Elsbeth Quennell

Elsbeth Quennell was born in a roadside ditch, between a broken cart and a field of nettles.

Her mother was a wandering midwife. Her father, nobody ever knew.

She learned to walk clinging to a saddlebag that smelled of rosemary, wormwood and dried blood.

At nine she could close a wound with gut thread. At twelve she knew which root put pain to sleep and which one put you to sleep for good.

Her mother taught her one law: "Herbs don't ask whose side you're on. Neither do you."

Elsbeth has kept it all her life.

One winter of war, a company of mercenaries made camp beside her cart. They were torn to pieces. Nobody else would open a door for them.

She stitched up every one of them. At dawn the captain left her a purse of coins and an offer.

She went with them. Thirty years, four companies and more battles than she cares to count.

She watched the bannered armies take the glory. And she watched her own, the hired ones, die on the front line without anyone writing down their names.

That's why, when a mercenary falls, Elsbeth runs twice as fast.

It isn't favouritism. It's a debt.

They were the only ones who ever called her "sister" without asking where she came from.

She has never carried a sword. She held one once, in her first battle, and dropped it to press her hands against a boy's open throat.

Since then, her hands are for healing. And for shutting mouths.

Anyone who mistakes a healer for easy prey learns too late that those hands have set hundreds of bones. And know exactly how to unset them.

When she joins the brawl, her own stand taller. Watching a 58-year-old woman throw punches lights a fire in anyone's blood.

She charges.

Always.

Bread, salt, a blanket, a good story. Whatever you've got.

Not out of greed. Because what's given away isn't respected, and what isn't respected is forgotten.

One night she patched up soldiers from both armies under the same canvas. The next morning they killed each other a hundred paces from her cart.

She gathered the bandages, washed her hands and kept walking.

She doesn't judge. She doesn't choose. She heals.

Her remedies are never weighed on a scale. They're measured by eye, by the handful, by whatever the wind lets through.

Sometimes the handful falls short and barely closes a scratch. Sometimes it lands exactly where it should and brings someone back who was already saying goodbye.

Elsbeth doesn't apologise for that. "Luck is an herb too," she says. "Just not one I grow."

Against the ills that aren't of the flesh, fever, the evil eye, the fear that freezes you, she carries rue and salt. She blows them into the wounded one's face, and whatever was clinging to them falls away like old dust.

If the wounded one is one of hers, she also squeezes their shoulder. And the mercenary goes back to the line with tougher skin than before.

No home. No banner. No one waiting for her.

Just a saddlebag, a pair of weathered hands and a road that never ends.

They say she has watched more people die than she has saved.

She denies it. She says she keeps her accounts in order.

And the day they don't add up, it'll be because somebody didn't pay.