“And I brought some stew.” I nodded at the pack by the door. “It should be warm enough still.”

I held the blade of my knife in the flames and watched Larkin help her with the socks. Watched him dish out some stew. Watched her take a bite.

“Oh my,” she said, her eyes closed. “In all my life, in all the world, nothing has ever tasted better than this.”

“Do you want some?” I asked Larkin.

“I’m not hungry,” he said, though he looked like he was. He fetched a bowl and a grater from the cupboard, and in no time he had turned the potato into shreds.

I liked a person who could do something well, without a lot of wasted motions, or time, or wondering how to do it. He just did it.

I said, “My father woke up this morning.”

Cate stopped eating. Opened her eyes. “From a coma?”

I nodded.

“For how long was he gone?”

I thought back. “Since late in January. Since just before that big storm.” We had been housebound for days, sitting in the dark, cold cabin, watching my father sleep while the world outside wore white and blue and gold.

“He was asleep for twelve weeks,” I said. “Almost thirteen.”

“And now he wakes, just like that?”

So I told them about the cold water and the snake and the potion I’d made. The twitching hand. The rolling eyes.

They listened as if to a bedtime story.

When I finished, Cate looked at me thoughtfully. “There was a time when I would have said coincidence. Poppycock. Wishful thinking. But that was a long time ago.”

“Do you think it was something in the potion I fed him? Maybe the balsam?”

She shook her head. Went on eating. “Not in the least.”

“The snake?”

She huffed. “Not that either.”

“Then what?” Larkin said.

Cate shrugged. Tipped her head toward the big books on the desk. “Something else you won’t find in those.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

“And now it’s time for you to learn how to let blood,” Cate said.

“What, me?”

“Hard for Larkin to lance his own eye. And I already know how.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “It won’t take but a minute.”

“You want me to poke a knife into the skin by his eye?”

Larkin himself looked more than a little alarmed by the idea.

Captan did, too.

Cate smiled. “Aristotle said, ‘For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.’”

Which reminded me of my father and the day he’d taught me to make fire. And of Samuel as he caught his first fish.

“Who’s Aristotle?”