Herbs

Overview

Herbs are the plants the peoples take for healing, seasoning, and scent rather than for bulk. They grow wild nearly everywhere and are grown in beds and gardens wherever people settle. Herbs carry a lifeforce pattern of their own, so medicinal herbs really do restore strength, and the same herb acts differently on different peoples (see Plant and Animal Lifeforce). The Elven forests are their richest source, and medicinal herbs are among the few things the Elderweald and the Briarreach send outward.

Appearance

No people names its herbs as one kind; they are many small plants known by use, and the kinds most often met are these:

• Low leaf-herbs of the forest floor and garden bed: shin-high, soft-stemmed, with small toothed or downy leaves in greys and greens, and tight heads of white, yellow, or violet flowers in early summer.
• Thicket herbs of the Briarreach margins: woodier and lower, rooting in thin soil under thorn, with narrow leaves and a resinous smell.
• Fever-bark: not a plant of the bed but the inner bark of a tree, cut in strips from the living wood and dried to reddish brown, intensely bitter.
• Roots and seeds: pale, knotted roots and small hard seeds, kept whole and ground when needed.

Dried, most herbs turn the colour of hay or old leaves. Hung in bundles from rafters or stored in sacks and jars, they give a room the dry, dusty-sweet smell that the peoples know as the smell of healers, shrines, and grandmothers.

Habitat and Range

Wild herbs grow in clearings, along streams, at the forest edge, and in thicket. In the Elderweald households gather them with nuts, fruit, fungus, and roots as medicinal growth the forest lets go. In the Briarreach the Thorn Elves gather them from their own woods and small grove-gardens. In the Crownboughs they are grown: herb beds lie between the orchard rows of the cleared understorey, along the swept road to the Understorey Courts, and in the canopy gardens. Rare kinds are sought further off, in the Verdant Expanse and the Drowning Garden, at a cost.

Behaviour and Temperament

Most herbs are quick, short-lived plants that seed freely and come back each year from root or seed. Beds want weeding and light; wild stands want gathering in measure, because a stand stripped bare does not come back the next year. Heavy drawing on plant life thins them: a village that heals its sick all winter may find its herb beds poor in spring.

Abilities

An herb's virtue is real. Plant lifeforce is diffuse, stable, and gentle, suited to slow recovery and safe for repeated small doses. Healers of Nature Magic draw it forward: Herbal Purge readies fever-bark within the hour instead of over days, though overused it strengthens toxins as well. Herbs are among the living sources a caster may draw on (see Sources of Power), and an herb or ash blend masks scent against hounds.

Life Cycle

Leaf-herbs sprout in spring, flower in early summer, and are cut before or at flowering, when their smell is strongest; seed and root are taken in autumn. Most die back in winter, and the perennial kinds come again from the root. Bark is cut from living trees in strips small enough for the tree to heal.

Uses and Dangers

Herbs are the first medicine of every people: teas, tonics, poultices, and brews for fever, wounds, sleep, and the bowels. They season food and sweeten rooms. They are traded far: Elderweald medicinal herbs go out to the edge settlements, the Briarreach sends them out with thornwood, bark, resin, and dyes, and a trader may camp a whole season at the Waitfield of the Thornbound Circles for the right to buy them.

The dangers are dose and kind. A brew that strengthens one people may do little or harm to another, a forced preparation strengthens its poison with its virtue, and some herbs kept by poisoners look much like those kept by healers.

Lore and Belief

The smell of dried herbs belongs to the gods of care, death, and memory. Ghessa the Hearth-Mother smells of woodsmoke, camp bread, and dried herbs; where Ennor the Grave-Watcher passes the air smells of damp earth and dried herbs, and where the Ancestor-Warden moves it smells of old dust and dried herbs. Many households hang a bundle at a deathbed or over a door for that reason. Folk healers hold that an herb gathered by the wrong hand or at the wrong season loses its virtue; the virtue is real, the rule is custom.

Herb-hunters who go for the rare kinds into the Verdant Expanse or the Drowning Garden are a known and short-lived trade; a healer's shelf with a jar from the Expanse on it is a shelf someone died to fill.

Where It Appears

Places:

• The Elderweald
• The Briarreach
• The Crownboughs
• The Understorey Courts
• The Verdant Expanse
• The Drowning Garden

People and gods:

• The Thornbound Circles
• The Hearth-Mother
• The Grave-Watcher
• The Ancestor-Warden

Magic:

• Lifeforce
• Biological Affinity
• Sources of Power
• Nature Magic
• Trace Magic