I didn’t want to think about losing Quiet. Losing anything. “Nothing. Go on in to supper now or you’ll get no pie.”

But I almost called him back as he scampered off toward the cabin.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

“This first part shouldn’t hurt a bit,” I told Cate as I settled a lantern and the glue pot next to the bed, “but I brought some willow tea down from your cabin and never used it. Would you like some now . . . for what’s coming?”

“No,” she said, after a moment. “It will lower my fever, and I need that fever right now, to fight the germ.” She nodded at the glue pot. “It’s cool enough?”

I nodded. “I think so.”

It felt odd to be sitting with Cate, intent on her instead of my father, who lay just there, on the other side of her, without a sound or any suggestion of life except the slow bellows of his lungs, the heart that I could hear somewhere inside my own chest.

I turned all my attention back to Cate.

I untied the bandages again and gently unwrapped her leg.

“We should thank those bees,” I said, leaning close to study the wound. It didn’t smell as bad as it had before, but it was still foul enough.

“No should about it,” Cate said. “Do. Every day. Them and the trees and the flowers and every other kind of doctor to be had.”

Which was all true. And more besides.

“Now don’t move. I want the glue to stay put.”

Cate huffed. “Isn’t that the whole point of glue? And why go to so much trouble? Why not clean things out and wrap me up again?”

She looked like she already knew the answer to that, but I sat back, the pot poised in my hand, and gave her one anyway. “I thought of just pouring the vinegar again and again, over the bandages so they’d keep the cut good and wet for a day or two. But I think the cut needs to be drenched. I think the vinegar needs to seep all the way in to keep the honey soft and sink down deep to the bottom of the wound. I think we need to clean it out from the bottom up, else we might not get at all the corruption.” I leaned again toward the wound. “I don’t want it to spread any more than it already has.”

Cate smiled tiredly. “That’s a lot of thinking.”

I remembered what she’d said to me on the mountaintop. About whether a hag was the kind of person who would read books.

“A lot of thinking for a twelve-year-old girl?”

Which earned me her customary snort. “A lot of thinking for anyone.”