The Apothecary
The blue tent smells like every remedy your family has ever believed in, all at once. Behind the counter, on a high stool, sits a badger in half-moon spectacles and a waistcoat with more pockets than cloth, grinding something that glows in a mortar.
You describe the wound. The grinding stops at the word grey.
“Thorn-grey,” the Apothecary says, over his spectacles. “On a guardian. Hm.” He climbs down, disappears, and returns with a jar the size of your fist, full of what looks like liquid moonrise. “Moonsilver salve. Stops thorn-grey the way a shore stops a tide — one application, one night, done spreading forever. I stock it because the Market crosses her lands, and her lands are… growing.” The spectacles flash. “The price is not money, honey-child. It never is here. The price is the memory of your best birthday. Whole and entire — the cake, the faces, all of it. It goes in a bottle on my shelf and it stops ever having happened to you.”
He says it kindly, and that's somehow worse. On the counter between you, the jar of moonrise glows, and outside the tent the market murmurs, and somewhere east of town, in a cellar, the grey is a finger-width wider than it was yesterday.