Winnifred
There has been pressure building since the forest, the molgrath in the forest, since I used mana. It coils inside me now, restless and raw. I am awakened, yes—but unblessed. I hold no right to wield mana. Every flicker of power risks exposure. Risks unraveling the name I carry like a borrowed cloak.
And yet.
Some part of me wants to be seen, praised, even feared. That part betrays the girl who only wanted to pass unnoticed.
I keep my hands clasped behind my back as if to still the tremor that creeps through my bones. Nayla walks ahead, speaking softly to Krinta about watch shifts and visibility in the inner woods. I pretend not to listen.
Malton is quiet this hour—the morning haze clings to the gutters and the vines that curl between rooftiles. A crow clicks from its perch on a leaning post—three times—and I hold my breath, as if it were a signal I've forgotten how to read.
Briar emerges between butchered stone steps and a cracked green door. The shutters are half-latched, but the smell—roots and smoke and bitter flower—tells me someone is inside.
Nayla knocks twice. A pause. Then a voice from within: "Enter, but do not slam it."
Inside, the air hangs heavy with steam and the sting of something bitter. Bundles of herbs—dried and curling—dangle from the rafters like withered bats. A jar of preserved beetles gleams on the counter, their lacquered shells catching the light like staring eyes.
Behind it, a woman works with the slow precision of someone used to waiting. Her sleeves are rolled high, her hands stained with powder and resin. She grinds something pale and brittle into a stone bowl—bone, perhaps, or dried antler. The pestle moves with patient violence, unbothered by our entrance.
She doesn't look up.
"Lantara is here," Nayla says, her voice edged with the chill of the forest still clinging to her.
Only then does the woman move. Helene. She sets the pestle down delicately, as if it might crack the silence, and walks over, plucking the limp plant from my hand without a word.
She turns it in her fingers, inspecting the roots, the torn leaves, the veins blackened from frost. The steam curls between us like breath, thick and faintly metallic.
Krinta speaks next, her voice low. "We ran into a Molgrath."
That word settles into the room like soot.
Helene pauses. Her gaze flicks to Krinta. "Where?"
Near the river's bend. It was alone, but it followed us for a while." Krinta's eyes shift to me, just for a moment. "It was drawn to something."
A silence stretches. Helene places the Lantara on the table and wipes her hands on a cloth, slow and deliberate.
"They don't see," Krinta continues. "No eyes. Just ears. And scent. They're like dogs—but worse. They don't hunt to eat. They want the source."
I feel the weight of their stares, though no one names it. The "source" lingers like a thorn in the air.
A drop of water beads from a rafter and falls into the bowl of crushed bone with a soft hiss.
"I've only heard of them near the Deep Reaches," Helene says, at last. Her tone is dry, but her eyes are no longer fixed on the plant. "If one reached this far inland... something's bleeding too much mana."
My fingers tighten inside my sleeves.
"I thought we were escorting a girl in need of herbs," Helene adds, mildly, but there's a flicker beneath the words. Not accusation, not yet. Curiosity. Wariness. "Not bait."
The word lands with a quiet weight.
Nayla shifts, folding her arms across her chest. "We took care of it."
Helene raises an eyebrow. "You killed a Molgrath?"
"No," Krinta says. "We escaped. But it was close."
"Too close," Helene murmurs.
She turns back to the counter. The pestle resumes its rhythmic sound, slower now. Measured.
I say nothing. My heart still pounds with the echo of that chase—its snarls in the fog, the way it turned its head when I stumbled. As if it knew.
I hadn't used mana. Not fully. Only a breath of it, a flicker. But it had been enough.
Too much.
And now they know.
Or they suspect.
"All right, that's enough, Helene," Nayla said with a grin. "We're heading back to the academy next moon—break's over. Time to part ways for now. Bye!"
She reached out and clasped Krita's hand. With a quick wave, the two of them walked out of the shop, their voices fading down the street.
The door closed behind them with a soft thud.
Helene stayed at her workbench, eyes fixed on the piece she was mending. She didn't look up when she spoke.
"You have something you want to tell me?"
I hesitated, then said, "I used my mana. By accident."
Her hands paused for a brief moment. "Are you blessed?"
"No."
She let out a quiet sigh and shook her head slightly. "That's going to be a problem."
"Why?"
"Because here in Sera, you can't use mana unless you've been blessed by the Church. It's the law. Doesn't matter if it was an accident—unblessed magic gets you into serious trouble."
My stomach tightened. "What should I do?"
"You'll go with Priya—she's one of my apprentices. She's heading to the shrine in three days to receive her blessing. You'll go with her and get yours too."
I nodded slowly. "And until then?"
"Earn your keep," she said, still focused on her work. "Help around the shop. Keep your head down. And whatever you do, don't use your mana. Not even a spark."
—----
I woke before the sun lifted its head over Malton. The window glass was still cold to the touch, and the floorboards groaned beneath my steps like old bones stirring. Even without instruction, I moved quietly through the shop—sweeping ash from the hearth, discarding wilted petals from the bowls near the altar shelf, scrubbing mortar bowls until the stone shone clean.
Helene's door remained closed, her lamp unlit. I didn't bother waking her. Raphael was already gone. Where, I didn't know—and I didn't ask. He had his own way of disappearing.
I found the delivery satchel beside the counter, still half-packed. I sorted through the orders—poultices for bruising, dried blueleaf for fevers, a salve jar marked with a hawk's symbol I couldn't read. I matched the labels with the registry Helene kept beneath the herbs rack. Her handwriting was sharp, rigid. Like her.
I restocked the tincture shelf and reorganized the cutting knives by their sharpness. A few of the bottles still had fingerprint smudges—I wiped them off with the hem of my sleeve.
When Helene finally emerged, she didn't speak at first. Just looked at the bench, the clean floor, the bundles now tied tighter than before. Her eyes lingered on the empty kettle—washed and drying.
She didn't praise me. She never did. But she noticed.
Without looking my way, she said:
"Deliver the herbs today. Priya's absent."
I nodded. "Okay."
She passed me a folded scrap of parchment with names and streets inked in tight rows. A map, more or less. I tucked it into the satchel.
"Some of them might ask questions," she added. "Answer what you know. Don't guess."
I met her eyes for a brief second. "Understood."
She nodded once, then went back to grinding bone into powder like nothing had passed between us.
The morning air clung cold against my sleeves as I stepped outside, satchel slung over my shoulder, parchment tucked close to my chest. Malton hadn't quite woken yet. Shops still had their shutters half-drawn, and smoke curled lazily from brick chimneys.
I walked with my hood up, chin low. Not hiding—but not inviting questions either.
The first house was easy to find. A blue door with ivy curling up the side, just as Helene's note described. An old man answered, blinking hard through the slats.
"From Briar Apothecary," I said.
He sniffed once and opened the door wider. "Took you long enough."
I handed him the dried moss sachets, already sealed in wax paper. He didn't thank me, but I wasn't waiting for it. By the time the door closed behind me, I was already reading the next name.
The second house was harder. I circled the lane twice before spotting the sign etched low in the stone—barely visible beneath moss. When I knocked, a small child answered. I asked for the mother; the child just stared.
"She's resting," came a voice behind. A young man stepped out—mid-twenties, with tired eyes and ink on his fingertips.
I gave him the balm. He inspected it suspiciously. "Is this the same as last time?"
"I don't know," I admitted. "But it was prepared fresh this morning."
He gave me a longer look. "You're new."
"Yes."
A pause. Then he nodded slowly, almost to himself. "She liked Helene's work. She'll trust this."
It wasn't a compliment, but it settled something in my chest.
I moved on.
By noon, the sun had begun to warm the stones underfoot. I reached a crooked stair leading down to a basement door—my last stop. The name matched the list, but something felt wrong. The air smelled of old oil and rust. I knocked, waited. No answer. I knocked again.
The door creaked open a little. No voice. No footfall. Just the hollow stillness of someone waiting.
I didn't step in.
Instead, I leaned the parcel—wrapped in cloth and labeled with the correct sigil—against the doorframe. Then I turned and walked away.
Let Helene deal with them later.
When I returned to the shop, she looked up from the fire and asked, "All done?"
"Yes."
"You left the salve for Britha under the steps?"
"Against the door. No one answered."
She didn't speak for a beat too long. Then: "Good. If no one answers there, never go in."
She handed me a chipped bowl to grind seeds. The work resumed as if nothing had happened. But she looked at me differently, just for a breath.
Like I had passed something unspoken.
The mortar was warm in my hands from constant grinding, seeds cracking to dust beneath the pestle's rhythm. I had learned Helene's tempo by now—quiet but unrelenting, like the hum of a wheel that never stopped turning.
Then came the knock.
No pounding.
Helene looked up, one brow twitching. Before either of us could speak, the shop door flew open.
A woman stumbled inside, one hand gripping the shoulder of a boy who limped behind her. Blood soaked through the cloth wrapped around his shin.
"Please," she gasped, "he—he stepped on something in the fields—there was metal—and it's deep—"
Helene was already moving. "Sit him down. There—by the stove."
The boy's face was pale, his mouth tight with pain. His mother's hands trembled as she tried to loosen the cloth. The moment she did, a rush of blood followed, dark and steady.
"Miriel. Boil water. Now," Helene snapped.
I obeyed without question, throwing a pot over the flame and adding two drops of tinctured rue. I gathered what I'd seen her use before—clean gauze, iron tweezers, crushed myrrh, and balmroot.
Helene washed her hands quickly and knelt by the boy, examining the wound. "Barbed wire," she muttered. "Foreign. This isn't from Sera."
She didn't elaborate. She didn't need to.
"Hand me the balm," she said.
I passed it wordlessly.
Then came the part she didn't ask for. As she angled the boy's leg, I saw how deep the wound went—metal lodged beneath the surface.
"He won't stop bleeding if it stays," I said softly.
Helene didn't look at me. "You think I don't know that?" But there was no venom in it.
I stepped closer. "I've removed deeper ones before."
She paused. Looked up. Her eyes locked onto mine.
One breath.
Then she moved aside. Just slightly.
I knelt, wiped my hands clean, and took the tweezers. The wound was ragged, angry, weeping with each pulse of blood. I worked swiftly, feeling the edge of the metal with the tip, coaxing it free in one slow pull.
The boy whimpered, but didn't cry. His mother clutched his shoulder, murmuring prayers.
When it came loose, Helene took it from me and dropped it into a bowl with a hiss.
"You know what you're doing," she said, still watching my hands.
"I had to learn." I didn't elaborate either.
Helene cleaned the wound, stitched it closed with firm, practiced hands. When the boy had been given a sedative and lay quietly beside the stove, his mother whispered her thanks, eyes wet.
Helene gave a tired nod. "Leave him here for now. You can come back tonight."
When the door shut behind them, the silence returned. Only the soft bubbling of the kettle remained.
Helene turned to me.
"You've been more than an errand girl before," she said.
I shrugged. "It was never a choice."
Helene was quiet a long moment. Then she said, "Good. Because the next time this happens, I may not be the one reaching first."
She passed me a clean rag. "Now scrub that blood before it sets. This isn't a hospital."