Chương 8: CHAPTER EIGHT: ELSA FERRIS

He went to Millrun three weeks after Coppermill, on a morning cold enough that the puddles in the road had glazed over overnight and his breath came in steady clouds. The ostensible purpose was to check on the miller's family. The miller had died in spring, according to what he'd been told during the initial northern circuit, and the family was struggling. A castellan checking on a bereaved household was appropriate behavior, the kind of thing that cost little and communicated something.

The real purpose was the woman he'd heard about.

Three separate people — the Coppermill headman, a trader at Greyhold's market, and one of the garrison soldiers who'd been born in the district — had mentioned her in different contexts and with different framings, but the shape underneath each description was similar: she had arrived in Millrun after a fever illness in the spring, she was being called a healer, and what she was doing was working in a way that exceeded what a self-taught healer with traditional methods could account for.

She was waiting by the road. Not obviously. She was gathering something from the hedgerow, one of the bare-branched, stubborn plants that persisted through the autumn and produced something medicinally useful well into the cold months. She had a basket. She was working systematically — not the random gathering of someone collecting out of habit but the organized collection of someone who knew what they needed and was getting it efficiently.

When he pulled up beside her, she looked up with the specific quality of someone who had known he was coming and had positioned accordingly.

"My lord," she said, in the local language, with the correct respectful address. He looked at her for a moment. The body she occupied was perhaps thirty — strong and practical, with working hands and a directness in her gaze that the period explained as peasant bluntness and that he was reading as something else.

"Walk with me," he said. She set down the basket and walked, and they moved away from the road far enough to have a conversation, and then he said, quietly, in English: "How long?" She stopped walking. Just for a step, just long enough to register. Then she kept walking and said, also quietly, also in English: "Since the spring. The fever was the cover story for the transition." A pause.

"You're the castellan." This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it"Sergeant Marcus Cole," he said.

"35F."

"Specialist Yolanda Ferris," she said.

"68W." She paused.

"Combat medic." The relief in her voice was not dramatic — she was, like most soldiers, trained to maintain composure, and she had apparently been maintaining it for six months. But it was present, in the small loosening of the shoulders, in the slight adjustment of her breathing.

"You've been doing medicine," he said.

"Someone was going to die from an infected hand in my first week here," she said.

"I cleaned and debrided it. He lived. After that the word was out." She paused.

"I've been careful. Nothing that looks too far outside traditional practice. But it's hard to watch people die of things that don't need to kill them."

"I know," Marcus said.

"I have someone in Greyhold who's been doing the same." He paused.

"How are you?" She considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.

"Managing," she said.

"I have a husband here and two children. They're — " a pause that had a specific quality "—they're good people. They didn't know what happened to me, obviously. They just know their wife and mother was very sick and came back different."

"Different how?"

"More capable," she said, dryly.

"And more tired." She paused.

"I miss antibiotics."

"We're working on it," Marcus said.

"Longer timeline than I'd like." She gave him a look that was, despite the face and the century and the distance from anything they'd known, completely recognizable as the specific look of a medic being told a timeline by someone who doesn't do medicine.

"Tell me what you're building," she said. He told her. The walk lasted forty minutes and covered most of what he'd established in Greyhold, what he'd found in Coppermill, what he was planning. She listened with the active attention of someone processing an operational briefing — asking questions at the right moments, not interrupting when he was mid-thought, circling back to points that needed clarification. When he was done, she said: "You need me in Greyhold."

"Yes," he said.

"Eventually. When I have something worth bringing you to."

"You have something worth bringing me to now," she said, with the flat directness of a specialist who knows what a situation needs.

"You have a population of eight hundred with no trained medical care. You have the beginning of an organization but no medical officer." She paused.

"I have a family here that I'm not willing to abandon. But Millrun is twelve miles from Greyhold. If you can arrange a regular schedule — two days a week in Greyhold, the rest here — I can do both." Marcus thought about it. It was, he concluded, exactly the kind of thing a castellan would arrange if he had found an exceptionally capable traveling healer and wanted to secure her services. Legitimate. Explainable.

"Can you leave your family for two days at a time?" he said.

"My husband will manage," she said.

"He managed before he had me." She paused.

"What's your medical situation in Greyhold?"

"The town physician is an older woman who is — adequate," Marcus said carefully.

"Adequate isn't what you need heading into winter."

"No," he said.

"It isn't." She picked up her basket from where she'd left it at the road's edge.

"I'll come Thursday next," she said.

"Bring me the worst cases first."