The scent of drying elderflowers, crushed mountain mint, and fresh cedar filled the ground floor of the new clinic.
Although the second-story loft was still being shingled by the village carpenters, the main hall was already bustling. Benches made of split pine were lined with elderly wolves nursing aching joints, mothers carrying infants with mild coughs, and laborers seeking cooling salves for saw-blade burns.
Elena sat at a long, scrubbed wooden table near the sunlit casement window.
She wore a simple dark blue apron over her linen dress, her fingers nimble as she spread a poultice of crushed comfrey and marsh moss over the swollen wrist of Widow Martha, an elder whose family had worked the eastern timberline for three generations.
"The swelling will drop by nightfall, Martha," Elen
