Frostmoss

The clan roost echoes with the rasping coughs of children suffering from frost-lung. The healer—a lutrine named Nettle Darrow—dumps your frostmoss straight into a boiling cauldron before you even set the crate down. "Frostmoss is only half the cure! To brew the lung-balm I need rendered gloomwing fat, and all my hunters are bedridden with the cough."

Thick evening fog fills the canyon to the brim. Just above the mist line, a hundred leather-winged gloomwings hang sleeping in the cliff mouths, blinded by the vapor. One massive, fat old bull hangs lowest on the rock.

Toward dawn, the three sickest children finally stop coughing—only because they are too exhausted to draw breath. Nettle looks from their pallets to you. "Nursing only buys a few days. Only the gloomwing balm will cure the roost—or else a fast ship could carry these three worst cases down to a warm lowland port infirmary where their lungs can clear."

Nettle renders the gloomwing fat with the frostmoss in a steaming cauldron whose pungent fumes fill the entire roost. By morning, the children's coughing has broken. Scraping the remaining salve into stoneware crocks, she asks how you want your reward.

As your ship descends into warmer air, the children's rasping coughs ease mile by mile, and the youngest sleeps soundly through the final night. On the dock, port physician Maud Tanner reads Nettle's letter and nods briskly. "Frost-lung—down here in the warm air, they'll recover fully by spring. I know the mountain roost couldn't pay you, so you can claim a carrier's fee from our hospital fund, or take a fitted surgeon's chest I prepared for a ship's sickbay."