“I swear I’ll work it off. I don’t want you to think I’m taking advantage of you.” I was starting to lose track of how many times I’d done this to the poor woman. Was it three or four?
She stopped and looked at me as if offended. “Fallon, I can see the energy of your soul. You would never take advantage of me.”
I sagged in relief that she wasn’t upset with me, and then noticed she had loaded over fifty bottles into the basket.
“Whoa, that’s too much,” I told her.
She walked over and flipped the sign on the front toClosed.“It’s probably not enough. It’s time the West Side got an apothecary shop, at least for today. We will help as many people at the clinic as we can.”
My heart squeezed at her generosity, and I nodded. Avis truly was an amazing person.
We rushed outside and mounted Ember, Avis seated behind me. She was careful not to touch any of my skin, keeping herself inches away from me. With a click of my heels, we rode through town and then out the gate of the East Side, across the main road that divided the properties, and into the gate on the West Side. I pulled the horse right up to the tiny clinic, dismayed to see a line spilling out the door. The brick building was smaller than the cafeteria at school and full to the brim. Yanric flew down from the top of the building as Avis handed me three tinctures and I took off like an arrow, running inside with Yanric flying above me.
Opening the doors to the clinic, I was hit with the overwhelming smell of sickness, vomit, and sweat, and nothing good. There was a line down the hall with people sitting up against the wall, all waiting their turn. They clutched broken arms and bloody wounds. I finally reached my father, relieved to see that Mable had stayed with him.
When I took in the sight of his leg, dizziness washed over me. His pants were torn at the upper thigh area and a strip of flesh was hanging loose with a decent amount of blood soaking the pant leg. Mable looked up and saw me, quickly covering the wound with a bloody cloth she must have been holding to it. My father’s skin looked waxy and pale, and my hands shook as I fumbled with the bottles Avis had given me.
“Dad. I brought tinctures.” I held them up.
Mable looked at me warily. “He needs stiches.”
The woman next to him moaned and glanced up at me. I noticed that her face was bright red with fever. “You got a tincture for infection and fever?” she asked me.
I didn’t want to turn her away, but I was here for my father.
“I’m a seamstress. I can sew him up.” She indicated my dad and then looked at the tinctures in my hands with envy.
I glanced at my father, hoping for any sign of what he wanted to do, but he was just biting his lip, staring forward as if trying to keep it together.
Maybe I should have brought Ariyon.
No. It wasn’t worth time off his life.
“You sew fabric, not skin,” I told the woman.
She shrugged. “People ain’t that different. I done it before.”
It was true. In Isariah, if anyone needed stitches, it was done by the dressmaker.
I handed the pain tincture to Mable. “Give him a small sip of this for the pain.”
“Large gulp if you want to knock him out for a procedure,” Avis said behind me.
Right.
“Large gulp,” I confirmed to Mable.
While Mable fed that to him, I grabbed the other bottle Avis had given me.Infection-be-Gone.
“Take a sip,” I told the woman. “It’s for the infection.”
She grabbed the bottle with shaking hands and took a mouthful before handing it back. “Thanks, dearie.”
Avis kneeled next to the woman who said she was going to sew my dad up, looking at her as if scanning her energy.
“You have a headache too, don’t you?” Avis asked.
The woman nodded. “Like a horse is sitting on my skull.”
