Chapter Two

Just a Finger of Silverleaf

And so my days in Avengard continued even after the last brick was dismantled from the cathedral, and the lingering dust and rubble coated the air in its surroundings, enveloping the refugee encampment where I stayed with my mother and sister in particulate. We worked past the coughing fits, of course, and in one way or another fell into a routine of struggle and survival in a land leagues away from our home.

It would be unfair to claim that Avengard was cruel to us. They allowed us in, as with all of the other refugees from regions across, which is more than what could be said for many other cities and states that had not been completely consumed by conflict and the war. No, at worst, they were apathetic, and that was perhaps all we could ask for. The refugees and my own family were not treated like citizens, but still, we could find gaps in society where we could earn our keep.

Javis, for all his skill in mathematics and design, went to work with the city watch and Avengard’s own sappers, performing emergency maintenance on the city’s ramparts and walls. My sister, Isidora, had some experience with herbalism and care. She would assist some sicksisters at a temple to Avenor, after having been turned away by some of the herbalists who thought of themselves as some form of recluse, or perhaps urban hermits.

I found some modest opportunity for myself with the city guilds of stonemasons and carpenters. With many fighting age citizens of Avengard off on the frontlines, there was still demand for homes to be built and roofs to be thatched, and with my ambition to build something of my own that could I be proud of, I took great pleasure in assisting the older men of the guild where I could.

They were skeptical at first, as different as I was. With my red-tinted brown skin and straight hair, I stood out from their pale complexion and curly locks, and naturally, they treated me with a generous amount of skepticism and doubt, but that too soon enough fell away with another roof, another wall, another foundation filled and properly mortared. They took me in, and in turn, I learned more about their way of life and their philosophy of work ethic.

The men, all in their fortieth year or more, and also on their second wife or more, taught me that Avenor had preached that only the sweat of a man’s brow could be a proclamation of love. Hard labor and sacrifice, they emphasized, were manifestations of passion, just like how Avenor had devoted himself to serving the land and the people. It seemed that work and success were what passed as morality to the local people, and I bit my tongue and accepted them as they were. I refrained from protesting and arguing that love itself was love, and not weeks or months spent away from family. I refrained from revealing the secret perversions that Avenor had lowered himself to, or how he had devoted himself not to the people, but to the wicked Lady of Loss. I refrained from confessing my love for creation, rather than for labor.

Despite my own internal disagreements with the Avengard faithful, however, I learned what I could. I picked up the pieces of the culture that I agreed with and wanted to embody, and carefully considered and discerned the pieces which I disagreed with.

In time, however, my mother then grew sick with the krankenflux. Chronic coughing, phlegm marked with blood, and a terrible dryness of the throat. I figured that it must have been from old age and the travel and the toll it had taken on her body. At that time, it must have been almost three years since we left home, and just under a year since dad had passed.

There wasn’t much either of us could do.

My sister did her best to take care of her. In another life, she might have been a healer, or a sicksister. In that life, probably, we both would have found mentors to apprentice under…but then again, I suppose I did have Javis to learn from. My sister had nobody but the busy sicksisters at the temple, and the elderly women in whichever refuge we found ourselves in, but still, she managed.

“I can forage for the ginger and the honey for her myself, but we’ll also need a few fingers of silverleaf herb, and that needs to be bought,” she instructed me. She had barely left the little encampment of tents that we and the other refugees had set up against the Avengard walls on the outskirts of town. “We’re far too west for it to be growing in the wild, even here by the Black Forest.”

“We don’t have any coin left,” I pointed out in a whisper, though I had a feeling she knew that already.

“I wouldn’t be asking you for help if all I needed was a simple trip to the herbalist,” she answered as she tied her hair up in a bun. Mom was coughing out blood again, and my sister wet another old cloth to clean her lips. The tent smelled metallic from how much blood she had been spitting out; I felt sorry for the both of them.

“Of course. Thanks for taking care of mom, Isidora.”

She averted her gaze from my eyes, nodded, and held her hand to mom’s forehead, and then she cupped her ears and whispered to me in a low, grave voice, “She has gotten much worse over the past night. If we don’t find silverleaf for her by tomorrow, she won’t last more than three days.”

I set off to the town to find work at the usual spots, but with the war raging further now, the landscape of all of Avengard had changed.

The Stonemason’s Guild of Avengard had emptied out; all the able-bodied men and women were defending Avengard and its people either here on the walls or at the keeps and star fortresses to the east, hoping to keep the fighting and bloodshed away from the city. The less able-bodied were serving to construct more barricades and ramparts with allies across the continent. After all, these were the same men who shared the guild with those who had built the Cathedral of Avenor, cast in both stone and bronze. Speak not, however, of how these were the same men from the town that had brought it down, of course.

As far as it goes for towns to have been forced to take refuge in, in retrospect, I suppose Avengard was good to me as a younger lad. There was much for me to learn. Though, as it was becoming more and more apparent, not very much for me to work on and earn money from.

Next, I tried the market. It was at the town square, surrounding the Fountain of Avenor. This was a marvel of bronze that would be taken for the war effort last, I figured. The fountain was a marble statue of Avenor himself carrying a replica of his bronze mace, standing triumphantly on the ship he had sailed with east to Damasko underfoot. This was a matter of pride for the city, I suppose, and offered much less yield in terms of bronze than the cathedral had. If this statue were to fall, then Avengard would be truly lost.

Most of the stalls here were permanent fixtures, and were built of brick and stone rather than lumber and timber, like in Listerbury or Fleur d’Lain. Over the past few weeks, I had been able to make a small bit of coin here or there by offering to round out the edge, or work in a simple cabinet for them to use to store wares overnight. I approached the shoe cobbler Klaus Ziegler, and Rudolf Müller with his stall filled with kegs of beer and ale, and even Otto Drai Gerber and his leather goods, but none needed my help that weekend.

Or rather, none could afford any help at all.

The Laurelsroad leading in and out of Avengard, they explained, were dangerous, and mercantile travel was not flowing in and out of the region of Jatta as it was months prior.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

A lot of reasons why — men of the Laurel of Avengard were being sent to the front, for one, and in their absence, bandits and thieves reveled on the caravans and wagons. Less merchants, too, were receiving the wares they had paid coin for months and years in advance; the ports and harbours in Helstendam and Listerbury had essentially run dry. Shipbuilders, too, turned their attention to behemoths of war rather than coin.

But most of all, they explained to me, men were similar wary of traveling on the road these days.

There were Seviskian dragons afoot on Jattan soil.

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There was no coin for me to be found nor earned in the town square, in simpler words, but that wouldn’t do for me because it wouldn’t do for my mother. I persisted, and walked across the city of Avengard from shop to shop, home to home, offering everything from masonry to laundry. I worked my way from the District of Laurels of politicians and spiritual men, where Avenor himself had been born, down to the Geldenheim District with the traders and merchants, and then to the Schwarzahnn Roads, where only us refugees could be counted as poorer than they. But coin was tight for most everyone, however, and by sundown, I still had not found myself any closer to the coin needed for even a single finger of silverleaf from the apotheke.

Desperate, I realized I only had one option left — the one thing which I hadn’t tried, which was to ask the apotheke herself for work.

I made my way back to Geldenheim as the sun was close to setting, and elderly men of the Laurel were crisscrossing the streets and dirt pathways to light gas lanterns with their flint and steel. There, I found Kirshka’s Apotheke, a small shop that could have been mistaken as a hovel. No glass panes on its windows, only shutters; like many, she, too, could not afford fire-blown glass from Helstendam or Voxden.

The door creaked as I entered the shop. I could smell her wares before I could see them — it was an attack on the senses. Sweet, tangy lines of citrus fruit and junipers. Dark, musky undertones of bayleaf and highsalt. And somehow, amongst all the others, the deep, earthy smoke of sulphur.

Kirshka stood next to a cauldron, stirring in a powder I did not recognize into a brew that I had an even lesser chance of identifying. She was a disheveled old lady, easily beyond her fiftieth year, with a headscarf tying back her long, wiry gray hair. She turned to look at me, one eye much bigger than the other, and said, “It’s late, boy. Too late for paying customers, and much too late for refugees asking for hand-outs.”

“I’m not asking for hand-outs,” I protested. Others in the camp would, but Isidora and I had always found some means to work and earn our coin — until today, at least. “I’ve never asked for charity. I’m a worker of some amount of skill. An apprentice.”

Her eyes flitted down to my hands, then back at me. “Perhaps, but not an apprentice of herbalism nor the fruits of the earth. What are you, then? A carpenter? A shepherd’s boy?”

“A mason,” I answered confidently.

“A dumb mason is what you are,” she said cruelly. “Look around, boy, what do you see?” She gestured wildly at her hovel. The walls were lined with slipshod wooden shelves nailed unevenly — some sides with many more nails than the opposite end. The shutters were uneven, and creaked with small gusts of wind.

“I understand you might not be in the search for a mason, Dame Kirshka, but perhaps there may be some other way I could help you and your apotheke. All I ask for is three fingers of silverleaf.”

“Silverleaf!” She threw up one of her hands in the air, as if to emphasize her exasperation before returning to stir a another vial of liquid into her cauldron. “Must be for a treatment of krankenflux, I suppose. It’s silverleaf you want, but it is also silverleaf that you will not receive. That herb simply doesn’t grow here in Jatta, boy, you haven’t a chance.”

I looked back at one of the wooden shelves mounted on the wall and craned my neck to read out one of the vials. “No, but you have some. That bottle over there, it’s labeled silverleaf, is it not?”

She looked at me again, much more curious this time. “So you can read, then…” she mumbled to herself. “Very well. I can give you half a finger of silverleaf if you were to do something for me.”

“Half a finger?” I echoed her. “No, I need at least a finger.”

“A finger, he says!”

“Yes. Just a finger of silverleaf. And I’ll do whatever it is that you want,” I bargained with her.

She narrowed her eyes at me, as if calculating what good I could possibly do for her, before she said, “Very well, then. But only because it seems to have been completely impossible to find anyone else to do this for me the past few weeks.” She rested her ladle against the rim of her cauldron and procured a book from underneath one of her shelves. Then, she thumbed down the book until she found a particular page and, to my surprise, ripped the page out to hand it to me.

“That sheet of paper must have cost you some coin,” I mused, taking the page from her.

“There’s nothing in this book I haven’t already memorized, boy, it’s no matter. It will do more use for me when you take that page and read out its instructions in the Black Forest once you’ve tracked down the harvest I need.”

I looked at the page she tore out for me; it detailed a herb called nightshade. It grew near Avengard, but only in the hills where children were taught not to play, for fear of wolves and other dangerous wildlife. The page itself showed two illustrations of what seemed to be the same herb; I found this curious until I read on. Nightshade, as it turned out, looked extremely similar to ordinary waldenberries. The instructions explained how to tell one from the other, and how consuming nightshade would be deadly for anyone within mere seconds…

“This herb you need is utter poison,” I said, disgusted. “It’s going to kill someone.”

“You’re going to kill your mother if you don’t find your silverleaf, boy,” she said, her voice steady and serious this time. She was holding the vial of silverleaf in her hands now, her eyes fixed on me.

“How did you know about my mothe-“

Before I could finish, she ushered me out of her hovel, “Go. Now. The Lady is waiting for you.”

“But which Lady?” I asked her reflexively before she shut the door, leaving me on the street holding her torn out herbalist’s page and with more questions than answers.

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The sun had set by the time I made it to the edges of Black Forest, just outside of the city walls. This was not the best time to forage for herbs, but I had no time and, at the very least, I had the page to guide me to where I could best search for it — up the stream, and by a falkenbaum tree, if I could just chance upon one.

I stopped by each falkenbaum, fingering the herb between my thumb and palm as the page had instructed, hoping for no juice to spill out, but each time I did, some purple liquid would emerge, meaning I had found waldenberry rather than nightshade. Still, I persisted, working with but the last rays of sun and the first beams of starlight.

At some point, a howl echoed throughout the chill forest air, and the hair on my skin bristled and stood up. There was a reason why nobody else could be found in the city forest at night, but there was also a good reason for why I had to be there, so I continued. And as I continued, worries and anxieties and open questions shook about in my mind, like a child’s loose toys in his parent’s chest.

How did Dame Kirshka know that silverleaf would be for my mother?

What is she using nightshade for?

And most curiously, what did she mean when she said the Lady was waiting for me?

I knew that in some parts of the world, what she said would be used as a greeting for new guests and visitors, saying that the Lady of Creation would be waiting to receive them in their home. Was that what she meant? But she used it as a goodbye, and as I was leaving her home — and for the Black Forest, no less. This was neither home nor hearth associated with the Lady of Creation; this place was the realm of her sister, the Lady of Loss.

The patroness, apparently, of Avenor Himself.

Before I could sort further through the questions I kept for myself in my head, my eyes widened as I thumbed at another sprig of waldenberries — except these were no waldenberries, but nightshade. Each herb was dry on the inside, without the crimson juice of waldenberries.

“I’ve got it,” I rejoiced, excited, to no one in particular but myself. From this small vine crawling out of the wet, uneven loam of the Black Forest, I pocketed as much as I could of the small violet herb, before I heard a shrill shriek out in the distance. It sounded like a woman, older, perhaps around the age of my mother.

I rushed towards her, running faster than what I would have been comfortable with in the darkness of the Black Forest this late into the evening with only starlight to guide me. “Hello?” I called out as I ran. “Is there anyone out there?”

“Are you an Avengardian?” she called back. I was confused as to why she would ask that, but I was able to follow the sound of her voice to track her, resting against a large stone. And once I had reached her, she once again asked me, “Are you an Avengardian?”

“Yes,” I lied, perplexed as to why that should matter. “Are you hurt?”

“I hurt my ankle running,” she explained. She raised her foot. On one leg she wore her boot, and on the other, she was barefoot, exposing a heavily swollen foot. She looked to be in great pain, fighting back tears from her eyes. She was sweating heavily as well, as if she had just been running for hours.

“What was it?” I asked. “A dire wolf? A moonbear?”

“No,” she answered. “Seviskian men.”