The Healer's Secret

I woke the next morning to the sound of whispering in the hallway outside my room.

I could not make out the exact words but I could hear the tone, that low urgent kind of talking that people do when they find something surprising and are not sure yet what to make of it. I lay still for a moment and listened, and then I heard my own name spoken quietly by a voice I did not recognise.

I sat up slowly and looked at my arms.

The cuts from the Darkwood were almost completely gone. I had noticed them closing faster than normal the day before but I had told myself I was imagining it, that exhaustion was making me see things that were not there. Looking at them now in the pale morning light coming through the window, I could not tell myself that anymore. The skin was smooth and pink and clean, like wounds that were a week old rather than two days.

I pressed two fingers against the place where the deepest cut had been and felt nothing at all. No tenderness, no soreness, nothing. I sat there staring at my own forearm for a long moment and tried to think of a reasonable explanation for what I was looking at, and I could not find one.

Mira came in a few minutes later, carrying a fresh bandage in one hand and a small bowl of something warm smelling in the other. She set both on the table beside the bed with the same brisk efficient movements she always used, like every action she took had a specific purpose and she saw no reason to waste time on anything else. She reached for my arm without asking, the way she always did, and began unwrapping the old bandage carefully.

I watched her face while she worked because I had already learned in the short time I had been here that her face was the most reliable source of information available to me. Her hands slowed down as the bandage came away. Her breathing changed slightly, going out a little differently than it came in. She leaned closer to my arm and then closer still, and the efficient professional expression she always wore shifted into something else entirely.

She set the bandage down on the tray and straightened up and looked at me without speaking for a moment. "I need to run a test," she said quietly. "A blood test. I want you to wait here." I opened my mouth to ask what kind of test and she looked at me steadily and said, "The kind I have not needed to run in forty years," and left the room before I could ask anything else.

I sat on the edge of the bed and turned my arm over in my hands and looked at it and felt the first real flutter of unease move through my stomach. Healing faster than normal was one thing, but having a healer with decades of experience look at your arm like she had never seen anything like it before was something else entirely, and I did not know what to do with the feeling it left behind.

The silver-eyed warrior from the day before appeared in the doorway about twenty minutes later, carrying a change of clothes which he left on the chair without a word and then disappeared again before I could ask him anything. I changed quickly into the plain shirt and trousers he had left and sat back on the bed and waited, because there was not much else I could do right now.

I could hear movement in the hallway outside, more than one set of footsteps at different points, coming and going, and once what sounded like a brief low conversation that stopped as soon as it got close to my door. Whatever was happening out there was connected to whatever Mira had seen on my arm, and the fact that nobody was coming in to explain it to me was not making me feel any calmer about it.

After about an hour I heard Mira's voice from somewhere down the hallway, speaking in that low controlled tone that people use when they are trying very hard not to sound as unsettled as they feel. I could not make out what she was saying but I could hear the strain underneath the control clearly enough, and it made me get up from the bed and walk quietly to the door and stand just inside it, listening.

Her voice was coming from the herb room two doors down, the one I had seen the day before with its shelves of dried bundles and small glass jars. The door was almost fully closed and her words were too muffled to make out properly, but I caught fragments here and there.

Something about results she had not seen before. Something about records from a long time ago. And then, just before the door swung completely shut, two words spoken in a completely different tone, quieter and slower and weighted with something I could not name.

Moon Goddess.

The door clicked shut and I stood in the hallway with my heart beating faster than it had any reason to and those two words sitting in the middle of my chest like stones dropped into still water. I thought about my mother's hands in my hair and the promise I had made at thirteen that I had not understood until recently. I thought about the healer's face when she looked at my arm. I thought about Zane standing at the foot of my bed asking me who I was in a voice that suggested he already had some idea of the answer.

I walked to the herb room door and knocked twice. The talking inside stopped immediately and there was a short pause, and then Mira opened the door and looked at me with an expression I had not seen on her face before. It was not her usual efficient composure. It was something more complicated than that, something that had a quality I needed a moment to identify properly, and when I identified it I felt the unease in my stomach deepen considerably.

It looked like fear. Not of me exactly, but for me, the specific look of someone who knows something you do not know yet and is not entirely sure how to tell you. She stepped back and held the door open wider without saying anything, and I walked into the herb room and she closed the door behind us both.

She stood on the other side of the worktable and looked at me steadily, like she was deciding where to begin or perhaps deciding how much I was ready to hear at one time. The room smelled of dried lavender and something older underneath it, and the morning light came through the small window and fell across the wooden table between us.

"You heard something in the hallway," she said, and it was not a question.

"Two words," I said. "That was all."

She was quiet for a moment, just long enough for me to understand that what was coming next was not something small.

Then she looked at me with that careful weighted expression and said the thing she had clearly been working up to since she first looked at my arm that morning.

"Child," she said, her voice low and completely serious. "Do you know what you are?"

The question landed in the center of my chest and stayed there. I opened my mouth and then closed it again, because the honest answer was the same one I had given Zane the day before when he asked me who I was.

I had absolutely no idea.