The Queen and the Cure

by Amy Harmon

  “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.

  ***

  The landscape had changed when they exited the cave, and for a moment, none of them spoke, but stretched their legs and tried to adjust to the light and disorientation. Somehow, even though they’d escaped the brunt of it, grit stuck to their skin and coated their brows and eyelashes, and Sasha shook out her hair and her scarf, beating her hands against her dress and shaking out her shoes.

  Kjell found the highest point, little more than a mound of sand, and took out his spyglass, eager for Enoch and a bath. A haze hung in the air, obscuring the view in every directi
on. The sun was invisible, the light filtered and red. There was no horizon, no east, west, north or south. No matter the direction, the outlook was the same. Enoch would have to wait another day.

  Eventually, Sasha joined him on the rise, bearing good news. “Some of the men are exploring. Isak made a torch out of horse hair and a strip of cloth. There’s water farther back in the cave! Not a lot, but enough to wash our faces and fill our flasks.”

  “Then we’ll stay here tonight. We can camp in and around the cave. It does us no good to travel if we’re going in the wrong direction. We’ll just become more lost, and no one will find us out here.”

  “We’re lost?” Sasha asked. She didn’t seem especially concerned.

  “For the moment,” he replied, still futilely searching. He snapped his glass closed, and scrubbed at his skin. For a man who spent the majority of his time on horseback, he despised being filthy. Sasha handed him her scarf, and with a sigh, he accepted it. He’d pulled her close in the darkness, and he didn’t have the energy or desire to push her away again.

  Without her veil he could see an angry strip of red, blistered flesh on the side of her neck where the relentless sun had found exposed skin.

  “You’re burned,” he said, returning her scarf. It had helped to remove the sand from his eyelashes, if little else.

  She nodded, shaking the veil once and recovering her head. He drew it aside and pressed his palm to her sore skin, making her flinch. When he moved his hand the blisters were gone, leaving a line of large, golden freckles in their wake. The freckles bothered him. He ran his thumb across them, wanting to wipe them away, puzzled. When he’d healed Tiras, he’d left no scars. He’d restored him completely.

  “Don’t do that,” Sasha said, her voice sharp. It surprised him. Sasha’s voice was never sharp. He dropped his hand, raising his eyes from her skin and stepping away, confused. She’d welcomed his proximity in the cave.

  “It is a burn, Captain. It will heal on its own.” She pressed her fingers to her neck, hiding it.