what you just did for him.”
It’s the same question Rylan asked me weeks ago. Cedar stays quiet, fiddling with the hem of her skirts as I pull out a chair at the table.
“I know a lot about healing because I watched my brother do it,” I say.
“When our parents had an accident, the healers couldn’t save them.
Finnick made it his mission, you could say, to become a healer that could have saved them.
He wanted to know everything there was to know.
He even went to Rynwood once to study under a healer there.
” I can’t help but wonder if that healer still lives, or if the witch hunts landed on his doorstep too.
“But my brother was no good with ingredients. He knew what to use for which sicknesses, but he didn’t want to find them, to create salves and balms and teas.
So he enlisted me to become his apothecary, and so that is what I did.
” I shrug. “It gave me a purpose, something to focus on other than the grief, and I was good at it. I liked it. But I wasn’t like Finnick.
I didn’t want to be the person with another’s life in my hands.
I didn’t want to carry the responsibility of whether someone lived or died.
It was enough to make sure that none of my remedies hurt anyone, and sometimes they did. ”
I shake my head and stand up. “I never wanted to be a healer.”
I look over Jasper once more, his mouth slightly open as he sleeps. I hope he’s finding peace in the dark.
“I need to meet Rylan,” I say.
Cedar lets go of her skirts. “I want to come with you.” I meet her gaze, and the look in her eyes tells me there is no arguing with her. I couldn’t even if I wanted to, not while Elara sits nearby.
“I can stay with him,” she says. “I’ll make sure he drinks the tea.”
I nod. “I’ll make sure the shield stays.”
“Okay,” she nods one last time before Cedar and I make for the door.
“What do you mean, you want to come with me?” I say out of the corner of my mouth.
“If I’m going to be an accomplice in this, I at least want to see what it is I’m hiding.”
We don’t speak as I pull open the door, the young shield turning to look at us. “Elara,” I say. “Our friend, she’s going to stay with him. Can you stay?” I ask. “Keep watch for any more looters?”
“Sure,” he says.
I give him a nod before we walk away. I pause, turning back to look at him. “What’s your name?” I ask.
“Reed, miss,” he says, his back straightening. “Reed Edwards.”
Edwards. He is definitely from Rynwood. “Thank you, Reed Edwards.”
“You’re welcome.”