My Panther Mate & Our Little Cub novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Jar

I carried the jar to Hesper's den before Darek woke.

I had left a note on the table: "Gone for Tuck."

Hesper's den sat halfway down the cliff, a warren of low rooms hung with drying herbs, and Tuck was asleep in a nest of her blankets with a wooden bear in his fist.

Hesper was awake, boiling something that smelled like pine.

"Show me," she said, before I'd spoken.

I put the jar on her table.

She scraped a grain of the caked residue onto her fingernail, sniffed it, touched it to her tongue and spat into the fire.

"Hush-root," she said. "Ground fine, and mixed with honeybark to hide the bite. I've smelled it twice in forty years. The last time was on a woman in the Eastern den whose husband wanted her quiet."

"So it's poison."

"It's a slow one. It isn't meant to kill. It's meant to take the will out." Hesper's black eyes lifted. "And it grows in one place within three days' walk. A cold glen above the healer's house. Corra's grove."

The floor seemed to tilt.

"Ila hid this," I said. "She scratched on the wax. 'Not sick.' She knew."

"She suspected, and she hadn't the strength to prove it." Hesper wrapped the jar in a rag with a gentleness I'd not expected. "Hush-root eats the voice. She must have fought it a long time to get that much down."

I felt a sudden fierce grief for a woman I'd never met.

"We have to tell Darek," I said.

"Aye." Hesper hesitated. "Tell him gently."

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