Reborn as the Prince the Witch Stabbed, I Bought Her Off the Pyre novel · Chapter 46 of 64

Chapter 46: The Pump Handle

"Then she'll find me here," I said. "Where are the sick?"

The old healer looked at me as if I'd asked where the snow was.

"Everywhere," she said.

The healer from Velde had already gone past her into the first house with a black cloth on the door.

There were four people in the one room, on straw, and a woman in gray kneeling between them with her hands on a boy's chest.

Her gift was the warm kind that knits a cut and cools a fever.

I watched the color come back into the boy's face under her palms.

Then she took her hands away to go to the next one, and it drained out of him again.

"It comes back," she said, without turning round. "We put it right, and the water runs out of them, and it comes back."

She had fallen asleep kneeling up by the time I reached the door.

In my first life, in the mine towns, I'd seen a fever like this go through a camp in a week.

The company doctor had told us the story of a doctor in London who had stopped one in a city of a million.

He'd asked every house where it got its water, and he'd marked the answers on a map.

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