“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.