"Keep it dry," she said. "Change the binding in two days."
He looked at her. Something moved in his face that she didn't like, a flicker behind the eyes, there and gone.
"Me thanks," he said. And left.
She watched the direction he took, the pace of him, the way he moved through the crowd without once glancing at the stalls on either side.
A man who knows where he's going,and isnae shopping.
She stood with the lungwort in her hands and the unease sitting cold in her chest and could not name what she was looking at, only that she was looking at something. Then the crowd closed around him, and he was gone, and she gathered her basket and turned for the road back to McArthur.
She smelled the crowd before she saw it.
The particular quality of gathered people. Bodies and breath and wet wool and the specific charge in the air that happened when a crowd had a purpose, and the purpose was not a good one.
It reached her before the courtyard opened up, before she could see what was assembled under the arch. She came through the gate and stopped.
The council stood in a line beneath the archway. Six men, their expressions arranged.
Villagers pressed in from both sides, murmuring, their faces carrying the bright, uncomfortable energy of people who had been told something alarming and had not yet decided what to do with it. And there, at the center, held up by two guards on either side with his arm bandaged in her clean linen, was the man from the market.
He was standing differently now. The slump was gone. He was upright and deliberate, with an audience behind him and guardsbeside him, and the wound that had been quietly extended toward her on a rain-damp street was now displayed for the consideration of the assembled company.
In his other hand he held a bundle.
She looked at the bundle.
Cloth. Bone. A strip of something dark wound between them. Herbs, recognizable, specific. The kind of combination she used in James's second-stage preparation and left as discarded matter in the bowl by the worktable.
Her stomach dropped.
Those are mine.
Those came from me table.
The council elder stepped forward. A careful man, she had noted that about him, careful in the way of men who understood that what they were about to do would be remembered and had decided to do it with gravity.
"A matter has been brought before this council," he said, his voice carrying to every corner of the courtyard, "requiring investigation for the safety of everyone."
"He wasnae there before me."
Her voice came out steady. That surprised her.
She walked forward through the crowd, which parted. She stopped ten feet from the man. From the bundle.
"That man came to me at the market," she said, to the council and to the crowd and to anyone listening. "I treated a wound on his arm. I gave him lavender oil and clean linen. That is all I gave him."
"She lies," the man said. His voice was louder than it needed to be.
"She lies," someone echoed from the back. Then another voice. Then two more.
Already seeded.
They came here already knowin' what they were going to say.
She looked at the bundle. At the herbs she recognized. At the bones, the crude knot of the cloth, the symbols pressed into it that had never come from her hands.
"I have never made that," she said, quieter now, which sometimes carried further than volume. "I have never made anything like it. Those herbs were mine, but they were to be discarded later."
