Chapter 23

"Will it hurt?"

Erene Skujans looked into the child's eyes and thought of lying.

The girl was six, tiny and frail. She had big eyes, but they were made even bigger by the fear inside her. She cradled her right forearm, which was swollen and discolored.

Even without X-rays, Erene could see that the arm was broken and badly set. The mother had waited for days before seeking help. By now the bones had attempted healing, but they were healing badly. If they healed the way they were presently set, the girl wouldn't get much use from the arm in years to come.

It needed to be rebroken and reset. There would be considerable pain because of the stressed tissues around it.

Not telling the truth would have been the easiest, but Erene hated thinking of the repercussions. Few in the village trusted her as it was. She shouldn't have cared.

If they didn't trust her, they wouldn't come to her. There would be no more calls in the middle of the night to go birth a baby, no more interruptions during a meal to sew up a man's foot or leg where he'd mishandled an ax, no more infections to look at or warding off curses placed on one member of the village by another.

That would have been easier. And she knew how to lie. She was one of the best many people had ever seen.

But, in the end, that wasn't how her grandmother had trained her. As a hedge witch, the keeper of arcane health and lore, she was supposed to be a good force that the community could trust.

So she told the truth to the little girl lying on the table in the small house that had belonged to Erene's grandmother.

"Yes," Erene said, "it will hurt."

The child cried and tried to get away, rolling into her mother, who sat at the table's side. Tears rolled down the girl's face, and shrieks filled the small living room that doubled as Erene's surgery. The mother wept, too, but she didn't say anything. Nor did she try to take the daughter away.

Erene sat quietly by the table in the chair her grandmother used to occupy. If her grandmother had been here dealing with this, the arm would have already been fixed. But she'd had the complete trust of the village. They had come to her grandmother with everything. Most of the people living there now had been birthed by her.

Being inactive was hard for Erene. Especially knowing that Mario was dead somewhere and that she would never again see him. She felt tears prick the backs of her eyes.

"You can do this, yes?" the mother asked in English.

"I can," Erene said. They spoke English to her as if she was an outsider even though she'd been born in the village like most of them. But she'd left when she'd been seventeen, making her way first to Riga for a few years, then on into Europe.

Desperation lit the mother's eyes. "You can take away the pain, yes?"

"I can."

The mother's mouth trembled. Erena nodded, more to herself than anyone else. "I can."

"Then... please."

Erene looked into the woman's eyes as the little girl shrieked louder and tried to hold her mother even more tightly.

"Please," the mother repeated.

Erene opened the bag her grandmother had always kept ready. She rummaged inside and found the pouch of leaves she needed. Taking a pestle and mortar from the shelves built into the wall, she crushed the leaves until the sap gathered at the bottom.

Working carefully, she heated the sap over a candle. Like the rest of the village, the cottage had no electricity. When the sap began to bubble and the astringent smoke had started to make her nose burn, then tingle and start to go numb, she put the leaves on a cheesecloth, then poured the sap over them again.

Carrying the cloth by the ends, avoiding the sap and the leaves, Erene returned to the table. She placed the poultice on the child's neck.

"This will take the pain away," Erene said calmly. She made herself smile even though she couldn't stop thinking about killing Wolfram Schluter.

The girl started to reach for the poultice.

Erene captured her young patient's hands. "No. You mustn't touch the medicine. Okay?"

The girl nodded, but already her eyelids were growing heavy as her skin absorbed the narcotic and flushed her carotid arteries with it. Erene knew she didn't have to worry about the air passageways getting swollen. One of the herb's effects was to facilitate breathing.

When she judged the girl was sedated enough, Erene removed the medicine and put it aside. Later she would bury them so no animal would be tempted to eat them. Consuming the leaves could prove lethal.

Glassy-eyed, the girl lay back on the table, suspended between life and death.

"Is she all right?" the mother asked.

"She's asleep," Erene said.

"Those plants are dangerous. We are taught to be careful around them because they can cause death."

"They can. But they can also be used to take pain away. Don't you know what they're called?"

The woman shook her head. Turning her head and catching the candlelight as she did revealed the old bruise under her left eye.

"They're called yellow monkshood." Erene couldn't believe how little the people in the village knew about the natural world around them. Most struggled to save enough money to buy American jeans and music from the Russian and Chinese black marketers in Riga.

"But she's all right?"

"She's going to be fine. I'm going to let her sleep for a little longer, to make sure the herbs do what they're supposed to."

"The hedge witch taught you this?"

"My grandmother taught me this," Erene corrected. She hadn't realized how much her grandmother had taught her until she got out in the world that existed beyond the village. When she'd lived with her grandmother, she just accepted that her grandmother knew so much just because she did.

It wasn't until she was teaching herself her second vocation – the one that had allowed her to live if not in luxury then at least well in many of the cities she'd lived in – that she realized how much training her grandmother had given her. Erene had adapted easily and learned quickly, impressing the people she worked with.

"I meant no disrespect," the woman said.

"She took care of this village all her life."

"I know. We miss her."

But not enough to see that her grave is kept clean, Erene thought. She pushed away her anger. She was in a bad mood, about to do something that wasn't easy, and she wanted to take it out on someone.

"How was your daughter's arm broken?"

The woman hesitated.

Erene knew the woman was choosing her lie and was disgusted.

"She fell," the woman said. "It was most unfortunate."

"Fell?" Erene put as much disbelief into that one word as she could muster.

The woman nodded but wouldn't meet Erene's eyes. "She was caring for the goats. There was ice." She shrugged.

Erene caught the woman's chin in her hand and turned her head to better observe the black eye. "I suppose you slipped, too."

"Please," the woman whispered. Gently, she pulled free of Erene's grip. "I don't want any more trouble. My daughter and I have enough trouble in our lives."

"Your husband did this," Erene stated.

"Please treat my daughter."

Erene took a deep breath. "I don't want to heal her just to have her hurt again. Do you understand?" She spoke in Latvian now, and didn't even notice until she'd asked the question.

"He has a lot of anger in him," the woman said. "Things are not easy for him."

"Things aren't easy for anybody. There's no excuse for this."

The woman stroked her sleeping daughter's head. She wiped the tears from her face with her shirtsleeve.

"Where is your husband?" Erene asked.

Shaking her head, the woman made no reply.

"My grandmother," Erene said, knowing she spoke the truth, "wouldn't tolerate something like this."

"I know," the woman said. "She would threaten to put a curse on my husband. But she isn't here now, and he doesn't believe in things the way most of us do." She paused. "Not everyone believed in the hedge – in your grandmother."

The words cut into Erene. Not just the narrowly avoided slight against her grandmother, but the reminder that she, too, had abandoned her grandmother's ways.

"My husband," the woman went on, "is from Russia. When he first got here, I thought he was just a soldier who had seen too much fighting."

Erene knew that those men still wandered into the countryside. There were fewer now that Russia had adopted Western ways, but it still happened.

"Now I think he is just a criminal who wanted a place to hide." The woman shrugged sadly. "All the pretty words he gave me are gone these days. He works when he wishes to, but my daughter and I never see any of the money. If my friends didn't give us food to eat, we would starve."

Erene cursed, and the harsh words caused the woman to flinch.

When her grandmother had lived in the village, nothing like this would have happened. Her grandmother had involved herself with the lives of the villagers. They had respected and, in part, feared her.

"You can't have one without the other, Erene," the old woman would tell her. "Respect and fear almost always go together."

And the hedge witch's healing powers are nothing without the ability to punish, Erene thought. She focused on the woman again.

"I will heal your daughter, but I don't want her hurt again," she told the woman. "Do you understand?"

The woman nodded.

"Then you will tell me where he is when we are finished here."

Slowly, uncertainly, the woman nodded.

Taking a deep breath, Erene turned back to the child. Then she reached over and calmly rebroke the sleeping girl's arm.