Shadows of the Scriptures

FOUR: The Stallion that Strode

The needle is vital.

When Addie noticed fresh avren lichen, white and disgusting, crawling up the side of a stringbark, that was the primal thought which crossed her mind.

The needle.

While Nayari kept up her plod, Addie stopped to rifle through her cloak's districts. She went by dint of a black key as large as her hand, a splat of leatherleaf wood, a firecracker which popped in her hand like corn in a skillet, an ant, a pair of mittens that she had never seen before but fancied, three peanuts which she set aside for later consumption, and a pig-pink swath of cloth, before at last she found the pocket concealing her needle. Around it was wound a messy pellet of what looked like hair.

"Oh, string, how could I forget you," she muttered, unfurling the pellet, then loudly: "Wait yourself, good lady! For when I own a horse or an orrock, I'll be praying for it to have half the stamina as is crammed in your legs."

Nayari did not hear to this. Rather, she did but did not listen. Or listened but did not pay heed. Her feet urged on. The honeysuckle stalk rested on her shoulder, the squished flower pegs and barbed branches dancing a jig.

In any case, Addie soon fell into step beside her, needle and gut in hand, her breathing nimble as wildfire. Her endurance was all but dwindling. Sweat seemed to be soaking into her very bones.

"You have to stop," Addie breathed, jogging to keep up.

"I have to do nothing."

"You have to get to your daughter."

"That, yes."

"And you need to get there on your own two feet, not flung over my shoulder like a sack of taters."

Nayari knitted together her brows. "What are you talking about?"

"That." Addie pointed, Nayari looked, at the gash on the latter's papery dress. Under the rising sun, which was fuming in anger having been separated from his lover 'Mooch' Aeomar, it was revealed to be deeper than the sufferer was willing to admit.

"I am fine." Her stride never broke.

"For now. Your daughter was too, at first."

"What are you saying?"

"What you are hearing. Until your daughter got infected, she was fine. Now we're here, trying to get to her in time so she can forestall a life-threatening disease."

Now Nayari did halt. "I see," she said through bitten lips. "Do what you have to, and do it quick."

"I have to do nothing."

Nayari frowned again.

Addie smiled her cheap, charming smile. "Callback. To when you said - never you mind. Hold this." She handed over the needle and gut. "Wait your feet. I would sit down if I were you."

"Where are you going?" Addie sensed some of the fear from earlier lucent in Nayari's voice.

"Nowhere."

"Says the girl walking away from me as she speaks."

"I stop here, see." And Addie did, on a slight rise of the earth before the stringbark laden in lichen that had caught her eye. She pressed her nose to the bark and sniffed. Then she crinkled it, showing Nayari a thumb of all-well.

Discreetly, she brought her knife out and chipped away at the lichen, more leafy than crusty, with milky wafers at ends. But the white mat was stuck to the 'bark with some resolve, unwilling to come off. She did not want to tear it or harm it in any way; that could cause complications. So Addie put the knife edge-first on the top of the wafer, twisting it widdershins. Inhaling, she cleared her head of junk as one clears a garden of weeds, and thought, very pointedly: Curly white smoke rising up to your chest. Turning into pure stark energy as you -