Isla waits as I lace up my boots, but she indicates that I should try to dress warm. Keeping the blanket around my upper body like a cloak, I follow her to the door. The girl’s eyes dart excitedly from me to the room where her mother is still asleep. She puts a finger to her lips again, and I nod. I’ll keep quiet. If my visits to Storm’s End have taught me anything, it’s to trust a young girl when she has that determined kind of look in her eye.

We slip out into the night. My eyes adjust slowly, welcoming the moonlit scenery around us. A damp coolness hangs in the air, and wet earth muffles our steps. Ahead of me, Isla moves with fearless, confident steps. She knows this forest like I know the skies. I grin and quicken my pace to keep up.

After a while, she bends down to duck under the rotted, hollow core of a tree that has long since fallen. Other younger trees have surrounded it, one growing directly through where the other one split. I kneel to duck under the branches, but Isla’s smaller frame is better suited to crawling around here.

“Wait,” I say, shedding the blanket. Isla turns, smiling wide.

“Sorry,” she replies. “I, uh…” She motions to her head. “Didn’t think.”

“It’s okay,” I assure her, then motion forward. “Where are we going?”

“I found this,” she says. “I want to help.”

I crawl through the narrow space, trying to ignore the mud that’s seeped through my pant legs. Isla leads me further, but she walks more slowly now and makes sure I’m keeping close. Healthy green stalks of grasses peek between the otherwise dark earth. Suddenly, Isla turns and points to the ground just beyond another secluded thicket.

“I heard you asking about the flower,” Isla says. “Is this enough?”

I look where she’s pointing and gasp.

The red blooms are wet with dew and rain, and they are everywhere. Clusters of the cure burst from nestled alcoves between the cypress roots, between rounded rocks, and below the grasses.

“Yes,” I whisper, tears coming to my eyes. “Yes, this is enough.”

We retrieve the blanket and repurpose it into a kind of bag, then carefully collect as much of the cure as I dare take from this sacred, hidden source. Murmuring Noam’s memory device to myself, I pick enough petals and stems to heal a hundred children. The sheer, unrelenting relief of holding so much of the cure in my hands is a feeling beyond words.

“How?” I ask Isla as we gently fold up the blanket. I gesture to the cure we’re leaving behind.

She shrugs, completely unaware of the gravity of her gift to me. She picks at a handful of the cure, tying one of the stems around the others until it’s a tiny bouquet. “I like the trees.”