Chapter 4: Spring Vegetable Soup and Olivia’s Secret
OLIVIA woke to the morning sun slanting into her room. She hadn’t slept enough since she’d come home so late last night, but she suspected she might just sleep until the first customers came if she went back to sleep now. Instead, she worked up her energy and got out of bed.
She went downstairs, washed her face, gave Rob his breakfast, and started preparing her own. After lighting the fire in the stove, she roughly chopped a head of cabbage, thinking about last night’s events while she moved on to chopping onion, celery, asparagus, and carrots.
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🍲 🍲 🍲
JUST after getting into bed last night, she’d felt someone approaching, their heart filled with worry and sorrow. They were very powerful emotions, suddenly and painfully gripping Olivia’s own heart.
She quickly got out of bed and looked out the window to see a wolf. The memories flooding into her from the wolf made it clear it wasn’t a dog. It came up the moonlit path, its head hanging.
Olivia quickly changed clothes and rushed down the stairs to open the door with an oil lamp in hand. There she saw the female wolf, stricken with grief.
“What’s wrong?” Olivia asked.
My baby hurt, hurt. Help, help, help.
Olivia didn’t hear words. It was emotions and images flowing directly from the wolf’s mind into her own. Her heart ached from the mother wolf’s emotions, desperate, at a loss for what to do.
Olivia took a deep breath, pulled on her outdoor clothes, grabbed the satchel and water flask she had ready for this sort of situation, then she stepped out of the house.
“Let’s go. Show me the way,” she said.
Help, help.
“I will help. When did your pup become unwell?”
Dark forest. Baby hurt, very hurt.
“I understand. Let’s hurry.”
Olivia inspected the wolf’s emotions as they walked. It seemed like something had happened while the pup was playing. She thought of possible causes while they were on the way.
The wolf led her to the pup, who was lying listlessly on the ground. Every once in a while it made a retching sound, but nothing came out. It didn’t look like it had the energy to stand. Olivia looked around and found pieces of poison cherries in the pup’s vomit. Poison cherries were the red fruit of a wild bush. They were a little sweet, but also quite bitter, and contained a fairly powerful poison. They would be torture to a little body like this pup’s. The one saving grace was that the poison wasn’t generally lethal.
Perhaps the pup ate some while it was playing.
Olivia opened the pup’s mouth and pushed her fingers into the back of its throat, worried there might still be some poison cherries in its stomach. The pup retched several times, bringing up what looked like stomach fluids as well as the last remaining fragments of red fruit.
Next, Olivia poured a couple of drops of water from her flask into a wooden cup. She selected a medicine from her bag and placed just a tiny amount of powdered human antitoxin into the cup and mixed it until it formed a ball. After picking it up on one finger, she pressed it on the roof of the pup’s mouth, and then held its mouth closed so it didn’t spit the medicine back out. Then she waited.
Once she saw the pup’s throat move a few times to swallow, she lifted the pup’s head, poured plenty of water into the wood cup, and made the pup drink. She wanted to get it to drink as much as she could. It chugged down the water from the wooden cup.
“I’ll carry the pup back to your den,” said Olivia. “Are you still producing milk?”
Lots milk, many milk.
“All right. Have the pup drink plenty of milk. I don’t think it will die. It’d be best for it not to eat meat tomorrow, too. Just milk.”
My baby, love my baby, love.
Powerful feelings of affection poured into Olivia.
Just when she was starting to feel relieved, the wolf spotted Arthur. She couldn’t believe he’d followed her. Being a former mercenary must be why he was good at quietly following them, and his emotions were too calm for her to notice him either.