Chapter Three #2
Anna frowns. For it to have gone on so long is indicative of an infection in the lungs.
She reaches for the dried mullein and anise, putting a generous scoop into a small square of cloth and tying it closed.
“Boil water and pour it over the leaves—just a healthy pinch will do—let it sit a few moments until you see a change in color. No more than three cups a day of each, and try to rotate them as opposed to mixing. The more fluids, the better.”
The woman takes the medicine with a graceful hand. “Thank you. How can I repay your kindness?”
“Give what you can.” It’s the same line Eira often gives those who seem to have little. They’ve been paid in mismatched buttons of bone and wood, in a half a day’s labor splitting firewood. No amount is too little and no service too small.
The woman cradles the medicine to her chest and reaches into her pocket. When she holds out her hand, there is a ring nestled in the lines of her palm.
It’s unlike anything Anna has ever seen.
Pale and polished, it gleams against her skin—detailed carvings etched into its surface so delicately it almost looks like a trick of the light. When she picks it up, she realizes it’s some kind of bone or ivory.
“I can’t accept this.” Anna knows next to nothing of jewelry, but she’d have to be a fool not to see the value. “This is far too much for what you’ve been given.”
The woman’s hand closes over hers. “Please. This is what I have. I insist.”
It still feels like an uneven exchange, but there’s a serenity in her gaze that brings Anna some measure of peace. Wherever this ring came from, it isn’t treasured by her; no pain with its parting.
Anna accepts.
The next morning, Anna hands the ring to Eira. Her mentor looks at it, turning it over in the early light, before returning it. “It’s yours.”
Anna balks. “But—”
“Your patient, your payment,” she says, shooing away any argument Anna might have with a flippant wave of her hand. “Besides, such a tiny thing isn’t made for these old hands. I couldn’t wear it if I wanted to.”
Anna lets her fingers close around it, secretly pleased but still uncertain. They’ve never designated a payment before—everything they’ve earned, they’ve shared. “Are you sure?”
“Try it on,” she says, grabbing an empty basket. Anna remembers that they had planned to dig up the parsnips today.
She hesitates for half a breath, twirling the ring anxiously between her fingers, before she finally slips it on. Eira is right—it fits like it was made for her.
“Come on, then. Tubers won’t dig themselves.”
Anna nods numbly, but forces her feet to follow. When they go digging into the heavily mulched bed, the polished bone gleams up at her. Anna has never had anything so beautiful to call her own.
Spring comes and the snows melt.
Anna helps Eira treat everything from foot fungus to infection, influenza to dysentery. Some conditions don’t have cures, but the older woman shows her what to give to treat the symptoms. Anna learns that saving someone doesn’t always mean curing them.
There are women who come regularly, who only stay long enough for Eira to place a bag of blended herbs in their hands and pay her before ducking out the door. Eira calls it a treatment to ‘move the menses’.
Anna knows that’s not all it does.
The church adamantly condemns any interference of procreation—preaches that part of God’s plan is to “be fruitful, and multiply”.
Anna thinks it’s an easy thing to preach when they’re not responsible for any hungry, hollow-cheeked children of their own.
Easy when it’s not their bodies being tested, their lives being risked.
Some come to Eira for other womanly concerns: painful cramps, lumps in the breast, a confirmation of pregnancy.
As with everything else, she has treatments for some, but not all.
One thing Anna is surprised they haven’t seen is a delivery, but Eira explains that they’re far too remote for such patients to knock on their door, and Anna goes on to assume she’ll likely never see one.
Then, in the middle of November, Anna’s evening is interrupted by a pounding on the door and an anxious shout.
Anna opens the door to a heavily pregnant woman being supported by a young man she assumes to be her husband.
Her hand clutches her stomach, her face damp with sweat.
The young man’s expression is pinched with fear. “Please,” he gasps. “Please, I don’t—”
Eira curses under her breath, ushering them in. “What are you doing, bringing her all the way out here?”
The husband wipes the sweat from his eyes, a manic fear blowing his pupils wide. “The midwife is so ill she can hardly stand. Please, I didn’t know where else to bring her!”
Eira shoves an empty bucket into his hands. “Go, fetch some water. Anna? Help me get her on the bed.”
Anna brings her arm around the pregnant woman’s back and offers her hand. “Come on, this way. What’s your name?”
The woman groans, her grip a vice and her name slipping out from between clenched teeth. “Emma.”
Anna helps her sit at the edge of the bed, glancing over her shoulder to see Eira behind her with blankets. Her voice is calm, despite the hurried way she flits across the room. “All right, Child. Lay back and let me have a look.”
Anna holds Emma’s hand as Eira checks beneath her skirts. She waits, anxiously, for Eira’s assessment.
When she looks up, there is an aged smile gracing her lips. “My, you’ve been strong to make it this far. Baby is nearly here.”
Emma cries, her stomach going visibly taught. “What do I do?” she gasps, the words tripping off her tongue. “What do I do, I’ve never—”
“Sh,” Eira hushes. “Breathe. When you feel ready, sit up and lean on dear Anna here. Your body will do the rest.”
The couple sleeps by the fire, the light casting them in warmth and shadow. A baby girl lays, wrapped in one of Eira’s knit blankets, between them.
The labor went quickly and without incident. A blessing, Eira confided in her after, considering how far they traveled and how far into her labor she was—how long the poor girl fought her body’s instinct to push just so she can make it to their door. Many wouldn’t be so lucky.
Anna’s not sure she has ever witnessed anything so miraculous and terrifying in the same breath.
But the look in the new mother’s eyes, the hello she breathed into her baby’s skin, makes something in Anna’s heart ache. It’s a quiet pain, a shadow she never noticed lurking, but now she sees it at the edges of her vision—the ghost of something she will never have.
Then, in the space of one breath and the next, she realizes that she’s missing more than opportunity.
The pit in Anna’s stomach grows. She can’t shake the question churning there; can’t escape the sharpened edges of uncertainty.
When she goes to their shared bedroom, the candle has already been blown out and she can’t tell if the older woman has fallen asleep.
She whispers her name into the dark. “Eira?”
A soft grunt—a sign to continue. It still takes Anna a moment to find the words she’s looking for. She sits on her bed, drawing her knees up to her chest. “I haven’t had any monthlies.”
They were irregular and short before—a testament to how starved for nutrition her body was—but they were still there. It’s been nearly a year since she was arrested and left to burn, and Anna hasn’t bled in all that time.
There is a moment of silence before Eira’s sigh fills the space.
In the dim light, Anna can only just make out sympathy in her gaze.
“Nothing is without price, Child. Not even the gifts of gods.” She takes her hand, rubs a callused thumb over Anna’s knuckles.
“But believe me when I say, this one is a mercy. There is no pain like outliving a child.”
Any dreams Anna once had of a family had waned as the pale blotches on her skin spread, but somehow Eira’s confirmation still strikes her like a blow.
That night, when she curls up under the blanket and lets the tears drip silently from her cheeks, she wonders how it’s possible to grieve the loss of something she never expected to have.
The seasons pass. One year becomes three, then five, then eight. Something inside her, something she had never realized was broken, mends.
Summers are spent harvesting without fear of the cold winters to come, her belly full and her days content.
She continues to learn from Eira, collecting little pieces of information and committing them to memory so she can be more than a passive witness when the next person comes seeking help.
Every time she thinks Eira couldn’t possibly have more to teach her, the older woman delivers something new.
In the winter, they close the shutters tight against the cold and let their hands find meaning in other tasks.
Eira spends more time on her reading and writing, spelling out words in the ashes before making the letters disappear with a sweep of her hand so she can start all over again.
The sounds fall from her lips in a broken, stuttering mess and her letters are shaky and crude, but she reads. She writes.
It’s more than Anna has ever expected herself capable of. A life more comfortable than she has ever known or dreamed for herself.
She should have known it couldn’t last.
On the table is a bag.
Brimming with bottled oils and herbs and heavy with an insinuation that makes Anna’s blood run cold. The basket of elderberry she collected slips from her hand, hitting the floor with a dull thump and the scattering of dark fruit across the stone floor.
Rifling through the open shelves, Eira doesn’t bat an eye. “Clean that up for me, would you? I could use another jar.”
Anna can’t take her eyes off the bag, her feet rooted to the floor. “You’re leaving.”
“I am.”
Anna feels the words like a knife. Even though she knew, the moment she passed the threshold what her answer would be. “But why?”
“It’s my time to go.” Eira turns, a ruddy clay jar of what Anna recognizes to be a supply of dried chamomile in her grasp. Her stare is sharp with meaning. “It’s your time, too.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t want to!” She’s at peace here. More so than she ever remembers being. “I want to stay.”
“What we want isn’t always what we need,” Eira says, setting the jar on the table before reaching out and setting her ancient hands on Anna’s shoulders. “Immortality is a fickle beast, dear girl. Stay too long in one place and you’ll rot there.”
“But I’m happy—”
“No,” she interrupts, “You’re not unhappy. It’s not the same.”
Anna’s lip trembles, a prelude to the tears threatening to spill over her cheeks. “But where will I go?”
“Anywhere. Don’t you see?” Her hands lower, clasping hers. “The world is yours to enjoy, yours to savor. Don’t squander the gift you’ve been given on this empty corner of it.”
Her gaze is without end and, in that moment, Anna recognizes the same ageless wisdom she saw in Khiran. In this way, they are the same. Eira is older than she appears and more than what she seems.
“You’re not human.”
Eira laughs, the sound rich and warm. “Just figuring that out, are you? Did you think Khiran just dropped you off with some old crone?”
“I thought he was just getting rid of me,” she murmurs. The truth of the confession is an ache over her heart—a bruise she’s buried with time and avoidance. “He said it was so I could learn from you, but I thought that was just an excuse.”
“Khiran has too many flaws to name,” Eira hums. “The greatest is caring too much about things he shouldn’t.”
“That doesn’t sound like a flaw.”
She waves a hand. “This is a lesson Time will teach you. Or it won’t. Khiran has yet to learn it himself despite my efforts, so I won’t waste my breath.”
Anna frowns, irritated. “It’s been years and he hasn’t even bothered to visit. I hardly think he cares.”
Thick salt and pepper brows rise. “Hasn’t he?”
Anna’s argument withers into bitter realization.
She thinks of all the patients Eira insisted she treat alone over the years—how she barely afforded them a glance before handing over their care.
She thinks of the ring on her finger.
A stumbled step back, Anna grips the table for support and distantly registers the sound of a dish smashing at her feet. She doesn’t flinch. Neither does Eira. They are caught in a tangled web of half-truths; the strands woven over years without Anna ever noticing. “You knew.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She shrugs. “Not my business.”
Her words sting; a slap of betrayal. This whole time, she had believed Eira to be a friend—and maybe she was, in her own small way—but now Anna realizes what she should have probably suspected from the beginning. Her loyalties lie with him first.
Eira sighs, no doubt catching her flash of hurt. “You came to me to learn. You’ve done that and then some. There is nothing left for me to teach you.”
Hands clenching in her skirts, Anna fights to keep her voice from cracking. “Is that all? Am I only worth your time if I’m your student?”
Eira takes her hands, an anchor in the storm. Her calm eyes, crystalline and deep, remind Anna of the legendary waters said to heal all ailments. “Dear Child, you are worth more.” Her lips lift at the corners as her gaze sweeps over Anna’s face. “He chose well.”
“But for what?” she whispers, pulse drumming in her ears. “What have I been chosen for?”
She pats the back of her hand. “To put some good back into the world.”