The first step was to cut the plant into two-centimeter-long sections before boiling them down, but that was only the beginning. The cut herbs needed to simmer for an hour, and they needed to remain entirely submerged throughout the process, requiring water to repeatedly be added to the pot.
The water had to turn a deep brown. (Misha was told to look for the color of an andie’s fur, but she didn’t actually know what that was. Apparently, it was a kind of field mouse common in the area.) Once it reached that color, the water needed to be boiled away. Keeping the right amount of heat from that point was a challenge. It was very easy to burn the herbs if you weren’t careful. Once the herbs had dried out enough to be crushed without any fluid coming out, the next step was to move the dried madleaf to a mortar and begin grinding. And once it had been ground down to the point of having no more visible fibers, then it was time to add the other ingredients, grind everything down further, and form the mixture into pills.
It wasn’t an especially difficult process—the people in the far north usually made it without bothering to use precise tools or measurements—but it was a time-consuming one. Besides the process of boiling them, the plant itself was tough and fibrous, making the grinding process a great deal of work.
Misha’s first thought was that it would be better to only use the softer leaves of the plant, but the people up north insisted vehemently that you needed to include the stalk and root as well for the medicine to be effective.
Since they had so much extra now, the apothecaries experimented making the medicine using each individual part of the plant. Sure enough, none of their tests produced any worthwhile effects, so they had no choice but to continue with the original laborious process.
Apparently the name of the plant had been derived from the fact it was such a pain to work with it that it drove the people working on it mad. Misha laughed at how silly the naming process had been, but Miranda shrugged, saying that’s just how naming things went.
The process was straightforward enough that not only the apothecaries and the doctors but also the apprentices and anyone with basic medical knowledge was able to pitch in and help, leading to a large room of people complaining about the soreness in their arms.
That said, not a single one of them gave up. Compared to the long days of helplessly watching people getting sick and dying, the sensation of their arms turning to jelly was downright pleasant. Even when they were too weak to hold their utensils properly at mealtimes, everyone who helped was unbothered.
Some of them even started to lean into that situation, enjoying it when maids were sent from the castle to help them eat, but those people were quickly chastised through kicks from their companions. Everyone’s legs were in perfect working order, after all.
“True enough. It’s pretty rare for an herb to require this much work,” Miranda said, agreeing with Misha’s point.
Herbs were often finicky, whether it was them needing to be carefully harvested, or drying in the shade over a great deal of time, or requiring very specialized environments to grow in. Nonetheless, it was almost unheard of for an herb to need this much processing to become medicine. It was certainly the first such herb Misha had ever encountered.
“But if it’s so important to have all parts of the plant to make the medicine, then it should have been obvious to me that taking the vapors from boiling it wouldn’t be enough,” Misha said.
The effect from breathing in the vapors had been minute at best. It had been much more effective to drink the resulting soup. But even that was only half as effective as the usual medicine, which meant the plant itself, discarded after the boiling process, was also important.
“In any case, we need every part of the plant for the medicine to work. That’s why it’s so effective when we grind it down into a powder and inhale it.”
Nel had been able to create three of his specialty mortars before he ran out of gloves to make them with. Grinding the medicine down to the point it could be inhaled properly took a great deal of time, and judging whether the fineness of the powder was acceptable enough wasn’t exactly easy either, so this process had been left to the People of the Forest.
Besides, they didn’t want to share the material used to make these specialized mortars with that many people. Even Misha was rarely called to participate, only doing so when there was no one else available.
As Misha glanced over at them, she heard them singing while they worked. They moved their pestles into their specialized mortars in rhythm with the gentle melody.
Misha listened for a while before suddenly blinking in surprise. “This song...”
“What about it?” Miranda asked.
“My mom used to hum this song when she was making medicine. When I asked her about it, she would just say, ‘Oh, was I humming?’ as if she didn’t want to admit it. But whenever she was focusing really hard, she’d start again...”
The words they sang here were in a language Misha didn’t know, but she definitely recognized the melody. It was the same tune her mother would hum on rainy days when they stayed inside and made medicine together.
The faint sound of rain, the sound of their tools grinding herbs, and her mother’s gentle humming had all blended together into a single harmony, but when Misha had asked about it, her mother had acted like she didn’t know what she was talking about. Misha had thought it was quite strange, but, wanting to hear the song, she’d stopped asking about it so that her mother would keep going.
“Really? If she was humming it without realizing it, maybe Ryne’s visits were weakening the hypnosis they placed on her.”
“Hypnosis?” Misha tilted her head in confusion.
“When someone leaves the village, they are forced to take on a number of limitations,” Miranda explained. “One of those is a kind of hypnosis placed on them using drugs. They’ll remember that they grew up in a small village in the north, but they’ll have no memory of what it was called or where it was. In the same way, they won’t be able to recall the secrets of the tribe.”
Misha gulped at the unexpectedly heavy answer. “So is that why I never heard about the People of the Forest from her?”
It hadn’t been until she left the forest that Misha realized how strange it was that her mother had never told her about where she grew up. She had never heard anything about her grandparents or about how her mother lived as a child.