Just another patient, she repeated like a mantra,just another patient, but it didn’t work. Elspeth was not just another patient, no matter how Charlotte tried to convince herself.
At some point, Elspeth fell asleep. Charlotte moved her collar aside, holding her breath. The veins seemed less extensive.
She let out a breath and smoothed Elspeth’s hair. Rather than waking her, Charlotte decided to give it another hour. To distract herself, she pored over the sketches of Arthur sitting every which way in his armchair but right, his nose in a book.
You’ll never findme, his voice echoed in her head. She pictured his face ghostly in the terrible trees outside. She swallowed.
“I will,” she whispered. “I will find you. I will.”
She put the drawings away; they reminded her of the faces and voices in the trees. She pulled the plant creature into her lap. It shaped itself vaguely into different animals.
Elspeth awoke with a lazy stretch. Charlotte was at her side in an instant. The plant creature clung to the back of her chair, as if to get its own look.
“How do you feel?” Charlotte asked.
“Better.” Elspeth breathed in deeply. “I can breathe. Ain’t so cold anymore, neither.”
“And the pain? The fatigue?”
“Gone,” Elspeth said. “All gone. What about—”
Charlotte peeled back her collar.
The black veins had vanished.
She touched Elspeth’s stitches, hardly believing what she saw. Smooth, unblemished tawny skin. The wound’s edges weren’t even red anymore.
She met Elspeth’s eyes. “It’s gone.”
Elspeth’s breath caught. “All of it?”
“All of it.”
Elspeth whooped and leaped up from the chair. Charlotte laughed, half crying with relief. Elspeth must be feeling better, she thought, to move like that.
Elspeth whirled them around the room until Charlotte was dizzy. The plant creature slung itself out of their way and curled up by the stove.
They stopped by the door, faces flushed.
“You did it, Lottie.”
Charlotte wiped her eyes on her apron. “Maybe.”
Elspeth laughed. “Maybe, nothing.”
“Maybe. It looks good, certainly, and your scar makes me hopeful, but I’ll have to repeat the test on another person, if I can—we’ll have to find more acorns—and you might need to repeat treatment to make sure the symptoms don’t return—”
Elspeth gripped Charlotte’s arms.
“Lottie. Take the win. You did it.”
Charlotte’s eyes darted over her face, down to her stitches. Half expecting the black veins to have returned. But they hadn’t.
“You really feel all right?”
“Yes.”
Charlotte couldn’t stop staring. She’d lost every patient infected with wood sickness. Two hours ago, Elspeth had been exhausted, cold, her breath rattling. Now she looked like she’d never been sick a day in her life.
