Focus.” Halian’s voice was firm. “Ellifa, you need to get these names right or you can make someone more ill or even kill them.” Halian rearranged the dried leaved on the table in front of her apprentice. On her one hand she wore a silver ring bearing the sign of the Keepers of Théotriewe, showing that she was once one of them. The leaves crumbled as she moved them, their fragrances forming a heady scent. The healer wiped over her brow and pushed her long braid over her shoulder, trying to hide from Ellifa that she, too, was exhausted.
“Name these plants,” she commanded.
Ellifa rubbed her eyes, trying to dispel the sleep and focused again on the leaves, stifling a yawn. Each of the leaves is dried, crinkled and creased and almost the same colour. She blinks twice and then starts on the left hand side of the row. As she named each one, she moved it slightly towards Halian. Then she pauses at the last leaf. It is definitely not one that she knew. But she was also smart enough not to guess – that was the first lesson she received as a Healer’s apprentice.
Halian picked the leaf up and placed it in its own glass bottle on the shelf with her books.
“What plant is that?” Ellifa asks, her eyes fixed on the jar. Halian had never acted like this before.
Her mistress takes one of the volumes off the shelf and places it in front of Ellifa. She opened it at an old bookmark.
“I saw the title, Mistress Halian,” Ellifa said, trying not to sound disrespectful. “It is a book about legendary and mythical plants and animals.”
Halian’s smile deepens the wrinkles around her eyes. “Look,” she says and points to the page before glancing again at the bottle on the shelf. “Legendary indeed.”
“Dragon’s Bane?” Ellifa asked, reading the heading in the book. ”I thought the plants were all destroyed?”
The drawing in the book showed a plant taller than a grown man, with thick, black roots and more thorns than she thought possible on one plant. The flower petals are the shape and colour of flames and the fruits are in the form of small red and orange berries.
“It’s a plant that is only found in Naeddre,” Halian said, reciting the text on the page verbatim. “The roots and berries of the plant are used to produce the Blackroot or Dragon Poison that is used by the Fáll on their arrows. The berries are poisonous and are eaten by neither bird nor animal. The leaves resemble a claw and are dark green in colour. The first two leaves on every branch, when still light in colour, is used to create an antidote against Dragon’s Bane Poison.”
Ellifa walked over to the shelf and gingerly picked up the bottle. “Where did you get this? Who brought this here? Is this why you woke me up in the middle of the night?”
“Marko brought it here – some Fáll were captured not far from Éafod. They also had some of their writings with them.”
“And you need me to go to the city and decipher them?”
“We’re lucky that Abreiotan taught you the script. We do not know of anyone else in the whole province that can read it.” Halian paged through the book to give her hands something to do. “We need to know if the prisoners are telling the truth. If they are telling the truth, it would change everything.”
Ellifa sighed. She had been looking forward to the Spring Festival for weeks. Then she silently chastised herself for thinking of celebrating a simple festival when Fáll from Naeddre – the great enemy – had been so far from their own borders. She was acting like a silly girl, not an apprentice almost on her way to the Keepers. “When do we leave?”
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| Dried Leaf by Ofonesvanity |
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