“She cannot remain with a group of soldiers until we return to the city. It could be a month before we return.”
“You don’t trust your men to behave themselves? Or you do not trust yourself not to soften toward her?” Jerick asked, a small smirk around his lips.
“Stop speaking, Jerick.”
“She reminds me of our Lady Queen,” Jerick mused, ignoring him.
“She looks nothing like the queen.” Queen Lark was diminutive, a waif of a woman with silver eyes, soft brown hair, and an iron will.
“No . . . still. There is something,” Jerick argued.
There was something. It was in the stillness of their bodies and the stiffness of their spines, even when they bowed their heads. The woman—Sasha—was oddly regal for a slave. Queen Lark shared the same bearing.
Kjell wheeled his horse around, his men drawing to an immediate halt, their hands on their reins, their brows furrowed.
“Wait for me here,” he commanded. He felt their eyes on his back as he crossed the distance to the figure who trailed them, but he felt her eyes most distinctly. She watched as he approached, the veil he’d given her fluttering like pale wings in the breeze. She held a small bundle, most likely her few possessions. The bundle made his throat catch, and he wondered if she’d included the things he bought for her.
He didn’t know what to say. Words had never been his weapons or his way. He tripped over them and spoke in anger when he spoke at all. Anger was comfortable for him. She lifted a hand as if she knew why he’d returned, and he closed the gap between them. Leaning down, he ignored her upraised arm and instead, encircled her waist and drew her up in front of him. He felt her gasp and the shudder of relief that ended on a soft, “Thank you, Captain.”
“I am not your master. I am not a savior or a saint. I am Kjell. You can call me Kjell or call me nothing at all. I will take you where you can find work.”
“I will stay with you.”
“You will not.”
She didn’t protest further, but he felt her resistance, and he quietly reveled in it.
They rode for two days, riding east toward Enoch. Sasha didn’t complain, though she slept so deeply at night he knew she was taxed. Still she rose before him each day, determined to make herself useful. She was quiet, as if waiting for him to give her permission to speak, and though he was accustomed to solitude, her silence rankled.
She seemed comfortable with him physically, allowing herself to relax within the cradle of his body. It would have been excruciating for both of them otherwise. He had tried to remove his breastplate, making it more comfortable for her, but she shook her head adamantly. “There will be fighting.”
“When?” Her gift—like all gifts—made him uncomfortable. But he wasn’t fool enough to doubt her. In his experience, very few people wanted to be Gifted, so when they said they were, they were owed belief. He’d learned that the hard way.
“I don’t know when,” she answered. “But there will be a battle. And you will need to protect your heart.”
“You can see that?”
“I don’t see things exactly as they are or as they will be. My visions are more like glimpses. Pieces and images, pictures and suggestions. Sometimes it is easy to put the pieces together. I’ll see water. I’ll see sickness. I draw conclusions.” She shrugged. “Other times, I see things I don’t understand at all, and it isn’t until they are happening that I recognize the signs.”
He kept his armor on and directed his men to do the same, though the heat was sweltering and there were no signs of the Volgar. Now he baked in his breastplate and stewed in her silence.
“Speak, woman,” he insisted on the second day, her hushed expectancy wearing him raw. She jerked and strained to see his face though her head was beneath his chin.
“What would you like me to say?” she asked, clearly surprised.
He racked his brain, angry that he had to ask her to converse with him, and grasped at the first thing that entered his mind. “You said you awoke with no memories, but there were stories in your head.”
“You want me to tell you a story?” she asked hopefully, and he felt like a child. But if he was a child, he was a desperate one.
“Yes. Tell me one of your stories.”
“I can tell you the origin story. It was Mina’s favorite.”
“Changers and Tellers and Spinners,” he muttered. He didn’t want to talk about the Gifted.
“And Healers,” she added.
“And Healers,” he acknowledged. He definitely didn’t want to talk about Healers. But Sasha did.
“Have you always known you could heal?” she asked cautiously. It served him right. He’d asked her to speak, now he had to answer.
“An old woman—a diviner of gifts—once told me that the gift of a Healer is the easiest to deny. Especially among those who are comfortable with war and suspicious of love.” He had never forgotten the words. They’d seared themselves on his heart the moment he heard them. “I spent a long time denying.”
“Are you still denying?” she asked.
“Still resisting. The woman told me that for every life I save, I give up a day of my own. Though how that could be proven is a mystery to me.”
Sasha jerked, and he wondered what he’d said. “You healed two hundred people,” she whispered. “I asked you to heal them.”
“I have never been able to heal like that before. I am not particularly skilled.”
“But . . . you healed me.” She seemed stricken by the realization, and fell back into silence. He tried again.
“I don’t want to hear the origin story. I know it too well. Tell me a story you don’t think I know.”
She didn’t respond immediately, and Kjell waited impatiently, tempted to prod her.
“Once, in a place where the rocks and the grass grew together, a king reigned over a people who could shift into trees,” she started hesitantly, as though forcing her thoughts from where they’d been to where he wanted them to be. “When conquering armies would come to enslave them, the king’s people would encircle his kingdom and spin themselves into a forest wall, tall and stately, bending with the wind but not breaking, protecting the kingdom from those who would do her harm. But there was a girl among them, a princess who could not shift, and there were conquerors who could fly.”
Something niggled. “I’ve heard of this place.”
She tipped her head quizzically. “You know that one? Should I tell you a different story?”
“No. Continue.”
“The girl who could not spin climbed up into the largest tree to hide, sheltered by the leaves, but the invaders could smell her blood. They could hear her heartbeat. The king knew that she would not be able to hide forever, no matter how great the forest or how tall the branches, so he sent her away, far from the land of Tree Spinners.”
“Did she ever go back?”