A leather satchel holding a herbalist’s working tools: a stone mortar and pestle small enough to carry, a curved pruning knife for cutting cleanly without bruising, a folding drying frame of thin willow, rolls of linen filter cloth, stoppered glass vials for tinctures and distillates, twine for bundling, a small brass mesh sieve, and a wax-tight tin for the finest powders. Village wise-women, monastery infirmarians, and hedge-witches all carry some version of the kit; the contents vary with the season and the country, since a herbalist in the Byzarian hills works with different leaves than one in the northern marches.
The satchel is the field half of the craft. Longer preparations — macerations, decoctions, and the slow drying of roots — require a workshop, and a wandering herbalist trades with settled practitioners for the heavier work. The vials and filters are fragile, and a kit that has seen a season on the road shows it in chipped stoppers and stained cloth.