“Everything has an origin story. Every place. Every person. We come from the womb of a woman, who came from the womb of a woman, who came from the womb of a woman. We inherit gifts and weakness, we are born in triumph and strife, we are swaddled in kindness or indifference, and we are made to learn and walk among others who have their own origin stories, their own burdens, and their own history.”
Sasha’s voice was low and lilting as she bathed the feverish head of her aging master, telling her stories that calmed and comforted, distracting the old woman from her pain and her fear. Death hovered around the small stone house, scratching at the door, peeping through the windows, impatient to make its claim.
“What is your origin story, Sasha?” the old woman pleaded, a question she’d asked a hundred times.
“I don’t know mine, Mistress Mina,” Sasha soothed.
“You must go and find it,” the old woman insisted weakly.
“Go where?” Sasha asked patiently. The conversation had become almost a ritual.
“Your gift will lead you.”
“Why do you insist on calling it a gift?” Sasha pressed.
Mina sighed heavily. “You know why. You know the legend. Tell me the story again.”
Sasha did not sigh, though the story that filled her head was one she’d told so many times it seemed rote and tired, devoid of magic or truth, though her mistress insisted it was the origin story of all mankind, even Sasha.
“With words, God created worlds,” Sasha began, and the old woman relaxed, her eyeballs quivering, seeing the story behind her lids. Sasha spoke softly, soothingly, but felt little solace herself. “With words, He created light and dark, water and air, plants and trees, birds and beasts, and from the dust and the dirt of those worlds, He created children, two sons and two daughters, forming them in his image and breathing life into their bodies of clay,” she recited obediently.
“That’s right,” Mina murmured, nodding. “You tell the story so well. Tell me more.”
“In the beginning, the Creator gave each child a word, a powerful word, which called down a special ability, a precious gift to guide them in their journey through their world. One son was given the word change, which gifted him the ability to transform himself into the beasts of the forest or the creatures of the air. One daughter was given the word spin, for she could spin all manner of things into gold. The grass, the leaves, a strand of her hair. The word heal was given to another son, to cure illness and injury among his brothers and sisters. Another daughter was given the word tell, and she could predict what was to come. Some said she could even shape the future with the power of her words.
“The Spinner, the Changer, the Healer, and the Teller lived long and had many children of their own, but even with blessed words and magnificent abilities, life in the world was dangerous and difficult. Oftentimes, grass was more useful than gold. Man was more desirable than a beast. Chance was more seductive than knowledge, and eternal life was completely meaningless without love.”
“Completely meaningless.” the old woman repeated, and began to weep, as if the ancient account underscored her own life. But instead of urging the younger woman to continue with the retelling, she picked up the story on her own, weakly tiptoeing through the tale, touching on the parts that meant the most to her.
When the old one’s voice finally trailed off, her tears drying on her cheeks, Sasha rose and emptied the basin of lukewarm water outside of the earthen hut, pulling the thick flaps over the opening and leaving the ties loose so she could return quickly if the old woman cried out.
But the origin story continued on in her head—the Changer, the Spinner, the Healer, and the Teller, and the children that came after them. Hundreds of years. Generation upon generation, gifts celebrated and revered, then squandered and abused, and finally buried and denied as the only Gifted who remained became hated and hissed at. One by one, the Tellers, the Healers, the Changers, and the Spinners were destroyed. The forces of the king cut off the Spinners’ hands. They burned the Tellers at the stake. They hunted the Changers like the animals they resembled and stoned the Healers in the village squares, until those with special gifts—any gift—were afraid of their abilities and hid their talents from each other.
The village of Solemn was quiet, the air scorched of light or life, the heat of the day slumbering with the stricken hamlet. A sob suddenly pierced the air, and Sasha braced herself for the name that rose on the scream. It came, the identification making her lips tremble and her eyes smart. Another child had died. Edwin. The little boy with the bent leg.
The weakest were being taken first.
Sasha moved away from the rows of huts and the more stately structures of the elders, working her way on weary legs toward the water that flowed through the canyons. It wasn’t as close as the river that came from the east, but she didn’t think it would make her sick the way the water from the east had made Mina sick. When Mina had started to decline, Sasha had gone to the kindest of the elders, Mina’s brother, and told him to warn the people not to drink the water, that the water carried something dark. He counseled with the other elders. None of them were ill, and they’d been drinking from the eastern river for a long time. They said she was mad and she would frighten the people. They told her to hold her tongue or she would lose it.
Not long ago, there had been a great battle in the land of Jeru. Wrongs righted. Oppression lifted. But little had changed in the villages of Quondoon. The merchants came to Solemn from Jeru City bearing wares and tales, and Sasha’s master had sat with the elders, hearing the stories of the powerful King Tiras who could fly like a bird and who had done away with the old laws. Now the Gifted were free to roam and do their worst, the elders said, though no one had ever seen a Spinner or a Healer in Solemn. There were Changers in Doha, the village nearest them—an old man and a child, though they could only partially change, sprouting wings or powerful haunches at will, but unable to completely transform. Sasha had never seen them, but the elders were dismissive, laughing at the oddity, claiming it more a curse than a gift. The merchants brought more talk from Bin Dar—the land to the north—of great birdmen who made nests and ate human flesh, but no one from Solemn had seen them either. Sasha was not a Changer, a Spinner, a Healer, or a Teller. She was something else entirely. No one talked about Sasha, but their silence did not equate to safety, and Sasha had no confidence in a king so far away or laws that were supposed to protect everyone. Even slaves.
He had a face that she wouldn’t forget and one she couldn’t remember. She shouldn’t have been able to see him so clearly. It was night and he hovered above her, shadowed beneath a half-eaten moon. His eyes were like the sea, blue but not untroubled, and his mouth was her anchor, making promises that kept her from floating away. His hands were gentle, his words were rough, and when he asked her to come with him, she did, rising from her body and becoming someone new.
But they still found her.
Figures moved in and out of the mist, shifting and searching. People screamed and shadows flew through the air, diving and swooping. She hid, flattened against the ground, her face in the dirt. She tried to draw breath but choked and coughed as she breathed in bits of earth. She covered her face with her scarf to strain the air and crawled forward. There was no sound. She tried to shout and felt the shape of his name on her lips, a word she couldn’t hear. A word she didn’t know.
Whop, whop, whop.
The sound echoed in her head and her chest, and the world of hidden figures and flying death whirled away as the beating grew louder.
She’d fallen asleep too close to the fire.
Again.
Her hair and face would be streaked with soot, and she’d drawn ash into her lungs. The house was too hot for a fire, but she hadn’t been able to keep Mina warm, and the coals were slower to die than the old woman had been. Her heart was pounding and her throat was raw. The slapping sound became sharper, heavier, and it left her head and shook the air with the sound of a thousand wings.
“Sasha! Let me in. Untie the flaps.”
Sasha rubbed at her eyes and rose unsteadily to her feet, drunk on the old dream. She was weary and her cheeks burned. She’d been too many days at her master’s bedside, tending the old woman until, like the dream, Mina had drifted away. She’d mourned alone, setting up a call into the night that had been met with moans and little more. Mina’s brother had come with the elders only hours before. They had taken the body of her master away and left her behind.
“Sasha! Let me in!”
“Maeve! You’ll wake the whole village,” she warned, stumbling to the door and unknotting the ties with weary hands. The girl, small and dark like many of the people of Quondoon, tumbled through the opening and fell into Sasha’s arms.
“Sasha. Run. Go now! They’re coming for you,” Maeve gasped. “Mina can’t protect you anymore. They’re coming. I heard them. They’re scared, and they blame you.”
“For what?” Sasha cried. But she knew. Maeve knew too, and didn’t waste time with unnecessary words, grabbing at her hand and pulling her forward.
“Where will I go?
“You’re free. Go wherever you wish.”
“But this is my home.”
“Not anymore. Mina is dead. And you soon will be if you don’t leave now!”
“I’m not properly dressed.” Sasha reached frantically for her head covering, needing to shield her pale skin and her bright hair. Her shoes were outside the door.
“You’ve no time!”
Then Sasha heard it. Felt it. And she recognized it. She’d seen this moment. The sensation of loss and . . . relief washed over her. It had come. There was always relief when visions became truth. She didn’t know why.
From far off there were shouts and cries, as if the village was under attack. But there were no pillagers on the borders, seeking entry. There were no dragons in the air, breaching the borders of the city of Solemn. The enemy was within the gates.
The crescent moon, gloating and glowing in its safety above them, made their night travels across the plain a cold pleasure. The sky was devoid of clouds and littered with shards of stars. The cliffs rose up like marooned ships, their ragged stone masts pointing at the star-filled heavens, and their horses began to descend, winding their way downward into Solemn on the far edges of Quondoon. Kjell of Jeru, Captain of the King’s Guard, had only been there once before, but he remembered the simple attire of the desert dwellers, their covered heads and their quiet ways.
They’d seen no sign of the Volgar—the monstrous birdmen—in the last few days, no nests or carcasses, no stench or even stray feathers, and he wondered again at the hysterical reports in the villages on the border of Bin Dar about devastation in Solemn. But there was something in the air, and his horse, Lucian, was restless, chuffing and flighty, resisting the descent and the press forward.
It would be so much easier if he had Queen Lark’s ability to command and destroy. Instead, he and an elite group of warriors had traveled through the provinces of Jeru, north to Firi and west to Bin Dar, east to Bilwick and back to Jeru City, hunting the Volgar the hard way, at the end of a blade. He’d spent the last two years on the back of his horse, destroying what was left of the winged creatures that had once laid waste to vast provinces and almost decimated an entire kingdom.
When he’d received word that there were flocks of the birdmen in the cliffs of Quondoon, he’d left Jeru City again, oddly grateful there was something to do. Tiras, his half-brother and the king of Jeru, ruled ably, finally freed from the affliction that had kept Kjell so close for so long. They’d rarely been apart since the day Tiras ascended the throne in their father’s place, young and Gifted, with no one else to turn to but his illegitimate older brother. But Tiras didn’t need Kjell anymore. Not in the same way.
Kjell didn’t desire riches. He didn’t want power or position. He’d never longed for possessions or even a place to call his own. Though he was older than his brother, he’d never wanted to be king, and he’d never envied Tiras—legitimate son and heir to the throne—who shouldered the weight of his responsibility with a calm acceptance Kjell had never mastered. Kjell had always been happiest watching his brother’s back or lost in the heat of battle, and he’d always known who he was.
He hadn’t been especially proud of it, but he’d known.
He was the bastard son of the late King Zoltev and the servant woman, Koorah, who’d warmed His Majesty’s bed for a time. A very short time. She’d died in childbirth, and Kjell had been named by the midwife, who thought his infant cry had sounded like the scream of a Kjell Owl before it attacks.
But there was more to a man than his parentage. More to a man than his blade, or his size, or his skills, and all that Kjell had once known had shifted and changed in the last year. He’d been forced to accept parts of himself that he’d always denied. He was Gifted. One of them. One of the people he’d feared and forsaken. And it had not been an easy adjustment. It was as if he’d battled the sea all his life only to discover he had scales and gills and belonged beneath the depths instead of casting nets. He no longer knew who he was or what his purpose might be. Or maybe he knew and just didn’t like it.
It had grown cooler as night fell. It would be hot—too hot—when the sun rose again, but Quondoon enjoyed extremes. Heat in the day and cold at night, towering peaks and flat plains, brief, punishing rains followed by long, dry spells where the rain refused to fall for months on end. The people of Quondoon were shepherds and scavengers, weavers and potters, but they didn’t grow much. They couldn’t. Kjell wondered again at the Volgar sightings. The Volgar preferred the swamp-lands. If the Volgar were nesting near the villages of Quondoon, they had truly grown desperate.
An eerie howling rose up suddenly from the precipice above them, and Lucian started in fright.
“Halt!” Kjell commanded, and his men obeyed immediately, hands on their swords, eyes on the canyon walls to their right, looking for the source of the sound. As they watched, figures materialized on the bluff that rose and plateaued to the right. The city of Solemn lay beyond. But these weren’t suspicious sentries. These were wolves who resented the interruption of their evening’s activities, and the baying rose again, making the horses shudder.
“There’s something there, Captain. Something wounded—or dead. The wolves want it,” a soldier spoke up, his eyes glued to the darkness that clung to the base of the tallest cliff.
“If it’s Volgar, it’s alone. The wolves wouldn’t go anywhere near a flock,” Jerick, his lieutenant, spoke up.
“It isn’t Volgar,” Kjell answered, but he dismounted and drew his sword. “Isak, Peter, and Gibbous, stay with the horses, the rest of you, fall in behind me.”
His men obeyed immediately, creeping through the brush and dry grass toward the base of the sheer wall that jutted from the earth. The shadows obscured whatever lay crumpled—for there was indeed something there—among the pale rocks. Something rippled—a dark billowing—like a Volgar wing, and Kjell paused, bidding his men to do the same.
Oddly, the wolves felt no compunction toward silence, and a lone howl rose above them before the others joined in the chorus. The baying did not cause the shadows to shift or the rippling to halt, and Kjell moved forward again, eyes on the shuddering darkness.
With several more steps, the moon unveiled her secret. The movement they’d seen was not a Volgar wing but the billowing dress of a woman, lying in a lifeless heap. Her hair was crimson, even in the shadows, blending with the red of her blood and the warmth of the earth. She lay on her back, her eyes closed, the oval of her face as pale and still as the rocks around her. Her arms were thrown wide like she’d embraced the wind as she fell.
Her back was oddly bent and one leg twisted beneath her, but she bore no teeth or claw-marks, and her clothes weren’t in tatters. It was not a Volgar attack; she’d fallen from the ledge above. Jerick was the first to close the distance and kneel at her side, touching the white skin of her throat with the impudence he usually reserved for Kjell.
“She is warm, Captain, and her heart still beats.”
Kjell wasn’t the only one who gasped, and the shocked intake of air echoed around him like a den of snakes, hissing through the huddled soldiers. She was so broken.
“What do you want to do?” Jerick raised his gaze to his leader, and the question was clear, though he didn’t voice it. Jerick knew Kjell was a Healer. They all knew, and his men both feared and worshipped him, watching in awe as he restored the fallen and the dying with nothing more than his hands. But he’d only healed those he had affection for, those he served and who served him. And he hadn’t done it often. He’d healed a few of his men. He’d healed his brother. His queen. But he’d been unable to find the power when there was no . . . love. He laughed bitterly, making the men around him shift awkwardly, and he realized the mocking chortle had escaped his lips.
“Go,” he commanded abruptly. “Take Lucian and the rest of the horses and find a place nearby to wait.”
No one moved, their eyes on the crumpled woman and the pool of blood that called to the wolves outlined on the cliffs above. The wolves were waiting for the soldiers to retreat and leave the girl.
“Go!” Kjell barked, sinking to his knees, knowing he’d wasted time when there was none. The soldiers rushed to withdraw, wary as the wolves, obeying their captain, but unhappy about doing so. Jerick didn’t leave, but Kjell had known he wouldn’t.
“I can’t do this while you watch,” Kjell admitted brusquely. “It makes me too aware of myself.”
“I’ve seen you heal before, Captain.”
“Yes. But not like this. I don’t know her.” Kjell placed his hands on the woman’s chest and felt the warmth of her heart, willful even as her body begged to be released from its torment. He listened for her song. For the single, clear note that would aid him. Her spirit, her force, her self.
“Imagine that you do,” Jerick urged softly. “Imagine her . . . full of life. Running. Smiling. Mating.”
Kjell’s eyes shot to Jerick’s, and his lieutenant stared back unapologetically, as if imagination was something that came easily to him and should therefore come easily to Kjell.
“Imagine that you love her,” Jerick repeated.
Kjell scoffed, resisting the sentiment, and bowed his head. He closed his eyes against Jerick’s gaze. His hands curled against the woman’s breast, urging her heart to obey, and an image rose, unbidden, in his mind. A woman who smiled at him with eyes that kept no secrets and told no lies. A woman with fiery hair like the one who lay before him, alone and dying. He lashed out again, demanding that Jerick depart. She was dying and he was listening to the mutterings of a foolish knight who’d clearly been too long without a woman. Running, smiling, mating. Bloody fool.
“Leave me, Jerick. Now.” If Jerick remained, Kjell would flog him. Jerick must have realized his captain would give no more quarter, for he turned away, and Kjell heard him depart through the brush, his stride dejected.
Kjell ran his hands over the slim ribs of the woman, feeling the jagged pieces of broken bones, and he bade them mend. He didn’t pray as his hands roved. The Creator had given him this curse and this cure, and he wouldn’t beg for an increase.
The woman resisted him, her slim frame stubborn in its death throes.
Kjell started to hum, purely on instinct, matching his timbre to the intermittent baying of the wolves above him. After a moment, he felt the tell-tale tingling in his hands, and his pulse surged in triumph. He commanded his body to share its light, and the shattered cage of her ribs righted beneath his touch, lifting her chest and curving outward into his broad palms. And still, he couldn’t hear her song.
“Where are you, woman?” he asked her. “I feel your heart and the seeping of your blood. Sing to me so I can bring you back.”
He moved his hands to her thighs, feeling the shape of her body return, the bones of her legs knitting together and notching into the curve of her hips. When her spine became a long, straight line, he rolled her to her side to run his hands over the back of her skull. It was wet with blood and soft in his hands. He swallowed back bile, surprised at his squeamishness. He had gutted men and beasts and never winced or even hesitated.
“I am a man with little imagination,” he whispered, smoothing her hair. “I cannot pretend to love you. But I can heal you if you help me.”
He strained, still listening for that one note that would save her life. He’d been in this position once, years before, straining to hear something he’d never heard, hardly knowing what he sought, but listening all the same. At the time it was his brother, and his wounds had been just as grievous as this woman’s. Kjell had saved him. He’d healed him. But he’d also loved him.
Fear trembled in his belly, and the heat in his hands instantly lessened. He forced his thoughts back to his brother, to his affection, his respect, his devotion. The thought became strength, and the heat in his hands became light.
He leaned down and whispered in her ear, sing-song and coaxing.
“Can you hear me, woman? Come sing with me.” The only songs he knew were bawdy and lewd, simple tunes about lifting skirts and brandishing swords.
“Come to me, and I will try to heal you. I will try to heal you, if you but come back,” he chanted softly, the melody monotone, the lyrics weak, but it was a song of sorts, and it fell from his lips in a husky plea.
“Come to me, and I will give you shelter, I will give you shelter, if you but come back.” His lips brushed the lobe of her ear, and he felt an odd shudder that passed from his mouth and lifted her hair. Her heartbeat strengthened as if she heard. He continued to chant, allowing hope to make him a liar.
“Come to me, and I will try to love you. I will try to love you, if you but come back.”
He heard a single, solitary peal, almost inaudible. Almost imaginary. Almost gone. A bell ringing once.
But it was enough.
Kjell lifted his voice, grasping the pitch and pulling the tone from the winking stars. Suddenly the death knell became a merry tolling, clear and bright. It grew and grew, and still he hummed, until the sound resonated in his skin, in his skull, behind his eyes, and deep in his belly. He was euphoric, vibrating with sound and triumph, his hands smoothing back the matted hair from blood-stained cheeks and staring down into eyes so dark they appeared infinite. Their gazes locked and for a moment, there was only reverberation between them.
“I saw you,” she whispered, the bell becoming words, and Kjell drew back, releasing his grip on her hair, the song in his throat becoming shocked silence. He clenched his hands and felt her blood on his palms.
“I saw you,” she said again. “You’re here. You finally came.”