A Healer Passing Through

The stranger came to Greywater the same week as the fever.

It rode in on a boat from somewhere downstream, the way sickness so often did in a river town, and it spread through the close-packed houses of the lower town faster than anyone could track.

By the third day Maren had not slept. She moved from house to house with her satchel and her grim patience, bringing down temperatures, forcing fluids, sitting with the worst of them through the long bad nights.

The stranger appeared on the second morning, in the thick of it.

The first thing she noticed about him was that he was not afraid of the fever. The second was that he knew what to do.

His name, he said, was Tomas. He was a healer, he said, travelling south to the coast. When he had seen the state of the lower town, he had not been able to walk past it.

He had good hands and a calm way with frightened people and a bag of remedies not so different from her own.

He fell in beside her at the bedside of a lumberman's family where three children burned at once. Between them they pulled all three through the night.

By dawn Maren was too tired and too grateful to question a gift that had arrived exactly when she needed it.

That was her first mistake. She would not know it for days.

Tomas stayed. He took the houses on the harbour side while she took the hill, and they met in the middle each evening to compare who was failing and who was turning.

He was easy to talk to, in the way tired people are easy with one another when the work has burned away the small talk.

He did not ask her where she came from. She liked that he did not ask.

She did not notice, at first, that a man who does not ask is sometimes a man who already knows.

He was good with Wren, too.

On the one evening the child had been underfoot, fetching water and clean cloths because she could not be made to stay away from anything interesting, Tomas had crouched to her level and called her his assistant.

Wren, who liked to be useful and liked even more to be taken seriously, had glowed under it.

Watching them, Maren had felt something in her chest unknot that had been knotted for five years.

Here was a man of her own kind who was kind. Who was good with her daughter. And for one foolish evening she had let herself imagine, just a little, what it might be to not be so alone.

She would think back on that evening later with a cold horror. At how close she had let him get. At how she had nearly handed him the very picture he had come to confirm.

On the fourth day the fever began to loosen its grip.

Maren walked home grey-faced through the emptied streets, thinking in the dull, slow way of the sleepless about the two she had lost. An old man whose heart had given out. A baby too small to fight.

She was not as careful as she should have been. Not as turned-outward.

Perhaps that was why it took her so long to feel what was standing in the dark behind her.

She stopped dead in the middle of the road.

It was not a sound or a sight. It was older than either. A thing that lived in the oldest part of her, the part that was wolf, and it had not stirred in five years.

The awareness of another of her kind. Close.

And not just any of her kind. The cold thing uncoiling in her chest knew this one. Recognised it the way a scar recognises the blade that made it.

She turned around slowly.

He stood at the mouth of the alley behind her, where the harbour light did not reach. For a moment he was only a tall shape in the dark, the way he had been a tall shape against the fire on the night he ended her.

Then he stepped forward, and the grey evening light found him.

Dorian Vale. Five years older and a great deal harder.

"Maren," he said. Just that.

Her name. Her real name. The one she had not heard spoken aloud in five years. The sound of it in his voice almost took her legs out from under her.

Not from tenderness. From sheer animal shock. The past reaching up through the stones to seize her by the ankle.

And under the shock, something worse. Her body knew him. Five years gone, and the traitor thing in her chest still leaned toward him, still remembered his hands, still wanted.

She hated it. She buried it.

She did not run. Running would tell him everything. It would tell him she had something to run toward, something to protect.

So she stood, the way she had stood in the great room five years ago. She made her face into nothing.

"You have the wrong woman," she said. "My name is Frost."

Something flickered across his face. Not surprise. He had known it was her. He would have known her scent from across the town.

"Do not," he said quietly. "Please. Five years, Maren. Do not make me stand here and pretend I do not know you."

"I do not know what you think you have found." She made herself take a step back, casual, a woman edging away from a stranger. "But I have sick people to get back to. And if you follow me, there are men who come when I call."

"I am not here to hurt you." He had not moved. He stood very still, his hands open at his sides.

She remembered, with a lurch, that this was how he stood when he wanted something badly and was afraid of frightening it away.

"I have spent five years looking for you. Five years. Do you understand what that means, for an Alpha to leave his territory, again and again, to walk human roads asking after a woman who does not want to be found."

"I have ruined myself looking for you."

"Then you have wasted five years." Hard and flat. She was proud of how steady it came out. "I owe you nothing, Dorian Vale."

"You rejected me. You tore the bond out of my chest and turned me out into a storm. And now you have crossed two hundred miles to tell me you have changed your mind, and I am telling you that I do not care."

For a moment neither of them moved. The river ran on at the bottom of the street. Somewhere a gull cried, thin and lonely.

"I cannot go home," he said. "There is nothing there. I broke us for an alliance that fell apart inside two years."

"I have spent every day since in a hall that gets colder no matter how high I build the fires. And I am not too proud anymore to stand in a wet street and tell you that I was wrong."

"I was wrong, Maren. I would give the Hollow itself to take back what I said in that room."

And the terrible thing, the thing that made her hate him with fresh and burning clarity, was that she believed him.

She could hear the truth in it. He meant every word.

And it did not matter. It did not change a single thing. Because she had not built her new life on the hope of his regret. She had built it on the ashes of it.

A man who comes back to say sorry for the fire does not get to warm his hands at the hearth you made from what he burned.

"You should have thought of that," she said. "Before."

"Maren." He took one step toward her. Just one. And stopped himself, and the stopping cost him something visible. "At least tell me you are well. Tell me you have not been alone all this time. I have imagined every kind of thing."

For one breath she almost laughed.

He wanted absolution. He wanted to be told she had landed softly, so he could carry his guilt more comfortably.

She would give him no such gift. Let him imagine. Let him lie awake with every cold and hungry version of her his mind could build. It was a fraction of what he owed.

"I am none of your business," she said.

Then she turned and walked away from him, up the hill toward her sick and her work. She did not look back.

Behind her, Dorian Vale did not follow, and did not call her name again.

The not-following was somehow worse than anything. Because it meant he had decided to be patient.

And she knew exactly how patient he could be.