Free Web NovelChapter 11: The Price of Frostroot
It was Priya, of all people, who handed him the idea without meaning to.
"Frostroot," she said, three days after the potion, tossing a bundle of the pale curling stems onto her supply table like it weighed nothing at all, because to her, economically speaking, it didn’t. "Cheapest thing on that whole ridge. People use it for sore throats, mostly. A copper a bundle, maybe two if the trader’s feeling greedy that week."
Milo looked at the bundle for a long moment. He was still doing the math from three nights ago, still hearing, underneath everything else, the specific gold-tinted silence of a potion working — and it occurred to him, standing there in Priya’s tent with the smell of crushed herbs in the air, that he was looking at the single most valuable plant in the entire camp, and nobody else in it had the faintest idea.
He didn’t act on the thought right away. That came later, and it came because of the tents.
He walked the length of the camp that evening, the way he sometimes did when his own head got too loud to sit still with, and he made himself actually look this time instead of walking past the way everyone eventually learns to walk past suffering that isn’t currently their own.
An old man three rows down from Kira’s tent, hand gone the color of river glass past the wrist, still trying to whittle something with fingers that no longer bent the way fingers were supposed to. A woman near the well, crystal climbing one side of her jaw, teaching her daughter to braid hair with the specific, unhurried patience of someone who has done the math on how many more evenings she has left to teach it. A boy, younger than Aria, sitting perfectly still outside the healer’s tent because sitting still hurt less than moving, while his father argued quietly with Priya about a price for care they clearly didn’t have.
Milo had walked past all of this a hundred times before tonight, the way you walk past weather. Tonight he stopped, and counted, and didn’t like the number he got to before he ran out of tents to count.
He had the cure. Not a full one — a delay, a mercy, a month bought at a time — but a real one, sitting in a recipe he now understood well enough to reproduce, made from a plant that grew wild along a ridge two hours from camp and cost less than bread.
And he had no way to make enough of it for everyone who needed it. Not without money. Not without more Frostroot than he could gather by hand in a lifetime of solo trips up a frozen ridge.
That was the thought that actually kept him up that night — not the idea itself, which arrived almost gently, almost reasonably, the way bad ideas often do when they’re dressed as good math. It was the shape of what came after it. Because the moment anyone else figured out what Frostroot was actually worth, the price would stop being a copper a bundle. It would become whatever the sickest, most desperate person in the camp could be made to pay for one more month of their own hand still looking like a hand.
Somebody was going to own that market. Milo lay awake turning the thought over and over, hating how clearly he could already see the shape of it, and hating more that some cold, practical part of him had already started doing the arithmetic on how to make sure it was him.
"You want to what," Hadjer said the next morning, not quite laughing, not quite not.
"Buy it. All of it. Every bundle of Frostroot on that ridge and every bundle currently sitting in every trader’s stall for two valleys in either direction." Milo said it plainly, the way he tried to say everything, because pretending the plan was smaller or kinder than it actually was would only make it worse later. "I need capital. More than I have. I’m going to borrow it."
"From who?"
"Ferris. The trader by the east gate. He lends at interest to anyone he thinks will pay him back, and he’s going to think that about me, because I’m about to make sure he’s right."
Aria, sitting cross-legged by the fire with her unlearned Rogue book open in her lap, looked up sharply. "You’re going to corner the market on the one thing that could save people like Kira. And then charge them for it."
"I’m going to corner the market," Milo said, "so that when everyone else figures out what I already know, there’s still enough of it left for anyone to buy at all. If I don’t do this, someone worse will. Someone who doesn’t have a sister on the other side of the ledger, keeping the price honest."
"That’s a very tidy way to say ’I’m going to get rich off dying people.’"
It landed exactly as hard as she meant it to, and Milo let it land, because arguing it away too quickly would have been its own kind of lie. "Yes," he said instead. "That’s also what I’m going to do. Both of those things are true at once. I don’t like that they’re both true. I’m doing it anyway, because Kira needs a dose again in four weeks whether I’ve solved my conscience by then or not, and because I walked past a boy yesterday who’s stopped moving because moving hurts less than the alternative, and I have the one thing that could buy him time and I currently can’t afford to make enough of it."
Aria didn’t have an answer for that right away, and Milo respected her too much to fill the silence for her.
"I still don’t like it," she said finally.
"I don’t need you to like it," Milo said, gentler than the words sounded on their own. "I need you to tell me if I’m lying to myself about why I’m doing it. That’s different from liking it."
She was quiet a moment longer, turning the unlearned book over in her hands like the answer might be written somewhere in a Chapter she hadn’t reached yet. "You’re not lying," she said eventually, reluctant. "That’s what scares me about it."
Ferris turned out to be a small, precise man with ink-stained fingers and the specific unhurried patience of someone who had never once in his life made a loan he expected to lose money on.
"Frostroot," he repeated, when Milo laid out the request, turning the word over like he was checking it for a hidden edge. "You want to borrow against a plant children use for sore throats."
"I want to borrow against what it’s about to become," Milo said. "I can’t tell you the details. I can tell you that in a month, the price of Frostroot on this ridge is going to be unrecognizable, and I intend to already own most of it when that happens."
Ferris looked at him for a long moment — the specific look of a man deciding whether he was in the presence of a fool or the exact opposite of one — and named a number, and an interest rate that made Milo’s new, improved CON score feel entirely irrelevant to the sudden tightness in his chest, and Milo signed for it anyway, because four weeks was not very long at all, and some debts were worth being afraid of.
The gathering took the better part of five days. Hadjer and Aria helped, wordlessly, without either of them ever quite saying they’d decided to — Hadjer because a plan that involved outsmarting a market appealed to something gleeful and reckless in her that Milo suspected she’d never admit to out loud, Aria because, whatever she thought of the reasoning, she wasn’t about to let him do the actual physical grinding, buying, and hauling alone. They bought out every stall between the camp and the nearest trading post, quietly, a little at a time, so as not to spike suspicion before the stockpile was secure. They spent two full days on the ridge themselves, harvesting wild growth by hand until their fingers went as numb as the plant they were picking.
Then Milo did the second half of the plan, the part that actually frightened him more than the debt did: he let the recipe start to circulate.
Not all of it, and not for free. He sold partial formulations — enough detail to be real, not enough to be complete — to two alchemists in the trading post and one healer two valleys over, for coin, with the quiet, deliberate understanding that word travels exactly as fast as you let it. Within a week, three different healers were asking after Frostroot by name instead of by vague description. Within two, the price at the east-gate stalls had tripled. By the time the fourth week closed in, a single bundle of the plant that used to sell for a copper was going for the kind of coin that would have fed a family for a month, and Milo — who had bought most of the region’s supply before any of that happened — was sitting on more wealth than he had ever imagined touching in his entire life.
[SUPPLY SECURED: FROSTROOT RESERVE — SUFFICIENT FOR APPROXIMATELY 40 FUTURE DOSES]
[MARKET PRICE INDEX: FROSTROOT +310% SINCE last week ]
[CAPITAL GAINED: SUBSTANTIAL — DEBT TO FERRIS REPAID IN FULL]
He should have felt triumphant. Mostly, he just felt tired, and a little sick, in the specific way that comes from watching a plan work exactly as well as you built it to.
Aria found him counting the ledger by lamplight, the night the last of Ferris’s debt cleared, and didn’t say anything for a while, just sat across from him the way she had a hundred times before, watching him do math she didn’t fully understand.
"You did it," she said eventually. "You actually did it."
"I did." He didn’t look up from the numbers. "Kira has enough Frostroot reserved for years, if it comes to that. I can brew for anyone in this camp who needs it now, and still have stock left to sell for whatever it takes to keep doing that. I built exactly what I set out to build."
"And?"
"And I keep thinking about the boy outside Priya’s tent," Milo said, quiet. "The one who’d stopped moving. I could brew for him tomorrow. I have everything I need to. And some part of me is already doing the math on what it would cost me to do it for free instead of at a price, and I don’t like how long that math is taking."
Aria didn’t have an easy answer for that either, and for once, neither did he.
That was when they heard it — a commotion from the direction of the healer’s tent, raised voices, one of them cracking with the specific, ragged edge of someone who has run out of other options. Milo was on his feet before he’d decided to be, ledger forgotten on the table behind him, Aria half a step behind.
A woman was standing outside Priya’s tent, mud-streaked, breathless, a child no older than six held against her hip with one arm gone the dull, unmistakable gray of crystal past the elbow. Priya was already crouched in front of her, voice low, apologetic in a way Milo had never once heard from her.
"I don’t have that much," the woman was saying, over and over, like repeating it might change the number. "I don’t have — please, I heard there’s something now, a treatment, I heard —"
"I know," Priya said, and there was nothing brisk left in her voice at all. "I know you don’t. I’m sorry. I don’t set the price."
The woman turned, mid-desperation, and found Milo standing there in the lamplight — Milo, whose name, it turned out, had already started attaching itself to exactly this kind of rumor whether he’d wanted it to or not — and something in her face changed from grief into something sharper and more focused the instant she recognized him.
"You," she said. "You’re the one who has it."
Milo opened his mouth, and found, for the first time in longer than he could remember, that he had absolutely no idea what the honest answer was supposed to be.
