by Jean Johnson
From the sudden quieting of the children and their wide-eyed stares as the two men passed, Kenyen wondered if he had gone a little overboard in dotting his face with scrapes and bruises. Nor did it help that Zellan had literally dragged Kenyen behind his mountain mare for several yards, scraping and muddying his borrowed clothes for verisimilitude.
Turning onto a path that rose a little bit higher, they made their way to a cluster of homes a little too big to be called cottages. This was a prosperous holding, for many of the buildings had been plastered and whitewashed beneath their slate-and-moss rooflines. It also boasted the large, stone-walled blacksmith's forge Traver had mentioned. The other buildings were surrounded by herb beds, vegetable patches, even chicken coops sitting in the middle of reed-fenced runs, but the smithy sat in the middle of a broad, flat, flagstone-lined patch. That, Kenyen guessed, was no doubt so that any fires accidentally sparked wouldn't be able to spread far enough to threaten the other structures.
As it was, the makeshift courtyard around the forge served as the gathering place for the locals. They drifted onto the flagstones, the men in gathered breikas similar to what the Shifterai wore on the plains, the women in gathered skirts instead of more sensible trousers. Then again, they weren't expected to pack up and ride every handful of days, following their herds nine months out of the year.
Men, women, and children alike peered in curiosity at the injuries Kenyen sported and muttered in worry when they recognized the bruised and bloodied features as those of the missing Traver. One of the older women abandoned the basket she was weaving on the stoop of her home. Bustling over to the second house from hers, she rapped on the door. "Reina! Solyn! We need a Healer out here! Traver and Zellan came back without the caravan!"
Within moments, two women emerged. They looked like before-and-after images of each other; both were slender with somewhat heart-shaped faces, both had hazel green eyes and brown hair pulled into braids, with curly little wisps that tried to escape here and there. Both were clad in faded blue skirts and matching chamsa tunics, their garments partially covered in stained beige aprons.
The elder one had dark, polished horn buttons holding her tunic together down her right side; the younger one had pale bone buttons. The elder had her hair braided and looped around her head; the younger wore her braid dangling down her back. Beyond that, the only difference between them was the twenty or thirty years that had weathered the elder's face.
Wiping her hands on her apron, Reina Lai Fa—wife of the blacksmith Ysander Mil Ben, according to Traver—flicked her fingers at a couple of the curious loiterers. "Well? Don't just stand there! Help the boy down, and get him into my sickroom. If he hurts half as bad as he looks, he could fall out of the saddle at any moment."
Kenyen remembered to blink and give her a dazed look, then winced and whimpered, moving stiffly as helping hands lifted him down from the saddle. His injuries were faked, far less painful than they technically looked, but he knew enough—and remembered enough, from injuries past—how to move slowly and awkwardly, as if they were much worse.
It didn't take long for him to be ushered, limping, into the home of the local Healer. The house was large enough; it had an entry hall with three doors. One led to the right, to what looked like the family gathering place; one led back to what looked like a kitchen, and the one on the left led to a smallish room with a pair of tables pushed against the walls, a couple of stools, a chair, a small hearth sheltering an equally small fire, and a cot. One of the tables was crowded with bowls, bottles, tools, and bandages in neatly but tightly spaced arrangements; the other was bare and clean, broad enough to have supported a man.
It was to the cot that he was led, not to the bare table or one of the stools. Female hands plucked at his clothes, unbuckling his belt, tugging off his boots and socks—he remembered to wince when the left one was removed from his mock-swollen ankle—and then Solyn shooed the other women out of the room, letting her mother unbutton Traver's brown tunic from Kenyen's reshaped chest. Zellan lingered in the room, the concern furrowing his brow no doubt as much from his worries over Kenyen's impending performance as from overt compassion for all those injuries.
"However did this happen, young man?" Reina asked, fussing over his wounds.
"Uh... I fell?" Kenyen muttered, matching Traver's rougher-sounding tones. He blinked and followed the Healer's movements as she hustled into the next room to the left, which reeked of the scents from a hundred herbs in various stages of preparation and preservation.
Zellan stepped into the breach. "He took off the first night out. We don't know why; we think he forgot something and wanted to come back and get it. I found his pony wandering loose, backtracked it to a ravine, and found him at the bottom of it, dehydrated. He'd lain down there all the next day, I think."
The young woman, Solyn, gave Kenyen—or rather, the man she thought was Traver—a worried look. "... Are you alright?"
Kenyen debated how to react. His own reaction would have either varied between brushing it off with humor—since he was a shapeshifter and could heal his own injuries quickly enough, given time and effort—or sarcasm. Traver, however, hadn't seemed the type to use either. He shrugged awkwardly, hissed, and supported his sagging left elbow. "I can't remember if I've had worse. My arm doesn't want to work."
Reina tutted as she came back from the herb-room, carrying a precious glass cup and a brown glazed vial. "I'm not surprised. Congratulations, it seems you've thoroughly dislocated it. We'll get these scrapes cleaned up, wrap some bandages and poultices on everything, then roll it back into its socket. But first, a pain posset. You'll need it." She poured a dose from the bottle to the cup, eyed him, and added a tiny bit more. "Drink this. Do you need me to hold it for you? No? Good."
Taking the cup, Kenyen sipped at it. The combination of herbs and spirits warned him it would be fairly potent. If he did drink all of it, without real pain to absorb the effects, the dose she wanted to give him would send him into a drugged daze and possibly be strong enough to lose his shape. Thinking fast, he drank about half of it, then made a face, took another sip, and held it out with a grimace.
"I... I can't... It's making me feel sick. I'm sorry," he mumbled.
Reina took back the glass, setting it on the table under the window. "If you want more, it'll be over here. If you need to vomit, there's a bucket under the bed, to the right of your legs. Solyn, start bathing that side of him. We'll also need to get his trousers and underthings off—no ogling or thoughts of twining, young lady," her mother added briskly. "He's in no shape for such things."
Solyn wasn't the only one to blush. So did Kenyen. He cleared his throat and stated carefully, "Uh... twining? I don't really... I'm sorry, but I don't know what you're talking about."
That made the younger woman glance up at him sharply. He gave her his best helpless look and shrugged his good shoulder.
"I don't remember a lot. I mean, you both look familiar, and I know a couple things when I look at you, but... My head really hurts," he finished lamely.
Zellan spoke up again from his spot near the entry door. "He couldn't even remember my name, though he did know me as a friend when I found him. He may have had a concussion while he lay in the ravine for all I know, but it seems to be gone, now. Along with bits of the boy's memory and wits."
Stooping, Reina pried open each one of Kenyen's reshaped eyes. She peered intensely, gaze flicking back and forth, then straightened and shrugged. "His pupils are reacting normally. It's rare to lose a lot of memory in a fall. Not unheard of, but rare. It should come back, though, particularly now that he's back on familiar ground.
"Still, a concussion can be serious. I'll probe you with my magics once we've tended to the more obvious wounds. I'd be more concerned if your eyes weren't dilating," she added, patting Kenyen on his uninjured shoulder. "As it is, let's make sure none of those scrapes get infected. Let's get you on your feet and drop your trousers."
Blushing, Kenyen obeyed, grunting
in a show of pain as he stood. It didn't take long to remove the rest of his garments—technically Traver's clothes, not his—but when the Healer calmly unlaced and dropped his undertrousers as well, gesturing for her daughter to stoop and help him step out of the crumpled linen, it was all Kenyen could do to keep his altered shape. Particularly when he saw the younger woman's eyes widen, her head low enough to have a good view of his limp genitals.
Face red, Traver's betrothed quickly exchanged underdrawers for the cloth and bowl her mother passed her, accepting the ointment bottle Reina plucked from the crowded table. Pouring the contents into the bowl, she started bathing his legs. Kenyen wobbled, startled by the intimate touch. It was rare for a shifter to need tending by a Healer, once he or she grew into their powers.
He clung to his mental image of Traver Ys Ten, as much to keep himself unresponsive as to keep the appropriate shape. Knowing that this was another man's beloved made the intimacy level that much more awkward. Added on top was the instinctive urge to grow a protective, modesty-screening pelt, either of fur or feathers or scales, something to preserve his civilized dignity. But he couldn't, not when the real Traver certainly couldn't have done that.
It helped somewhat, in a bruise-stinging way, that her mother was doing the same thing up by his head and arms. His upper body bore the worse of his faked injuries, so it made sense for the Healer to tend those, and leave the rest to her daughter. The moment Solyn started patting near his upper thighs, however, Kenyen flinched involuntarily, shifting away from her and bumping his legs into the edge of the cot. His dignity was already in tatters; he did not need her gentle fingers tickling near that part of his anatomy, and he particularly didn't want her commenting on that ring the real Traver had insisted he wear.
"Enough—enough! Trust me, that's not injured."
Reina chuckled. "Clean off his backside, Daughter, then give him a blanket, help him to sit, and let him recover his dignity. I'll want to look at the swelling on his ankle, but it seems like that's the worst of the lower troubles—how many times did you hit your head, young man?" the Healer added in an exasperated voice, gingerly feeling her way across his shapeshifted locks. "Three times? Four?"
"I honestly don't remember. I'm sorry," he added, twitching a little as his purported betrothed scrubbed at his buttocks with her damp rag, then wrapped a strip of toweling cloth around his hips. Cheeks still flushed, she added a soft wool blanket from the foot of the cot, draping him from hips to feet in the lightweight wrap. Grateful, Kenyen sat back down.
The tension of the moment and his embarrassment kept him from reacting to her touches—she was quite attractive, in an understated way—but he was still grateful for the modesty shield. Nakedness on the Plains wasn't the same as nakedness anywhere else, something of which the warbands that headed outkingdom in search of mercenary work were well aware. Healers had to tend their patients' various needs, true, but that didn't mean casual nudity was acceptable, here.
The younger woman, Solyn, glanced up from time to time, her hazel eyes meeting his brown ones. A question lurked in her gaze, unspoken and unanswerable. As Zellan described the condition he had "found Traver in," she continued to work under her mother's direction, cleaning his scrapes, coating them with salve. Kenyen heard her hissing in sympathy when her mother had him stand, brace his dislocated shoulder against the wall, and push it back into its socket with a roll and a grunt. The grunt was manufactured; literally, a shifter couldn't dislocate anything for real unless they were very weak.
Healing was a matter of remembering how a body part should properly feel, and just shifting and reshifting until it felt whole and functioned right. The stronger the shifter, the faster they could heal. He wasn't his brother, who had more than a dozen shifts to his name, but Kenyen could have repaired a dislocated joint in just three or four shifts. Twenty or thirty would start to tire him, and up to fifty full shifts in a day would exhaust him, or twice as many minor shifts. However, the point wasn't to heal himself. The point was to fake his injuries enough that it would fool a Healer.
The moment Reina settled him back on the cot and laid her hands on his shoulders, pouring her magics into him in rhythmic, lyric murmurs... he sneezed. Repeatedly. Kenyen couldn't help it. Some shifters—himself, his brother, and his father included—could "feel" magic as if it were a tickle in the nose. Once he had reached puberty and his shifting abilities developed, he had rarely needed the spells of Family Tiger's Healer to fix his injuries, though he had accepted some of the herbal remedies for colds and such. Mages of any flavor just weren't common on the Plains.
"—Achoo!" He sneezed one last time, grateful that her spell had finally stopped.
Taking away her hands, Reina eyed him warily. "I don't sense a cold lurking in the energies of your body... but those energies feel rather unusual. A bit higher than they should. I can't detect a fever, either, which might've explained it... Normally I'd just send you on home since you don't seem to have a concussion anymore, Traver, but I'd like you to stay here overnight for observation, just in case I'm missing something."
Rubbing at his nose, Kenyen nodded.
Reina nodded and turned to the doorway, where curious onlookers had lingered. "Alright, you lot, out you go! Zellan, you, too—ah, there you are, Tenaria; thank you for bringing him a fresh change of clothes. You can fuss over your boy for a little bit, but then he'll need to rest. Spells don't heal bodies purely on their own, you know. As soon as I'm done whipping up a milder pain posset, he'll need to drink it and lie down for a while. Solyn, will you go get him something to eat, then come keep an eye on him? Go get some of the pottage from the hearth pot and thin it into a light soup, in case his concussion is still lingering."
"Yes, Mother," she agreed, shifting away from the cot.
Bodies shuffled through the doorways. Kenyen found himself engulfed in a gentle but thorough hug while "his" mother fussed over what she thought was one of her sons. Guilt coursed through him as he accepted her attentions and resurged when she fussed over him when he lied to her about his memory problems. Stuck in this awkward position, Kenyen did his best to pretend to be the real Traver Ys Ten, one with touches of amnesia to hide his ignorance. The real one's life hung in the balance, after all.
Somewhere outside the Healer's sickroom, the shapeshifter named Zellan would be lurking, waiting to catch the least little slipup from him.
* * *
Four
There was something different about Traver Ys Ten. Solyn wasn't sure what, but she knew there was something different. Something in the way he had slept on the cot last night, curling up to use his own arm as his pillow instead of the one provided, and something in the way he moved. It was just... different.
More graceful, she realized, walking with him down the path to his family's home. His other set of clothes had been cleaned and dried overnight, though they would need some mending. She carried them for him in a string bag slung over her shoulder, with the intent to show his mother what needed repairing. Traver couldn't ply needle and thread if his life depended on it, though he had plenty of other domestic skills.
Huh... yes, he's more graceful. He always stumbles a bit on those two steps, but he didn't this time. Having given herself the task of helping him regain his fuzzy memories—a convenient excuse to try to get alone with him to ask him what had really happened—she had plenty of time to observe him. In a series of holding farms like the ones in the Nespah Valley, it was difficult to be alone for very long. Still, when they were out of earshot on the path, her ring did twist on her finger, indicating they were alone.
Changed or not, this was her friend Traver. He had reassured her two years ago that he had hidden his ring in a very unlikely spot, somewhere that no one would think to look and probably wouldn't find in a search. Solyn originally had guessed he had hidden it inside his mouth somewhere, which was the only place she could think of for it, but its actual location was nowhere near his mouth, as she had seen for herself yesterday. Tapping his s
houlder, she stopped him on the age-worn stones of the path.
"Alright, Traver, we're alone enough for the moment," she murmured. They might not have anyone near them for several hundred body-lengths, but that didn't mean she wanted to shout and have her words echo off the terraces. "What really happened with the caravan?"
Stopping and turning politely at her touch, Kenyen resisted the urge to glance around. Struggling against the urge to blush, he carefully kept his face Traver-like. "I told you. All I can remember is my mount bucking, and bits of me tumbling down the hill. Of lying in the mud for a long time. And... and I can't remember which house is mine. I just know it's down this path somewhere."
He flopped his hands uselessly, taking the time now to look around and make sure they were alone. Bodies young and old were weeding the sinuous ranks of gardens arrayed along the winding, green hills, so very different from the flat, rolling fields of the Plains. Thin, low clouds rendered the sky a bright shade of humid gray, and the shrieking laughter of children echoed in the distance. No one seemed close enough, but it was too soon.
If he revealed himself now, even to Traver's beloved, Zellan would race off to the others, to send shifters after Kenyen himself, and probably to that shepherd's hut, to ensure that the real Traver would die. All he could do was morph his own sense of frustration and helplessness into the role he was constrained to play and hope it worked.
Solyn eyed her friend, who looked helpless and frustrated and earnest, and relented. Patting him on the shoulder, she turned him back down the hill. "It's the second one on the right. Just... do me a favor?"
"Anything," he promised quickly.
Taking a deep mental breath, she trusted her friend, and the presence of that hidden ring on his body. This was the real Traver. It had to be. "If you should remember anything about heading down to the Shifting Plains, or having suspicions about the identities of certain folk, don't talk about it to anyone but me... and only if I myself bring up the topic."
