Chapter 6: The Stolen Medicine

In the second winter, twelve boxes of wound powder and a root of wild ginseng went missing from the camp physician's chest.

Nobody in Ironwall slept that night.

At dawn the soldiers tore through the barracks, the stores and the washhouse.

They found the powder under Ruyun's sleeping mat, packed in straw.

The ginseng root was wrapped in a rag in her own bedroll.

"Convict thief," said the quartermaster, holding the rag aloft in the middle of the yard.

He had been waiting for this since the day he was moved to the east stores.

It showed in the ease of his voice.

"Medicine that belongs to the wounded. Eleven men lay in the infirmary last month with fever, and this one hid the cure for herself."

Soldiers murmured along the lines.

The camp physician, a gray-bearded man who had lost his son on the north wall the year before, looked at Ruyun and said nothing.

Ruyun stood very straight in the snow.

"I did not take it."

"You were found with it."

"Because someone put it there."

"Who?" the quartermaster said, spreading his hands. "Who else sleeps on your mat?"

She did not look at the thin girl at the back of the washhouse line.

She had sat beside that girl for a year and heard her say perhaps ten words.

The thief girl was staring at the ground.

Her hands were shaking.

Shen Zhuo came down the steps from his tent.

Everyone went quiet.

"Theft of medicine from the wounded is a flogging of fifty," he said. "Or worse."

Fifty would kill her.

They all knew it.

"Commander," Ruyun said. "May I speak?"

"Speak."

"The powder boxes are stamped on the lid with a red thumb seal. May the physician read them aloud?"

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