Arthur did not sleep well that night.
He'd moved the pillow to the far end of the cot and tried to sleep without it. This had not worked. The mushrooms seemed to have grown even more in his pillow.
But the mushrooms were not the reason he hadn't slept well.
The reason was the girl.
She was still unconscious. He'd dragged her away from the seedlings carefully, making sure not to disturb the soil and propped her against the outside wall of the shack. He'd bandaged the arm, which was not broken but severely sprained, and cleaned the visible wounds as best he could with a damp rag and a grimace.
Arthur was not a doctor. He was an appraiser. His medical expertise extended to knowing that wounds were bad and that you should probably not let them get infected. The wound was already infected. It was swollen, red, hot to the touch, and had begun producing a yellowish discharge.
He'd done what he could. Cleaned it. Wrapped it. Propped the leg up on a rock to reduce swelling.
The pamphlet had not covered what to do when the patient was a half-dead soldier who had collapsed in your farm from a direction that, as far as Arthur knew, contained nothing but mist, monsters, and even more mist.
He'd checked on her three times during the night. Not out of concern. Out of a pragmatic desire to confirm she hadn't died, because a dead body on his property would attract scavengers, and that would create even more unwanted problems.
She was alive each time. Barely. Thankfully.
Morning came. Gray, as always. Arthur did not bother greeting it. He stepped outside, skirted around the girl she hadn't moved and walked to the basin to check the irrigation system.
The water level had risen overnight. Good. The plants around the basin had grown another two inches, and the filtration rate had increased proportionally. He dipped a cup in, drank, and made a note to expand the basin later in the week. If he doubled the surface area and added a second copper pipe, he could roughly triple his throughput, which would give him enough clean water to irrigate a full acre by the end of the month.
He was writing this down when the girl made a sound.
It was not a word. It was more of a groan.
Arthur looked up from his notebook.
The girl's eyes were open. Not focused, exactly, but open. They were a pale brown color, currently fixed on the sky with a blank confused face. Her mouth moved. No sound came out. Then she tried again.
"Water," she said. Her voice was a rasp.
Arthur considered this request. He had water. Clean water, in fact. The cleanest water in the entire Blighted Expanse, possibly the cleanest water on the continent, filtered through a system he had designed himself.
He looked at the girl. He looked at the basin. He looked at the girl again.
"If I give you water," he said, "you have to sit up. I'm not pouring it into a face-down person. That's just wasteful."
The girl stared at him.
It was a specific kind of stare. Arthur was familiar with this stare. He had received it many times at the Guild, usually after making a completely reasonable statement that other people for some reason found strange.
"I—" she started. Then she coughed. Then she tried to sit up, failed, tried again, and managed to prop herself against the wall of the shack with her good leg and a significant amount of grimacing.
Arthur filled a cup from the basin and walked it over to her. He held it out at arm's length, not because he was being cautious, but because he'd read somewhere that injured people sometimes grabbed things erratically and he didn't want the cup broken.
She took it. Her hands were shaking badly enough that some of the water sloshed over the rim. She drank the way a person drinks when they've been without water for a long time fast, desperate, in gasping pulls that made her cough between sips. Arthur watched with the detached evaluation of a man observing a system under stress.
She finished the cup. She stared at it. She stared at Arthur.
"What is this?" she asked.
"Water," Arthur said.
"This isn't water."
"It is. I filtered it. From the river." He paused. "Don't drink from the river directly. It's full of void-frequency contamination. Your organs would liquefy."
She stared at him some more. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"Where am I?" she asked.
"My farm."
She looked around. Slowly. Taking in the shack, the fence, the golden glow of the seedlings, the gray expanse beyond. Her eyes lingered on the plants for a long time. A very long time. Longer than Arthur felt was necessary.
"Your farm," she repeated.
"Yes."
"In the Blighted Expanse."
"Yes."
"You have a farm. In the Blighted Expanse."
"I prefer the term 'agricultural development.' Farm implies livestock, and I don't have any livestock. The Expanse doesn't have livestock. It has things that look like livestock but aren't, and I'm not interested in making that distinction at close range."
The girl opened her mouth. Closed it. She looked at the cup in her hands. She looked at the golden plants. She looked at Arthur, who was already walking back to his notebook because this conversation had reached what he considered a natural conclusion and he had irrigation calculations to finish.
"My name is Sera," she said to his back.
Arthur paused. He turned halfway. "Okay."
"I'm a private in the Vaeloric Third Infantry."
"Okay."
"We were marching through the Expanse to reinforce the border garrison at Carrow's Pass. We got hit by a mana storm two days ago. Lost the entire column. I've been walking since then." She paused. "I saw the light. I thought I was dying."
Arthur looked at her. Then he looked at his plants, which were glowing their soft, steady gold in the gray morning light. Then he looked back at her.
"The light is from my seedlings," he said. "They're photosynthesizing mana. It's a byproduct of the filtration process. It's not a sign of salvation or anything dramatic like that. Unfortunately."
Sera stared at him with an expression that Arthur could not quite read but suspected was somewhere between disbelief and the early stages of a headache.
"Right," she said.
"I'm going to finish my calculations now," Arthur said. "Your leg needs proper treatment. I don't have proper treatment. When you can walk, you should head south. The mist thin out about twenty miles that way, and there's a trade road that runs along the Expanse's southern edge. You can follow it to the nearest town."
He turned and walked back to the basin.
Behind him, Sera sat against the wall of the shack, holding an empty cup of impossibly clean water, staring at a field of glowing plants that did not exist in any botanical text she had ever read.
She did not leave.
Not that day, anyway. She couldn't walk. The leg infection was worse than Arthur had initially assessed, and by midday the swelling had spread past her knee and the redness had taken on a distinct purple tinge that reminded Arthur unpleasantly of the mushroom colony in his pillow.
He did not want to deal with this. He didn't want to deal with anything not relating to plants.
Instead, he was sitting next to an unconscious soldier, trying to remember what the first-aid pamphlet had said about infected wounds.
Clean the wound. Apply pressure if bleeding. Seek professional medical attention.
That was it. That was the entire extent of the pamphlet's advice on the matter. Arthur had never been so disappointed in a piece of literature in his life.
He looked at the leg. He looked at the basin of purified water. He looked at his plants.
The plants purified mana. The purified water had healed nothing, as far as he could tell it was just clean water, not magic water. But the plants themselves were processing mana at a rate that shouldn't have been possible for organic matter. The waste product the golden glow in the soil was refined, ordered mana. Pure mana. The same mana the healers at the Guild used.
It was currently seeping into the dirt under his seedlings and doing absolutely nothing useful.
Arthur stared at the golden soil.
He stared at Sera's infected leg.
He stared at the soil again.
"No," he said. "That's stupid."
But the idea was already there, lodged in his brain like a splinter, and Arthur had never been good at ignoring splinters. He pulled up one of the smaller seedlings carefully, keeping the root system intact and carried it over to Sera. He planted it in a small scoop of soil directly next to her wounded leg.
Nothing happened.
"Obviously," he muttered. "Plants don't heal people. That's not how plants work."
He sat there for a moment, watching the seedling do plant things, which is to say nothing visible. Then he noticed that the golden glow from the seedling's base was spreading toward Sera's leg. Very slowly. Very faintly. But spreading.
He watched.
This would take hours. Possibly days. Possibly it would do nothing at all, and Sera would lose her leg, and Arthur would have to explain to her that he had tried to heal a severe infection with a flower and a hunch.
He pulled out his notebook.
Experiment: Proximity-based mana infusion via Refined Resonant Botanical waste product. Subject: unconscious soldier with septic leg wound. Hypothesis: negligible. Expected result: nothing. Actual result: pending.
He underlined "pending" twice.
Then he went back to his irrigation calculations, because the seedling was either going to work or it wasn't, and standing over it wasn't going to change the outcome.
It worked.
Arthur discovered this three hours later when Sera sat up, looked at her leg, and screamed.
Arthur, who had been in the middle of calculating the optimal angle for a secondary copper pipe, dropped his notebook.
Sera was staring at her calf. The bite wound was gone. Not healing. Not scabbing. Gone. The skin was smooth and whole and slightly golden, as if someone had applied a thin layer of honey to the area. The swelling had vanished. The purple tinge had vanished. She flexed her foot experimentally, rotated her ankle, and then looked at Arthur.
"What did you do?" she demanded.
Arthur picked up his notebook. He flipped to the page with the experiment notes. He looked at the word "pending." He crossed it out. He wrote "successful" underneath it.
"I put a plant next to your leg," he said.
"You put a plant next to my—"
"Yes."
"And it healed me."
"It appears so."
"How."
Arthur considered this question. It was a reasonable question. He had a theory several theories, in fact, ranging from the plausible to the speculative but none of them were tested, and Arthur did not share untested theories.
"I don't know," he said. Which was true. He had a strong suspicion, but a suspicion was not knowledge, and Arthur was very particular about the difference.
Sera looked at the seedling. It was glowing contentedly next to her leg, looking for all the world like a completely normal, unremarkable plant that had not just performed a medical miracle.
"That's a flower," she said.
"Yes."
"A flower healed my leg."
"Technically the flower didn't heal your leg. The flower produced a refined mana byproduct that may have had therapeutic properties when applied in close proximity to damaged tissue. The flower itself was just doing what flowers do. It wasn't trying to help you. It doesn't know you exist."
"But it still healed my arm."
"correct."
Sera looked at him.
Then she looked at the field of glowing seedlings behind him.
Then she looked at the disappointing fence, which hummed faintly with filtered mana.
Then she looked at the clear water in the basin, drawn from a river that should have killed her on contact.
Then she looked at Arthur, who was already writing in his notebook and had apparently mentally checked out of the conversation.
"Who are you?" she asked.
Arthur paused. He looked up. He thought about this question, which was, he supposed, a reasonable thing to ask someone who had just accidentally cured a septic wound with a houseplant.
"Arthur Pendelton," he said. "Former Artifact Appraiser, Guild of Arcane Studies, Vaeloric Empire. Currently a farmer." He paused again. "The word 'farmer' is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, but it's the most accurate option available."
Sera opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
She did not say anything.
Arthur went back to his notebook.
Experiment 2: Controlled application of RRB waste product for therapeutic purposes. Need more data. Need more seedlings. Need this soldier to stop staring at me.
He underlined the last part twice.