“Thank goodness. I can’t go out at night for a while after this. They’ll get suspicious.” She closed her medicine box, then hid it inside her cloak.
“Have they been struck by some plague? You worked so hard to make that many medicinal potions, Miss.” Sophia stared at her in bewilderment. This was unlike Éloide.
“These are for the severely wounded knights,” she replied, turning toward the window. Her clear eyes gazed into the distance.
“What? You don’t even know them. Why go to all this trouble for them? Ugh, you really leave me baffled, Miss.” Sophia cried out in frustration, but Éloide merely laughed at her servant’s antics.
“That’s enough. Just sit quietly.”
“Miss Apothecary, you really came to my house?” A young man cried out in shock at the sight of the mysterious figure standing before his door.
“Sorry to have kept you waiting. Where is your father?”
He thrust out his hand, his trembling index finger pointing eagerly inside his dilapidated home.
“He’s there, he’s inside, Miss Apothecary. Come in. I wasn’t lying to you. My father has lost consciousness.”
Without saying much, Éloide saw in her clear gaze an old man lying inside, his face and body terribly gaunt. He looked gravely ill and was clearly suffering terribly.
“Don’t worry.” She touched the young man’s shoulder as he trembled from crying. “Give him this three times a day. Don’t let the potion come into contact with sunlight.” Éloide handed him the bottle, then briefly glanced behind her.
As if given an order, Sophia stepped forward and handed over a pouch of gold coins. “This is for you,” Sophia said.
“Miss Apothecary... this is far too much money.” His voice trembled, mingling happy sobs with tears of gratitude.
“You can use it to buy food for a few days,” Éloide added after administering the potion to the old man’s lips. “He’ll regain consciousness and recover slowly.”
It wasn’t long before the sound of coughing and heavy eyelids slowly opening made the young man hurry forward, dragging his feet. His tears flowed even more freely when he saw his father smiling.
“Father, you’re awake! Father... you’re finally awake!” he shouted, hysterical with happiness.
“Ha-Hans...” The old man’s hoarse voice broke. Tears streamed down his gaunt cheeks as he realized he was still alive.
“Miss Apothecary, thank you... My father, he... Miss Apothecary, where are you?” He fell to his knees, while his father lifted his head slightly, intending to offer his thanks. But the two mysterious women had vanished like a night breeze.
“How could you be so kind to us?” Their sobs became impossible to contain. They embraced one another, then gazed into the distance at the fading trace of Éloide’s figure.
“You’ve been doing this for four years without accepting payment. Don’t you feel like you’re being taken advantage of, Miss?”
Sophia followed Éloide with every light step she took. The servant couldn’t make sense of what Éloide was doing.
They weren’t knights from Bellmont Palace. Why should Éloide be responsible for treating their war wounds, too?
“I just want to treat them,” Éloide replied, her footsteps carrying her to the riverbank, where the swift current flowed toward the edge of the settlement. “Besides, some of the people joined the war of their own free will. I don’t want their families to grieve.”
“But you’ve also been making medicines that are different from the painkillers.”
“Yes. Someone sent me a letter by carrier pigeon saying that he’d been seriously ill for years. I hope the medicine can ease his pain,” Éloide replied.
She explained that several of the bottled potions contained liquids of different colors from the medicine meant for the knights.
The night breeze stirred part of her long cloak, while the moonlight made the hood concealing Éloide’s beautiful face look even darker and deeper.
Sophia dropped to her knees on the wet grass after seeing that Éloide had already knelt at the riverbank, holding a medicine box containing Isabella’s creations and medicinal plants brought from the outside world.
She bent slightly, preparing to place the wooden box in her hands into the flowing river.
“Are you sure the medicines you’ve floated down the river all this time actually reach their destinations, Miss?” Sophia furrowed her brow anxiously, her eyes shifting from her mistress’s moving hands to the sliver of her face peeking out from beneath the hood.
“I don’t know. But I’m fairly sure.” She answered with a gentle curve to her small lips as she watched the wooden box drift farther away. Then the night breeze made the slightly heavy hood of her cloak shift.
“Huh? How can you be sure, Miss?”
“We’ll see tomorrow morning, Sophia.”