“Pick the Eulia last,” Mara said, scribbling the flower’s name at the bottom of the list. Vauntner hovered beside the kitchen table where she sat, basket and sheers already at hand. “You know the rest?” She handed him the paper, watching his eyes scan it. After a moment, he nodded.

  “Come get me as soon as you’re back,” she instructed, and he hurried out the door to fetch her shopping list of herbs and flowers from the garden.

  Quint was in the sitting room entertaining Nick, and she’d left Eli with the girl–Carissa, they’d learned–trying to mend her body enough to give Mara time to brew. Mara hadn’t bothered requesting that Carissa’s caretakers–Lev and Farin, Eli had told her–leave the room, but she would when she returned. Farin, the older man, looked ready to collapse himself, and Lev was one wrong breath from outright hysteria.

  Mara set about transcribing instructions from her Codex. Treatment for Frostfoot venom was a combination of specially made topical paste and copious volumes of god’s leaf tea. The tea was easy–she already had a pot brewing–but the topical would take at least a day to prepare, which meant they needed to keep Carissa alive until then.

  Eli assured her he could hold the girl in some state of life for a day at least, provided they got some fuel in her body. According to Lev and Farin, she hadn’t eaten since the spider bit her and hadn’t had a sip of water in over a day. If they didn’t get something in her stomach in the next hour, Eli might not be able to hold her even to dusk.

  When the tea finished brewing, Mara fortified it heavily with honey and took the pot and a small cup to Vauntner’s room. Eli still sat on the edge of the bed, a hand on Carissa’s wrist. Lev sat by the girl’s head in a kitchen chair Mara had brought him, stroking her hair. Farin slumped in an armchair by the window, staring blankly. Mara was desperate to know about Eli’s connection to Farin, but now was not the time for casual introductions. All she knew was all she needed to know–the men weren’t a threat, and they cared for Carissa like she was their daughter. Nothing else mattered until the girl was out of danger.

  All three men looked to her when she entered. Lev offered her a watery smile, Eli a tense grimace, and Farin a blank and hopeless stare. Answering all three with a neutral smile, Mara set the cup and pot on the table by the bed. She sat opposite Eli and leaned forward, resting the back of her hand on Carissa’s forehead. Her skin, previously scalding, felt warm and healthy to the touch.

  “Incredible,” she breathed, smiling in awe over at Eli.

  He returned her smile, but his eyes were tight. “It’s a stopgap.”

  “I know.” She tucked a strand of hair behind the girl’s forehead. “But the tea will help her body get rid of the toxin, and the topical will neutralize it at the source. If you can keep her alive until it’s ready, her chances are very good.” She cast a reassuring smile to where Lev now sat on the arm of Farin’s chair, the two men clutching each other’s hands. “Have you told them we think we can save her?”

  “I told them we’re going to try,” Eli said. “I don’t deal in false hope.”

  “Neither do I,” she said calmly. It wasn’t Eli’s fault that he didn’t realize she was floating right now in the water that buoyed her. She knew what she was doing, knew how to manage distraught families and keep them strong without misleading them. In this, she didn’t need a guiding hand or a tether to reality. But how could he know that, when all she’d done since they met was stumble along at the edge of some unseen cliff, constantly testing his ability to keep her from tumbling into consuming grief or physical peril or both.

  And why did any of this matter right now? It didn’t. All she had time for was Carissa’s and keeping her on this side of the line of life. But later, once the girl was saved? Later, it might matter. Later, she might take some time to hope that his opinion had shifted. That he would see her, competent and self-possessed in the face of a crisis, and realize that she was more than the version of her he’d known.

  And why should it matter at all?

  It shouldn’t. But it did. And it might never be the time to contemplate that.

  With Lev and Farin watching anxiously and Eli sitting stiff and focused across the bed, Mara managed to tip half a cup of lukewarm tea down the little girl’s throat. Then she enlisted Lev’s help–principally through gestures, but with Eli’s occasional translation–in getting the girl out of her dirty clothes, cleaning the dried sweat from her skin, and re-dressing her in a clean men’s shirt, which fit her tiny body like a nightgown.

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  Around when they were tucking her back in, Vauntner returned with an overfull basket of herbs, knocking on the door to let her know he was finished, and she left the sickroom to start brewing the topical.

  Vauntner, she quickly discovered, might not have had the stomach for physiking, but he was an absolute pleasure to brew with. He answered each task she gave him with either quick, competent performance or deliberate inquiry followed by quick, competent performance. He kept her informed of both issues and successes with the same calm, steady nerve. He seemed to know by instinct what information was worth distracting her from her own tasks and what could wait.

  They reached a break in their brewing about an hour in, and Mara slumped into a chair across from him, gratefully accepting the glass of cool water he pushed across the table toward her. She’d planned to check on Nick during this break, but she could hear him squealing with laughter on the far side of the kitchen window, utterly entertained, so she decided to take the break for herself.

  “Do you study brewing?” she asked after a long sip. Brewing, such a central component of the physik’s repertoire, was generally considered a feminine endeavor in the Provinces. On the rare occasion anyone talked about it, that was. But perhaps things were different at the Enclave.

  Vauntner flushed a little at the tips of his ears and averted pale blue eyes. Mara wondered how old he was. Judging by Quint and Eli’s conversation that first day, she guessed he was about ten years Davy’s junior–old enough to have been a toddler when he left the Enclave. That put him in his early twenties, by her measure.

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “It’s only physiks and healers who learn to brew. I’m just a scout.”

  “Well, if you ever get the chance, you might consider picking it up. At least as a hobby. You’re a natural.” She stood, pushing her chair in. “You’ve got the next three steps? I ought to check on Carissa.”

  Vauntner nodded, reciting from memory, “Boil the slurry, take the tapgrass from the oven before it burns, and strain the kote tea after it cools.”

  Leaving Vauntner to his competence, she returned to the sickroom. Eli still held his position at the girl’s side, and Lev had reclaimed his seat in the chair. Farin now stood with his back to the room, looking out the window. For a moment, Mara felt guilty about Nick’s happy cackling as he played outside, somewhere beyond the outer wall–such a noisy, stark contrast to Carissa’s lifelessness.

  As soon as she stepped over the threshold, Lev shot up from his chair, his body as taut as a drawn bow about to fire, bloodshot eyes shooting bolts of desperation everywhere his gaze fell.

  She offered him a smile that she hoped conveyed all that Eli would be so opposed to saying–namely, that everything was going to be alright.

  Whatever magic Eli was working, Carissa was better by every measure Mara could take. Her temperature remained normal, her skin had regained a hint of color, and her pulse had slowed from a wispy, arrhythmic flutter to a weak but steady tick.

  “Eli,” Mara said, leaning her hip against the bed so they faced each other, her knee brushing his. His eyes–previously closed–slid open and he looked up at her, brows lifted in silent question. “It’s time to take a break.”

  He grimaced and dropped his gaze to Carissa’s face. “It hasn’t even been two hours, Mara.”

  “Exactly. Not even two, and at least twenty left to go, just until the topical’s done and we’ll still need you after that. I’m not asking you to be done, just that you take fifteen minutes to get some fresh air and something to eat.”

  He shook his head, angling his face away from the sunlight slanting through the window. “She’ll deteriorate if I stop.”

  “The toxin doesn’t work that fast. You’ve got her strong enough to hold it off at least fifteen minutes. Probably thirty.”

  “I’ll take a break for dinner. I’m fine for now.”

  They both kept their voices deliberately calm and neutral, lest they alarm Lev and Farin. For all the two men knew, they could be discussing the weather. Mara put her hand on her hip and smiled sweetly, for the benefit of their observers.

  “You’re pale. You’re sweating. The light is hurting your eyes. You’ll be in stage one by the top of the hour if you don’t put a few logs on the fire. Carissa’s not the only one working with a limited reserve, and I know because you told me that working against a patients’ natural defenses is draining on a healer.”

  His back was to Lev and Farin, so he was able to scowl at her freely. The force of it warmed her more than it burned.

  She crossed her arms. “Either you let me win this argument now, or I keep bothering you about it until I win by attrition. Either way, you’re going to lose because you already know I’m right.”

  His eyes slipped closed and he let his head drop forward in a dramatic show of defeat. A second later, the fuzzy charge of his magic left the air and he lifted his hand from Carissa’s wrist.

  “Thank you,” she said crisply. “Take Lev with you when you go. We need to start cycling them out for breaks. I left some Ringfeather tea brewing in the kitchen for him.”

  “Anything else you command?” he asked as he stood, twisting the stiffness from his back with a series of alarming pops and cracks.

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out the watch he’d given her, pressing it into his hand. “Don’t come back until both hands point up.”