The village had come alive. There was new life, and people scurried and scuttled. Children were underfoot, and an outdoor market, not all that different from the market in Jeru City’s square, lined the main thoroughfare. People were selling their wares and talking excitedly among themselves. A new well was being dug. A man from Doha was coming to Solemn. He was said to have the Gift to call water. He would walk without shoes, his toes curling into the dirt, and he could feel the water beneath the surface, no matter how deep. For the time being, the village had assigned all the able men to carry water from the stream near the cliffs.
Kjell was greeted with awe and tears. It made his stomach clench and his hands sweat. His name was called out, and food was pressed into his hands, presents laid at his feet. He tried to give it back, to refuse, but the people backed away, leaving their offerings and shaking their heads. One woman brought him a goat, tugging it behind her with a determination not to be out-gifted.
“No!” he roared. “I am a soldier. I can’t take your goat.” The animal bleated piteously, and the woman looked as though he’d struck her. She wore a pale green scarf over her hair. The material was soft and fine, and the color would not draw the heat.
Sasha had given her veil away.
“I will take your head covering. Give me that instead. You keep the goat.”
“But the goat is a better gift!”
“I don’t want it. I want the scarf. I need two more like it, in different colors. And three dresses. About your size. And boots. For a lady.” He reached for his coin pouch, but the people around him, enlivened by his requests, ran to fulfill them.
The woman smiled, nodding happily, and shyly withdrew her scarf. Her hair was as black as Sasha’s eyes, and Kjell’s mind immediately returned to the things he’d learned that morning. Sasha did not belong in Quondoon.
He brushed the niggling aside, immediately distracted by tradesmen and women, presenting him with veils and gowns and jewelry and shoes, sized to fit a tall, slim woman.
He pushed the ridiculous away—the jewelry and the slippers that would tear with any use—and barked his preferences with little fanfare, choosing colors that wouldn’t compete with Sasha’s hair or absorb the sunlight, and fabrics that wouldn’t abrade her skin or be difficult to wash. He’d never selected clothes for a female, and he spent more coin than he made in a month, just to be done with it. He paid two young boys to trail him with his purchases, but had hardly made it out of the market when he was hailed by the elder named Byron, the brother of the deceased Mina, Sasha’s master.
“Captain!” Byron called, his girth making him struggle to catch Kjell. Kjell stopped abruptly and turned, directing the boys to Sasha’s house and asking them to deliver the purchases to the woman who lived there. They seemed to know who she was—one of them called her the red witch—and trotted off, eager to do his bidding, his money in their pockets.
“We are grateful, Highness,” Byron said, bowing slightly as he reached him. “The people of Solemn will never forget you.”
“If it were left to me, I would have let you all rot. Your gratitude is misplaced.” He ignored the title. “You owe the woman a great debt.”
“I will give her to you,” Byron rushed, spreading his hands magnanimously.
“You will . . . give her to me?” Kjell asked, his voice flat.
“She may be of use to you,” the elder continued eagerly. “And she is no longer of use to my sister.”
“The elder said she’d been among you three years. How did she get here?”
“I was in Firi, in the employ of the Lord of Quondoon.” Byron puffed his chest proudly. “The refugees flooding Firi were numerous. You know that. She was with a group of people, many of them from Kilmorda, looking for work. I saw her on the blocks with a dozen other women. She was blank. Like a wall. I found it useful. The other women were crying. Traumatized. She wasn’t. I didn’t want trouble. I wanted a companion for my sister.”
Even the name Firi made his stomach knot and tighten. “I have no use for a slave,” Kjell said. “You will give Sasha her freedom. You will give her your sister’s home. And you will provide money for her welfare.”
“She is not safe here,” Byron protested, and he had the conscience to look embarrassed by the admission.
“You are a powerful man. You will see to it that she is.”
Byron swallowed, nodding.
Sasha thanked him with a smile for the packages he’d had delivered, but her smile slipped away when he told her he was leaving.
“This is your house. You will serve only yourself from now on.” He placed a small purse filled with gold coin on the table. “This is yours. There will be more. I’ve seen to it.”
Her eyes rose to his, dark and knowing, and his confusion and frustration writhed within him. She didn’t argue or count the money. She watched him walk from the house without asking him to take her with him, but he condemned himself with every step.
His horse had been readied, his men assembled, and within minutes they were riding back through the streets of Solemn, the farewell far different than the welcome had been. Children ran, people called out, and once again, a procession formed behind them, throwing bits of rice and wishing them Godspeed, as though they were off to wage war, instead of leaving the battle behind them. On the outskirts of the town the other half of the King’s Guard waited, watching their approach, unsmiling, unimpressed by the change in the villagers.
Kjell wanted to turn his head to see if Sasha was among them. He wanted to look at her once more, to see if she had joined the farewell procession, but he resisted. He had restored her health, made arrangements for her welfare, and he did not owe her anything else. And she owed him nothing. She was free to go wherever she wished. He rode with his back stiff, his eyes forward, and he left the crowd behind, the well-wishes and cries fading into silence.
“She follows, Captain,” Jerick murmured beside him.
Kjell jerked around, finding the lone figure trailing them a short ways off. She appeared to be running. It was hot, and the temperature would make the travel slow. The horses would not be able to carry the soldiers far if they pushed them, but Sasha would hurt herself if she tried to keep pace on foot.
“Blast. Bloody hell!” Kjell swore softly.
“We grow farther away every moment. She will go back,” Jerick said mildly.
“No, she won’t,” Kjell stewed. He closed his eyes against his guilt and his strange elation. She followed. And he was glad.
“I can’t leave her. She was driven out of Solemn. If she doesn’t want to remain there, we need to take her somewhere else,” he said.
“I agree, Captain.”
“But where?” Kjell barked, wishing Jerick hadn’t capitulated so readily.
“Take her to Jeru City. She can work in the palace.”
“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?”
“No. But the kingdom waits, unchanged, for her return. If you walk through the forest and look at the trunks, each one has a face hidden in the bark, a shifter waiting to become human again, sleeping inside the tree.”
He noticed the men traveling closest to them were listening, their heads bent to hear her story, and he bristled at the intrusion. When one story ended, they asked for another, and another, until they were all traveling at a snail’s pace, ears peeled, listening to her spin tales. Her voice was pleasing—low and gentle—and she told the stories as if they were as much a part of her as the palms of her hands or the red of her hair. When they stopped for the night, they’d traveled only half as far as they should have, and the men begged her for more stories around the fire.
Each night was a different tale. She described the creatures in the Drue Forest and the trolls from the mountains of Corvyn—Kjell told her of the queen’s valued friend, Boojohni. She knew stories of the Changer who became a dragon, of the king who built an army, of the lark who became a queen. Some of the stories she told were true—recent history—and the men loved those stories even more, nodding as she polished their own memories with the burnished glow of retelling. Sasha claimed those stories had spread all over the land, traveling from one mouth to another until they found her in Solemn. When his men asked her if she knew about King Tiras slaying the Volgar Liege only to be mortally wounded himself, she nodded and looked at Kjell.
“I’ve heard that tale. And I’ve heard the tale of a mighty Healer, saving the king and restoring balance to the kingdom,” she said.
Kjell grunted and stood, embarrassed. His men cleared their throats and shared weighted looks. He sent them all to bed, kicking dirt on the fire Isak started, just to make them disperse. They had no rabbits to cook, no water to spare for tea, no reason for a fire. The men rose reluctantly and, with beseeching looks, thanked Sasha for the entertainment. In only a few days, armed with a string of tales, she’d turned his battalion into a herd of sheep, following at her heels without a thought in their head but the next morsel.
She mothered them. She mothered him.
He hated it and loved it. He wished her quiet and prayed she would never stop talking. She made him both jubilant and miserable, and he found himself waiting with irritation and anticipation each night for the moment the men gathered and looked at her with pleading eyes and she acquiesced, telling them stories like they were children around her knees.
Each morning he awoke to boots that had been shined, clothes that had been shaken and aired, and a horse that had been brushed. She always woke before him, no matter how hard he tried to beat her to it. It was as if she knew when he would rise. His men smirked at her devotion, but she was so genuinely easy to be around, so cheerful and meek, that it was hard to tease her. She just smiled and played along, unconcerned with jest, indifferent to anyone’s opinion but his.
He could tell his disapproval bothered her.
He didn’t ignore her. But he didn’t dote on her either. He never asked her for a thing, yet he never thanked her for anything she did. She rode with him each day, never complaining, saving her best stories for him, and he listened, rarely contributing, pretending he was ambivalent toward her.
She’d grown quiet after a particularly interesting story about sea creatures in the Jeruvian Sea, and he was strategizing ways to make her speak without actually asking for her to do so.
“There’s a storm.” Sasha tugged on his arm. She turned her face, making sure he was listening. She wasn’t panicked, but her pulse thrummed at the base of her throat, and her eyes grew so wide they frightened him. It was just a smear on the horizon, a writhing in the distance that portended the arrival—or departure—of something that would never reach them. But Sasha saw something else.
“There’s a storm coming,” she repeated, and pointed toward the dark smudge, her finger outlined against a sky so impossibly blue, he should have laughed. He didn’t.
She began looking this way and that, searching for shelter. “There will be sand everywhere. We won’t be able to breathe.” Her chest started to rise and fall, as if oxygen deprivation had already begun. Then she shuddered, shrugging it off and keeping herself grounded in the present.
Kjell cursed, his eyes scanning the way hers had done moments before. The terrain from Quondoon to Enoch was rolling and relentlessly unvaried. Red dunes and dust littered with the occasional sandstone outcropping surrounded them in every direction. They needed a gully, something to create a barrier between them and what was coming.
He grasped Sasha’s chin and drew her gaze.
“Do you see shelter? Where should we go?”
She shook her head helplessly, and he could see the growing panic in her black gaze. Warning them of a tempest was of little help if there was no way to escape it. Then her eyes fell to Kjell’s lips and something shifted in her face, like she’d seen something entirely different than a looming storm.
“A cave. We are in a cave,” she murmured.
He released her chin and looked again, scouring the landscape for a hiding place large enough for two dozen men and an equal number of horses.
“There!” To his far right a rocky protrusion jabbed the sky like the remains of an ancient temple. It was far enough off that it could be bigger than it seemed or prove completely insufficient. But Sasha was starting to tremble, and her eyes had strayed once more to the innocuous dark cloud in the distance.
His men were still unaware, and he roared instructions, pointing toward the ridge and demanding they follow him. They didn’t hesitate, veering to the right, pushing to keep up with him. He heard Jerick cry out and turned to see that the darkness at their backs had grown, spreading, gobbling up the sky.
“Sandstorm!” his men shouted, and the rest of their words were lost in the wind. They spurred their horses toward the stony shelf, flying across the sand, racing the tempest.
Beneath the jutting overhang, as wide as three horses end to end, and as tall as two men were high, was an enormous cavern. The depth was obscured by darkness, causing a moment’s hesitation, but they had no choice. The horses balked, but the growing roar at their backs urged them forward.
“Lead them in!” Kjell shouted and slid from his horse, pulling Sasha with him.
“Isak, we need light.”
The fire starter rubbed his palms together, spinning a flame between them, widening his hands as his orb grew, lighting the immediate recesses, and making the walls around them jump into instant relief. Kjell led the way, one hand on his horse’s mane, the other on his sword. He wasn’t especially fond of serpents, and he had little doubt there were snakes in the cave. Snakes and bats.
“Deeper!” Jerick yelled, and Kjell pressed still farther into the darkness.
“We’re all in Captain,” Jerick called a moment later, and they halted, one woman, two dozen men, and their mounts, bathed temporarily in the warm light of Isak’s blaze. Seconds later, Isak released the flame with an apology. The ball of fire was too hot for the people huddled around him, too flammable for the clothes he wore, and with no torch to light and no way to shelter the flame, he had to extinguish it.
“There was once a Spinner who could turn memories into stars the way Isak pulls fire from the air,” Sasha spoke into the gloom. “I will tell you the story when the storm passes. Don’t worry. It will pass.”
She was trying to comfort them, a lone woman among soldiers who were well accustomed to supreme discomfort and fear.
A rush of tenderness gripped Kjell, followed by a glimmer of fear. Her voice had sounded odd in the chamber, like she floated above them. He reached for her, suddenly afraid that he would lose her into the black space pressing around them. In the darkness, free from judgment and the awareness of his men, he tucked her body into his, wrapping his arms around her, returning the reassurance she so easily offered.
For a moment they could all hear each other—the chuff of the horses, the changing of positions, the rustle of clothes, the scrape of shoes upon the rocks. Then the storm brought deep night with it, a black so complete, no light shone from the mouth of the cave and all sound was swallowed up in its fury.
Kjell was rendered blind and deaf, but he could feel her heartbeat against his belly, her face pressed to his chest, and the weight of her hair spilling over his arms. Fingertips brushed his face, and for a moment he stood motionless as she traced his eyes and his nose, his lips and his ears, seeing him in the dark. He thought about her mouth and the way she’d looked at him when she saw the cave in her mind.
He could kiss her. He could taste her lips and swallow her sighs and wait out the tempest exploring her mouth.
The desire wailed within him like the squall around him, but he resisted, unwilling to do what was expected, even if it was what he wanted. Her hands fell to his shoulders and she stood unmoving in his arms, her cheek on his chest, and he spent the storm in equal parts agony and bliss.