The sorrel arrived in a damp bundle, tied with the same river-grass cord Maret always used, and Wren knew before she opened it that someone was going to go without.
Wren worked through the pile stem by stem, fingers moving without instruction, sorting by touch before she looked. Good stems had a particular snap to them, a green resistance that gave and then held. These gave too easily. Too soft at the base, the fiber gone slack where the stalk met the root, as though the plant had been drinking but hadn't been nourished.
She pressed her thumbnail into one of the softer stalks and the smell reached her before she'd broken the skin all the way through — a sour-sweet bloom, overripe and wrong, the kind of scent that coated the inside of the nose and sat there. Not the clean bite she relied on. This was the smell of something that had tried and failed.
She crushed a tainted sorrel leaf between her fingers and touched a single drop of oil to the pulp. The sour-sweet didn't lift. It thickened. The lavender went under instead of over, and what rose from her palm was the copper-scent of rot-bloom braided with sweetness.
