There was suspicion in the children’s gazes when the tonic woman nudged closer. It took a bit more coercing, and a few more rings added to the trove of rewards on my palm, but soon each young one had a dose of the tonic in their bellies.
Sniffles and silent tears remained, but a few curious smiles broke out when I was careful to hook the elven silver around their curved ears. They did not have holes in their lobes, but I managed to fashion some of the rings into bracelets with long blades of grass with the promise to return with chains or twine soon.
“Thank you,” the woman whispered. “It’s an elixir to stave off fierce disease. Since we don’t know what it is, it’s the best prevention we have.”
“What are the symptoms?”
The woman glanced over her shoulder, a shudder rolling through her body. “Thrashing, and shouting. They’re delirious. Screaming in pain. It is as though something is rotting them from the inside out.”
There were toxins that could cause a mind to go rabid in the deep wood of the fading isle. I wondered if alver lands had something much the same.
“Not even Niklas has found a tonic to stop it,” the woman went on, “and he has been here since before midday.”
“Is this Niklas a healer?”
“An Elixist, the lead of the Falkyn guild, and brilliant with his mesmer.”
The Falkyn guild, the smugglers.
I looked at the longhouse. Distant shouts were there. Folk kept bringing things from inside and tossing them into the pyre. A smuggler, but it seemed the alver clans trusted him as their hope for this house.
“Meriba.” A woman raced for us, a man with a russet beard holding a bundled child in his arms at her back.
I tried not to stare, but the woman had odd eyes, green so bright they almost glowed and the dark center was sliced through like a cat’s.
“Lady Tova.”
The woman adjusted a leather satchel on her shoulder. “We’ve talked about lady, Meri. Call Bard lord all you wish, he loves a goodpreen, but not me. Can Kåre remain with you? Boy won’t sleep without one of us lately.”
“Of course.” Meriba took the small boy from—I assumed—his father’s arms.
“We’ll be back . . . when we’re back.” The cat-eyed woman studied me for a long breath, then rushed toward the longhouse.
“Have you met Tova and Lord Bard?” the woman asked. “He’s one of the queen’s brothers.”
Gods, they were part of the royal house.
“Tova is one of the king’s Kryv. And this boy”—Meriba bounced the sleeping child who couldn’t have been more than three turns—“is the cleverest thief in the making. He’d take to your silver like these littles.”
She chuckled and settled on the grass with the young one, humming a gentle folk tune.
I drifted toward the other children. The boy was clearly the eldest, maybe around eight turns.
“You’ve been brave while caring for your sisters. What is your name?”
“Pavva.”
I opened the thick bindings on the book of fables. “Do your sisters enjoy stories, Pavva?”
He glanced at the pages, using the back of his hand to wipe beneath his nose, and nodded.
“Do you read?”
Again, the boy nodded.
“Would you like to read to them, or should I?”
Pavva hesitated, then pointed to me, and nestled beside his young sisters.
