When Penelope commented on the villagers’ willingness to help each other, Crow nodded in agreement. The communal mentality of the people here was one of the reasons why he loved his home so much. No matter how hard things got, he knew he could always count on the fact that there were always people around who would take care of him. It had mattered much more when he’d been young and didn’t have the life experience to make it on his own, but even now, he occasionally found himself in situations where he needed the generosity of others to get by.

Thinking about it now, he could recall a number of times when he’d had to take cover in the homes of peasant families while local knights had been hot on his trail. If they hadn’t hidden him from the guards, he might have found himself in chains again. He shuddered at the thought. Though he was skilled in escaping from knights, he wasn’t perfect. Especially with such a high price on his head, he had needed all the help he could get to stay away from bounty hunters remain a free man.

As Penelope went on to talk about Hazel and the court physician, Crow turned to her with a hopeful look. “Hazel is already planning to make more of her medicine to give to the people here. Since Simon passed, that plan was put on hold, but I think she’s getting ready to pick it back up again soon. She definitely seems eager enough.” He lapsed into a brief silence as he pondered over the physician from the castle. Eldon had been quite confident that his poultice would work, and he couldn’t help but wonder if the old man really did have a cure. Somehow, the thought brought a twinge of frustration to the thief.

He absently lifted a hand to his chest, where the disease usually pained him. If Eldon had a cure for his illness, then that meant it had been curable since the start. It also meant the people of Myrefall had been dying for no reason. He clenched his jaw slightly. It upset him to know that there could have been a cure at the castle all along, and the only reason he was being treated now was because he was the king’s guest. The peasants of the outer villages deserved just as much respect. It didn’t matter that they were of a lower class; their lives still had just as much worth as his, if not more. They should have been receiving treatment too.

“I wonder if being the viceroy means I’ll have the authority to send physicians to the outer villages,” he mused out loud, letting his eyes wander over the people around them. “The Creeping Death isn’t the only sickness to plague these villages, and the peasants here have no way to seek remedies outside of the charity of herbalists like Hazel.” He looked back at Penelope with a frown. “The physicians at the castle seem much more capable. If they would just lay their pride down enough to treat people of a lower class, they could prevent many of the deaths that happen in our kingdom every day… I just can’t imagine how I could get them to do it for free, since no one here can afford to see a healer.”