“Look at that son of yours,” I teased, pulling her attention away from what I was doing.
“Oh my. Deacon!” she hollered, and for the moment her attention focused on where her errant son caused all manner of wild mayhem.
Quickly I closed my eyes, allowing the magic I didn’t understand to flow from me. I rested my hand against the wound, uncaring of the pus and blood, letting my palm tingle against her skin as I rested my other on the earth, pulling the power of nature towards Mary.
The spell was complete when my palm no longer tingled.
I glanced at the wound, allowing my lips to curve into a small smile when I saw that all the pus had disappeared. Turning my own palm over, I saw the remnants of it under my skin. There was nothing to fear. I knew it. Not from pus and poison anyway.
“There you go, Mary.” I said, swiftly wrapping a clean piece of cotton around her leg tight. “Leave it wrapped for a couple of days and then I’ll check it again for you.” There would be nothing to check, I knew that, but it would be better if she kept it covered for a couple of days instead of everyone noticing how swiftly I’d healed her.
Father was suffocating enough as it was. I didn’t want the weight of his disapproval settling on my shoulders because I was helping our people.
Helping our people was what I was born to do. I was sure of it.
Avoiding staring too hard at where my father stood with Tristram and the other elders, I cleaned up the bowl I’d used and slipped back to the round house. Closing the door, I leaned against it. With every movement I made my head shook in my skull, echoing, making me believe every action had been done before.
There was a word for it… I just couldn’t remember it.
“You know if you keep healing everyone, there will be talk.”
I whirled in place and stared unseeing at the girl in front of me. Blonde and slender, she looked familiar yet strange all at once.
“Mae? You look like you’ve seen a ghost?” She stepped forward and took my hand. “Is this magic of yours causing you ill?”
My head shook from side to side. Her name tingling where the forgotten word I’d failed to remember only a moment ago had been. My eyesight dimmed, the edges flickering as though the house were disappearing, old twisted trunks of trees and brown leaves stepping forth into its place.
“I feel.” I grasped out toward her. “I feel like I shouldn’t be here,” I stuttered. This is all wrong.
“Of course you should be here. This is your home, with me and father; with our people.”
“Tristan?” I called the name my heart wanted to hear.
“No, Mae. Tristram. Do you need him? Shall I go and call?”
I shook my head, my hand sliding to my pendant. Clasping my fingers tightly shut around the gem, I paused and breathed deep. In and out, over and over again. All the while, the purple stone warmed my hand. The black-tinged shadows of my sight receded, and I was able to look into the room properly.
“Alana?” I sighed my sister’s name, as familiar as my own. “I almost forgot who I was then.”
I wanted to see a smile, but across her smooth ivory skin a frown line stole its place. “I’d forget you to do your chores, to learn your lore. But, Mae, you are the strongest of all of us. If you forget who you are, what hope is there for the rest of us?”
A shudder crawled up my skin. If I closed my eyes and allowed my power to root through the earth floor of the hut, I could sense the approach of the red army. They were still marching straight towards us, although thankfully, I breathed with relief, they were still some way off. I opened my eyes and stared into my sister’s pale-blue ones. “I hope father has convinced them to move the settlement.”
The door swung open, my father sweeping in, his white robe dragging in dust and leaves. “Father, what did Tristram say?”
Another shadow loomed in the door and my father shot me a dark look. “What would you have me say, My Baduri?” Tristram’s gold-haired head ducked in through the doorway and all at once the hut shrunk in size.
“I—” I faltered. I couldn’t speak to him, not openly in front of my father.
“Everyone leave,” he snapped, and I stared aghast as even my father left at the will of his chief, although the pointed glare he shot me told me well enough to keep my mouth shut.
“How do you feel, My Baduri? I was worried for you the other day, it’s unlike you to pale so.”
I swallowed hard, my pulse thudding like the hooves of a deer in a hunt.
“Better. I’m sorry.”
He stepped closer while again my brain told me this was all familiar. I’d been through this before. “I’m worried for you. Your father keeps secrets.”
I bit down on my lip. I’d sworn not to tell him… why then was the voice in my head telling me to tell him all I knew, every muddled, senseless strand of it?
When I didn’t answer, his face tightened, the beautiful planes of golden skin hardening. “And you keep secrets, my priestess?”
I shook my head, but my heart sank. I was keeping secrets, but half of them I couldn’t make head nor tail of.
“My Lord,” I reached for him, my fingers catching the skin of his bare arm.
“Once, Mae, we were so much more than friends. You trusted me with everything.”
“And now I’m trying to protect you.”
He leaned closer, close enough that his breath fanned over my skin.
