“Thank you,” Kimala cried, reaching her hand toward him, and he rejected her thanks with a swift shake of his head. “Go and do no harm,” he said awkwardly. “Sasha. Quickly,” he urged, afraid of losing the thread of connection he’d established with his finicky gift. Sasha obeyed, running from the house and returning with a child who was so weak she had to be carried, lying limply against Sasha’s chest, her dark eyes huge and pain-filled.
“This is Tora. Tora loves birds. She can mimic all their calls.” The little girl squeaked softly, the cry like no bird Kjell had ever heard, but Sasha smiled. “See? I know that one.” She pursed her lips and whistled gently, copying the sound the child made.
Sasha laid the girl down on the bed in front of Kjell, and the child closed her eyes as if the bird call had been her last. Without waiting to see if he needed her, Sasha slipped her hand in his, then grasped the child’s hand, connecting them. He laid his palm on the little girl’s tiny chest and strained to hear something that would guide him. He thought he heard whistling and opened his eyes to bid Sasha to cease. She was watching him soundlessly, her lips soft and silent.
He realized the whistling wasn’t in his ears but in his chest and in his hands. The child’s song was very like the timid chirping of a small bird. He focused on the sound and struggled to recreate it, his throat constricting, resisting the pitch.
His grip tightened on Sasha’s. “The bird call. Do it again,” he demanded. She obeyed instantly, trilling softly, and he grasped the sound, magnifying it until his head and hands were ringing with the ear-shattering vibrations. Then he focused on the inky illness that coated the child’s every breath and infused it with the piercing shrill. It disintegrated with an audible pop, and the child’s lips parted in a soft snore. He’d put her to sleep. He fell back, releasing the pulse and removing his hands.
“It’s gone. She’s well,” he gasped. “Take her away and bring me someone else.”
Sasha scooped the child up and was out the door before he could ask her twice. With each person she brought before him, she told him something about them, something small but significant, something that allowed him to find the kernel of human connection that made healing possible. And she always took his hand.
He healed one after another, each healing song a different timbre, a different cadence, a different tone. Some songs sounded more like a series of clicks, some were high and shrill, some the sighing shape of the wind, like the mother who’d brought forth a child, only to grow ill shortly after. An old man had a song like a deep bass drum, and Kjell’s spirit thrummed with the strain of matching it. But match it he did, and the old man’s sickness fell away, leaving him free to leave Kjell’s presence by his own strength.
There were some he could not heal. A girl of twenty summers stared at him glassily. Sasha smoothed her hair and told Kjell how the girl loved the wildflowers in the rocks. But Kjell couldn’t hear anything but Sasha’s kindness. If the girl had a song, it was locked away somewhere he couldn’t reach. She was still breathing, her heart was beating, but she was gone. Another child, carried into the house in his mother’s arms, was also beyond healing. His mother insisted he was still alive—she screamed at Kjell when he shook his head—but the little boy’s limbs were limp and his eyes were cloudy. He’d been gone for hours.
One man, not much older than Kjell and riddled with pain, sat gingerly on the bed in front of him, but when Kjell asked him to lie back, he shook his head as if he weren’t ready.
“This is Gar. He’s very sick,” Sasha said softly, her eyes troubled, her lips tight. “His wife died last month,” she explained. “He misses her.”
Kjell placed one hand over the man’s heart and one on his back, easing him down gently. He didn’t have the time or empathy for indecision. The man began to weep, and Kjell ignored him, searching and finding the mellow strains of the man’s healing song easily. But when he tried to capture it, it changed, becoming a dissonant chord. Kjell didn’t know which note to sing. He hesitated, unsure, and the chord rose from the man’s skin, fluttered through Kjell’s fingers, and drifted—a tendril of smoke—higher and higher, until Kjell could no longer hear it.
When Kjell opened his eyes, he found Gar’s gaze fixed on the ceiling, his face smooth with peace.
“He didn’t want you to heal him,” Sasha whispered. “He wanted to go.”
“His song was so strong. I could have eased his pain,” Kjell argued, his sense of loss surprising.
“You did ease his pain,” Sasha replied simply. She closed Gar’s eyes and covered him with the pale blue cloth she wore over her hair.
“That’s yours,” Kjell protested. He didn’t know why it bothered him. She’d climbed the cliff to retrieve it and now she was giving it away.
“His wife was kind to me,” she explained. She left the room and immediately returned with three villagers. They carried Gar out, their eyes full of questions, and the process continued.
At one point, the sounds and songs began to run together, and Sasha refused to bring Kjell another citizen of Solemn. Instead, she pushed him down on the low bed he’d knelt beside for countless hours, placing a cushion beneath his head. Unable to summon a sound, he succumbed to her soft hands on his hair and her whisper of, “Well done, Captain. Well done.”
He awoke to sunlight and the scrape of a knife against his face.
“You are not my servant,” he murmured, opening his bleary eyes to the tickle of her unbound hair against his folded hands. She set her blade aside and scooted quickly away, pouring him a goblet of wine and helping him to sit. His body ached like he’d spent a week in battle or been dropped from the sky by a birdman. He downed the wine, and she promptly refilled it. It was mild and weak and far warmer than he liked, but it quenched his thirst. He fell back against the cushion, and she returned to his side, pulling his head into her lap.
“I will finish this. Then I will go. You’ve been asleep for two days,” she said demurely. “You’re turning into a bear.”
He snorted and her lips quirked, the corners lifting prettily before pursing in concentration once again. She used an oil that smelled of sage and made his skin tingle, and he closed his eyes and let her have her way. Her silence didn’t speak of secrets but of peace, and he let it wash over him. She was odd in her strange confidence, in her complete lack of pretense, and he felt an easing in his chest and a release in his head, like she’d loosened the past and tightened the present, making him more aware of the moment and less concerned with what had come before. He liked her.
“They will let you stay in Solemn. I will see to it. This home will be yours, and you will not be a slave. You will have nothing to fear,” he promised, needing to give her something.
“There is always something to fear,” she replied, her eyes on the blade she wielded. She said no more, and he was too drowsy to press the issue. He forced himself to remember the cool breezes of Jeru City, the shade of the trees, the sound of his brother’s voice, the clash of blades in the yard, the smell of fresh hay in the stables. He made himself think of home, yet he felt no pull toward it. Instead, it was his head in the lap of a slave, the silk of her breath on his face, and the tenderness in her hands that soothed him.
“You don’t look like the people of Quondoon,” he said simply, resisting the lethargy that wanted to pull him under again.
“No. Mina said I am ugly. My hair is not black and straight, my skin is not brown. I’m freckled and pale. My hair is the color of fire and it curls and tangles no matter how much I try to keep it smooth,” she said ruefully. “But it is the only home I know.”