Stanchweed

Overview

Stanchweed grows along every road, and that is where it is needed. Its crushed leaves, packed into a cut, slow and stop the bleeding, and every escort, soldier, carter, and herder carries a twist of it dried in a pouch. Of all the herbs, it is the one most people can find and use without a healer.

Appearance

It is a low, tough plant, a shin to a knee high, with leaves so finely divided that they look like green feathers or soft fern, dark green and slightly woolly, crowded up the stem. In summer it carries flat, dense heads of tiny flowers, white or faintly pink, as wide as a palm. The whole plant has a strong, sharp, bitter smell, like crushed chrysanthemum and pine, that clings to the fingers. Dried, it keeps its smell for a year.

Habitat and Range

It grows on poor, dry, trodden ground: waysides, field edges, meadows, banks, and the trampled margins of camping grounds and caravan yards. It is found on both sides of Caeldon wherever people walk, from the basin lanes to the passward shelters of the High Scars and the cistern approaches of the Leeward Folds. It does not grow in deep forest, desert, or the deep.

Behaviour and Temperament

It spreads by creeping roots into tough mats that stand trampling and mowing. A road that has been walked for a generation is edged with it.

Life Cycle

A long-lived plant that dies back in winter and comes up again in spring, flowering from midsummer into autumn.

Uses and Dangers

Its leaves, crushed or chewed and packed into a cut, help the blood clot and slow its flow, and its bitterness keeps a wound cleaner than a dirty rag would. It is the first thing put into a wound on a road, before a healer can be reached, and the escort companies of the Windscar and the armies of the cradle-web both carry it. A tea of it is drunk for fever and for a griping stomach, and the dried plant is strewn against moths. It does not close a wound and cannot clean one deep, and packing a dirty cut with it seals the dirt in (see Wound Rot).

Lore and Belief

Soldiers' tales hold that the first warrior learned stanchweed from a god who bled on a battlefield, and some companies call it the war-god's leaf. Orc escorts say that a party that carries no stanchweed expects someone else to bleed for it. Herb-wives say it stops a nosebleed when pushed into the nose and starts one when held under it, both of which are true enough.

A sellsword who comes into a company without a pouch of it is laughed at, and a surgeon's apprentice is first sent to cut it along the march, which is how many of them learn where the ambush ground lies.

Where It Appears

• Wound Rot