“If we get our chores done.”
“Okay. But only if you let me use my sword. Jonas never lets me use my sword.”
The sword in question was a stick bigger than Sasha, with which she was excellent at whacking people very hard. Before Charlotte could suggest, however, that it might be best if she didnotwhack her uncle as hard as she could with said stick once they got home, they disappeared around a corner. Sighing, she handed masks to Jonas and Agnes.
Agnes knocked on the chamber door but entered withoutawaiting response. She hurried to the luxurious four-poster bed, where a lump was piled with blankets.
“Gracie, dearest?” Agnes leaned close to the lump, lowering her voice. “The healer’s come, love.”
Charlotte’s skin prickled again at the endearment not meant for her ears, the tenderness in the old woman’s voice. The throbbing in her head worsened.
Gracie Buchanan turned over in bed, revealing a tanned, withered face threaded with black.
Jonas stepped back with a soft gasp. Charlotte drifted forward instinctively, her uncomfortable thoughts forgotten in light of a patient who needed her care.
She peeled the blankets back. “It’s all right.”
The black veins extended down the sick woman’s throat to her chest. Her neck was bandaged, but the veins concerned Charlotte far more. Even the whites of the woman’s eyes were threaded with black.
Charlotte’s skin crawled. Blood, pus, the throes of a difficult childbirth, a limb mangled during a shift in the cannery—none of them affected her, beyond the thought of how best to take care of them. The black veins characteristic of wood sickness, however, made her shudder. This was her eighth case this year, but she’d never get used it.
At least with those other things, Charlotte knew she could do something.
She felt Gracie’s forehead. No fever; there never was. But the woman’s breath rattled like a pot boiling over on a stove.
“How long has she been like this?”
Agnes wrung her hands again, her dark eyes fixed on Gracie’s face. “Since last night. She returned from a hunt two days ago—she loves hunting, you know, and she was itching for fresh venison—I told her we could send a boy, but shewouldgo—”
“Last night,” Charlotte prompted.
Agnes swallowed. “Yes, my dear, forgive me for prattling so, I can’t help myself—she returned two days ago with the most horrid claw marks on her neck. I was all a dither about it, but Gracie laughed and said it was fine, she’d had worse. But the next morning she shivered no matter how many blankets the servants brought or how much they built up the fire—she could hardly get up without leaning on me, insisted she was fine, but by afternoon I’d made her get back in bed, and around sunset—”
She broke off. Charlotte was about to nudge her when Gracie’s voice came, like a rusty pulley.
“Aggie?”
“I’m right here, love.”
The other old woman’s lips cracked into a smile. A thin, wrinkled hand crawled through the blankets, searching for Agnes’s. Agnes surged forward, shunting Charlotte aside.
Charlotte turned away. The sick woman needed whatever help she could give. That had to be her focus right now.
She reached into her pocket for her travel kit, a small leather case in which she kept general-use herbs and teas, an ointment for pain, a paste to prevent infection in wounds, a tincture for sleep, tweezers, sewing scissors, thread, bandages, and gloves. She slipped it into her pocket each time she left the house.
“You understand I can only do so much.”
Agnes perched on the bed, smoothing her companion’s hair. She blinked but didn’t cry.
“Anything to ease her, however little. She can barely breathe.”
She squeezed the other woman’s hand then sailed away in a rustling of petticoats.
Charlotte let out a breath. Life had long blown her about like a ship in a storm. The sea had stolen her husband, the forest her father and, in a sidewise fashion, her mother; her ownillness had left her weakened. Her work as a healer was the one thing that gave her a sense of control. No matter how bad an injury or illness, nine times out of ten she could heal or cure it. If she couldn’t, she learned something from the failure and was more prepared next time.
The sickness reminded her it was an illusion. She had no control. No matter how practical she was, how proper, how determined, how learned, she was at the mercy of forces beyond her ken. No different than the fishermen whose lives and livelihoods were at the whim of the sea. The villagers who had been impoverished by the very ventures that had promised to enrich them. She’d lost every person who’d fallen ill to the sickness, barely able to do more than ease their passing—sometimes not even that. And despite the increasing number of cases, she knew so little about it.
It affected only those who entered the wood. The villagers’ many precautions had no effect—of course; Charlotte had admonished herself more than once for thinking it could be otherwise. The sickness took hold quickly and killed quickly, in weeks, in many cases, but just as often within the week. Aside from the telltale black veins, it caused headaches, pain, fatigue, and difficulty breathing, but not fever. It was so like yet so unlike the myriad other illnesses she’d treated over the years.
