The sickness was gone.
“Well?” Elspeth croaked.
Unable to speak, Charlotte brought her the vial.
Elspeth whistled but broke off coughing midway through. Charlotte hovered, a hand at her back, until she quieted.
“I’ll be damned, Lottie,” Elspeth rasped. “You did it. What about the others, then?”
Charlotte handed them to her. Elspeth examined them.
“All right—harder to say. But it looks better, don’t it?”
Not clearly enough for Charlotte’s taste. The water in the other vials was brown with flecks that might’ve been desiccated plant matter or some remnant of the sickness. But they didn’t seem as black as they’d been, and the grass—there was no question its sickness was gone.
Charlotte sucked in a breath, leaning on the back of herchair for support. The anticipation had sapped some of her energy. The plant creature wrapped around her, offering more stability. She patted it gratefully; it had proven a good aid in the last two days.
“It’s a good first step.”
Elspeth laughed, stopped to fight another coughing fit. “First step! Lottie—”
Charlotte shook her head. “It’s good, I’m not denying that, but we don’t know if it’ll work consistently. Or if there are any side effects. Or if it’ll work on humans as well as plants, for that matter. But...”
Straightening with the plant creature’s help, Charlotte pulled Elspeth’s collar aside. The black veins at her scar had unwound farther, stretching up toward her throat and down toward her breast.
Charlotte swallowed. “I guess we’re going to find out.”
She found a glass in one of the cupboards and dipped it in the remaining acorn water, reconsidered and added more. Dosage. Another thing to figure out, if this worked.
“Start with this.”
Elspeth downed it. “Now what?”
“Now we wait.”
They passed a torturous hour in which Elspeth asked about her whistle playing and Charlotte named her favorite tunes. But their minds were on the acorns and the black veins at Elspeth’s collar, her increased exhaustion over the last couple of days. The plant creature wound around Charlotte’s feet, up her legs, over the back of her chair. Charlotte’s eyes kept flickering toward Elspeth’s shirt, but she forced herself to hold off checking until the whole hour had run out.
Elspeth sounded winded. “Well?”
“It’s hard to tell.”
Charlotte kept her voice light, but internally she panicked.She couldn’t tell whether the black veins had receded. Did it need more time, or a higher dosage? Both? Or was it simply not working?
She cleared her throat. She was a healer, for God’s sake. This was the whole business of her life. Not something to panic about.
“We’ll let you sit another hour and see what happens.”
Another hour made no change, but another dose would empty their supply. Charlotte’s hands shook as she gave Elspeth the rest of the acorn water. She had no more acorns to do a new batch. If this didn’t work—
Stop it. She didn’t usually panic so much when treating a disease.
But she’d never meaningfully treated the sickness. This was a new treatment, yes, a possible cure, and it had worked on the grass. But a blade of grass was not a human body.
It was agonizing. Elspeth slumped in her armchair with her eyes closed, her breath rattling. The plant creature swayed between them, its tendrils turning from Charlotte to Elspeth and back.
She’s just another patient.
Charlotte busied herself doing what she could to ease Elspeth’s pain and breathing, but it wasn’t much.
