“Tell Lieutenant Jerick. You will take the darkest shift,” Kjell called out. The man nodded, pleased, and the demonstrations continued.
Emboldened by the cat-eyed watchman, a few others came forward, shyly displaying talons, tails, spikes, and gills. The changes exhibited were small, partial, and specific, and none of the people who stepped forward could change entirely. The queen nodded encouragingly.
“There were Changers like that in Quondoon. Surely there is a use for your gifts here in Caarn.”
“I can change,” a man spoke from the crowd. “But not on land.”
“Completely?” the king pressed.
“Yes, Majesty. When I am in the water I can become any sea creature I wish.”
“How much water do you need?” Kjell said, raising his voice above the murmuring of the excited spectators.
The man shrugged. “It depends on the size of the creature I become.”
Kjell looked to Tess. “Can you make a pool for the Sea Changer?”
Tess stepped forward eagerly, hiking her skirts once more, and the water grew around her, a muddy patch that quickly became a large puddle.
The man asked the ladies to avert their eyes. None of them did. He shrugged, indifferent, and began to remove his clothes. The crowd gasped. Very few of them knew what Changing entailed.
“Have you ever seen a fish wearing a tunic?” the man asked with a smirk. “When I shift, my clothes fall off, and I’d rather not get them wet.” A few of the gathered villagers turned their heads, mortified, but most watched as, with an audible plop, the man became a small orange fish, not much bigger than the palm of Kjell’s hand. He swam in circles in the murky water before flopping on the ground beside the puddle and morphing back into a man. He calmly clothed his nakedness, a bit of mud smeared across his cheek.
A child of twelve or thirteen, a boy named Dev with green eyes and hair almost as red as Sasha’s, made the wind gust around them, whipping at the queen’s hair and parting the king’s beard.
“That’s a gift, isn’t it Highness?” his mother asked, unsure. “He’s a Tree Spinner too, but he spins like a storm. When he spins into a tree, he knocks the leaves off all the branches around him.”
“It is indeed a gift,” the king reassured as the boy sent a happy breeze through the uppermost boughs of the nearby trees.
A woman introduced her husband, Boom, claiming he was a special kind of Teller.
“I speak for him because his voice is so loud, it’ll make your ears bleed,” the woman explained. “That’s why we call him Boom. Even when he whispers it’s too much. He talks with his hands or writes on a slate to communicate most of the time.”
The man had a chest cavity like a lion and ears like a mole, as though the sound of his voice made his own head ache. Boom walked into the trees, putting a hundred feet between the gathering and himself. When he opened his mouth and said “good day,” the sound reverberated like a gong, and everyone assembled clapped their hands over their ears in pain.
The king asked Boom to walk to the borders of Caarn and try once more. He did so, his voice cutting across the distance clear and bold and decidedly less painful to endure. The king declared him the castle crier, charged with relaying royal messages throughout the valley, and the man found himself suddenly employed.
The gifts were odd and assorted, and more plentiful than Kjell had hoped. But as the day unfolded, no Healers revealed themselves. The gift of the Healer is the easiest to deny. He needed Gwyn of Jeru, the old Seer who could sense abilities in others, but he feared discovering a good diviner might be even harder than uncovering another Healer.
As the sun began to sink behind the trees of Caarn, the crowd thinned and the sharing of talents ebbed. The night watch began their rounds, the king and queen returned to the castle, and the gates to the keep were lowered. Kjell retired to his small quarters in the garrison and opened the book that belonged to another Healer of Caarn, a woman he’d never known. Painstakingly, he began to read, to peruse the pages, hoping to find answers to questions he’d never asked before.
Who were you?
Who am I?
How did you find the strength to leave?
***
The tables were laden with everything a man could grow, in a variety only a child could dream up. The meat was still scarce—a few wild turkeys, two geese, and one of the chickens brought from the Bay of Dendar—but two more deer had been felled since Kjell had slain the doe, and what was lacking in meat was more than made up for in everything else. Grain had been harvested and ground to flour to make breads of every kind. Bread stuffed with berries and wrapped around apples or studded with raisins and sprinkled with herbs, made the air smell of yeast and spice.
Stringed instruments and mellow drums made from the branches and trunks of fallen trees made warm music. No trees were cut down in Caarn. The tree had to die naturally before the wood was gathered. The people believed the trees gave freely of their branches and their leaves, their nuts and their needles in exchange for long life. Acorns were roasted, pine nuts were collected, sap siphoned, but only as much as the tree wanted to give. The trees had little use for any of the things they freely gave, and Kjell pondered whether the trees of Caarn had bleated like engorged milk cows, begging for relief, during the four long years no one had tended to them. Since the Spinners had been roused and the village enlivened, the forest floor had been harvested almost as thoroughly as the fields.
The celebration spilled out from the castle to the courtyard to accommodate the numbers, and the watch on the city walls was frequently changed, allowing Kjell’s men and the new sentry to participate in the day-long festivities. The queen’s guards were instructed carefully, but Kjell spent the hours of dancing, feasting, and celebration watching the corners and the lovely queen, fingering the blade beneath his sleeve and the sword swinging in its sheath.
Sasha wore the deep green of Jeru trimmed in the gold that suited her so well. The sleeves of her gown were wide, the edges trailing as long as her skirts, the bodice slim and the neck low, revealing the tops of her freckled breasts and the length of her slim throat. She wore her hair confined in dozens of braids coiled in dozens more, her golden crown resting in the wreath of her woven tresses.