Sickness, mostly. It was rampant in this part of the Moores. The girl stood in the narrow aisle between beds, bare feet silent on the packed earth. Her hair glowed in the dimness, silver threads catching Polis lantern-light. Three menders froze mid-motion, hands full of bandages and tinctures.
They didn’t greet her. Just stared.
She paid no attention to the way their eyes narrowed, the way their mouths thinned. Her focus had already latched onto the shelves lining the central pole. Bottles of every shape and color, packed close together: tinctures, salves, dried herbs, ground powders.
She reached out and plucked a bottle from the shelf.
“Don’t touch that,” one mender snapped, recovering first. An aging man, his sleeves stained near the cuffs. “Those are measured.”
The girl uncorked the bottle anyway and sniffed it. Her nose wrinkled. She made a face like a child tasting something unpleasant, then shoved the cork back in with surprising care and set it down in exactly the same place.
Or near enough.
She moved on. Another bottle. Another sniff. A small, thoughtful hum. A tilt of the head. She brushed her fingers along the row as she went, feeling out the different textures of the bottles with the pads of her fingers.
Zarrek watched, jaw clenched. Disorder. Disruption. This was how accidents happened—dosages spoiled, labels smudged, a healer reaching for one thing and grabbing another because some barefoot idiot had rearranged the shelf by smell.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” a second mender said, this one older, his scalp shiny with sweat. “This is a work tent. Not a—”
“She doesn’t listen, Tor,” the first one muttered. “I’ve seen her in camp. She wanders wherever she wants.”
“She’s Resh’s pet, that’s why,” someone else whispered.
Zarrek shot them a look. They could say what they wanted about the girl, but not Resh.
The girl stepped away from the bottles. Her head turned, eyes sliding sideways as a low, ragged groan cut through the tent. One of the wounded men twisted on his cot, sweat dripping from his beard, teeth sunk into a strip of leather. The stench coming off the wound at his thigh punched even through the strength of the herbs: sweet, rotting, wrong.
“Don’t touch him,” Tor snapped. “The rot can spread to healthy flesh.”
She walked toward the cot anyway.
“Leave her,” the younger one said. “If she gives herself the sickness, she won’t come here again.”
“I don’t need trouble with His Quintessence,” Tor frowned. "You too, Brez. If she gets the rot, he'll have our heads."
Zarrek straightened, a warning already on his tongue. He didn’t give it voice. Didn’t know why.
She reached the bedside, quiet as a wisp of smoke. The soldier’s eyes were glassy with fever, breath coming in wet, hitching gasps. The bandages wrapped around his thigh were crusted black and brown, the flesh beneath swollen and angry. It had the look of a wound that would eat its way up the body and into the heart.
Zarrek had reached into men’s bodies to rip out arrows. Had held men while they vomited. He’d waded through more types of filth than he could recall over his unnatural long life. Yet even he would never have touchedthat man’s rotting wound. Yet the girl did. She pressed her small hand against his bandaged thigh without a hint of disgust.
“Girl,” Brez hissed. “Do not—”
“Quiet,” the girl said. “Your voices drown out the Rivers, and the sickness lingers.”
Not a command. Not quite. But the way she said it scorched the air.
The hairs on Zarrek’s arms stood on end.
She closed her eyes.
Her shoulders loosened, then trembled. Her breathing slowed, then deepened. The lantern’s flame flickered, as if the mana in the air had thinned. For a heartbeat, Zarrek thought his vision blurred; then he realized it was the light—a faint, silvery shimmer blooming under her palm and seeping through the bandages like starlight through cloth.
The stench of rot thinned. Shifted. Turned to something else. The sour-sweet wrongness faded, replaced by the more familiar smell of old blood and sweat. The soldier on the cot jerked. His eyes flew open; clear and sharp, as if the fever had never taken root. He sucked in a breath, thenanother, chest heaving.
His wild gaze locked on the girl, and he whispered in a hoarse voice – “Sokâr…”
The menders stared. One dropped the cloth in his hands.
