Summoned to Carry His Bags, She Found Thank-Yous Beat His Sword novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Doveland Tonic

The healer Sella Brindle shows Naho the jars sold under the champion's name, gives her a foot salve that works at once, and says out loud, as Alric's boots split, that she has waited a year for someone to ask.

By the first camp, the blisters on Naho's heels had opened, and the hunger from the bootlace had not left.

She had walked behind the wagons for a whole afternoon with a pack that was not hers on someone else's back.

It had given her time to think about Alric's strap, and she had not decided anything.

The soldiers pitched tents in a ring around the cookfire, and Brant's pavilion went up first and stayed the largest.

At the edge of the firelight a young woman sat on an upturned crate.

Forty small jars stood in rows on a blanket in front of her, and she was labelling them one at a time.

She had an auburn braid, freckles and stained fingers.

The label said DOVELAND TONIC, and under it, in a neat print, By the Hand of the Chosen.

Naho read it twice, because reading a label twice was how she got paid.

"Which hand?" she asked.

The young woman looked up, and the brush stopped.

"Sella Brindle," she said. "I'm the column's healer. And I'd like very much to hear who told you to ask me that."

"Nobody did. It's a good label. It just doesn't say whose hand."

"It's mine," Sella said. "It was always mine. I boil the root, I strain it, I fill the jars."

"Then a clerk in Highwell writes the Chosen's name over the top and sells them at three silver each."

She said it without heat, because she had said it before.

"What do you get?" said Naho.

"The roots. And a bed." Sella tipped her chin at the pavilion.

"I'm going to have a shop one day, in my own village, with my own name on a board," she said.

"A shop costs forty silver. I have twelve."

Naho looked at her heels, which hurt.

Sella saw the look, took a flat tin from her apron and pushed it across the blanket.

"For your feet. It's nothing. Plain root, plain fat. I make it for the soldiers."

Naho took it in both hands.

"This is Sella's foot salve," she said. "She's giving it to me so my blisters will close by morning."

The tin warmed and the lid hissed softly, and when Naho smeared a thumb of it on her heel the blister went flat at once.

She was hungry again, in a new place, behind her ribs.

Sella sat looking at the tin.

"I've never seen it do that," she said. "Could you do that to forty jars?"

"It has to be given to me one at a time," Naho said. "I have to say what it is."

"And it can't be for sale," said Naho.

"Everything's for sale," said Sella.

"Then no," said Naho. "But I'd take one jar, if you ever wanted me to have it."

Sella's mouth tightened, and she went back to the labels harder than before.

Supper was stew, and Naho ate three bowls of it while the soldiers watched.

Alric sat on a folded cloak at the head of the fire and talked about the march.

Brant sat at his right hand and talked about the same march in a different voice, so that the soldiers could hear whose it was.

Naho put down her spoon.

She had decided that if a man claimed a deed in front of her, she would ask the question.

She had decided it a long time ago, in a meeting room in Shinjuku.

"Could everyone say what they did today?" she said. "I'd like to put it in order."

"I led the march," said Alric at once.

"Which part?"

"The direction."

"There's one road," said a soldier, from the back.

"I commanded the column," said Brant.

"He called two halts," another soldier said, and then looked at his boots.

"I carried the pack," said Gerta, "and the water, and I cooked, and I sewed the second wagon's cover when it split."

"I boiled forty jars," Sella said, "and I wrote forty labels, and I did not write the name on them."

They all looked at Naho.

"I was handed a bootlace," Naho said. "I would like it noted that it was a good one."

The soldiers laughed, which they had not planned to do.

Alric did not laugh.

He lifted one of Sella's jars from the blanket and held it in the firelight, where everyone could see the label.

"My tonic," he told the fire, "mixed with my own hands over a hundred nights, has cured every blister in this column."

Naho watched his boots.

The left sole parted from the upper along its whole length with a long tearing sound, and the right followed.

The soldiers saw it, and so did Brant, who looked away.

Alric put the jar down, very carefully, and tucked his feet under the cloak.

"The cobbler," he said, "was clearly rushed."

Sella stood up from her crate.

Her hands were shaking at her sides, and she looked straight at the Chosen.

"I've waited a year for somebody to ask that out loud," she said. "Which part was you?"

Nobody answered her, and the fire popped.

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