What the Healer Knew

Elara's POV

Kael walked me back toward the lodge, which I hadn't asked him to do and didn't tell him to stop doing either. We didn't talk much. 

There wasn't really anything left to say that wouldn't have sounded smaller than what we'd just told each other, and I think we both knew it, so we let the quiet sit instead, comfortable in a way I wouldn't have predicted twelve hours ago.

Ronan was waiting at the edge of the guest lodge when we came into view. I recognized him from the long hall, the lieutenant who'd looked at me like he hadn't decided yet whether I was a threat or a joke.

Up close, in daylight, he had the kind of face that gave away exactly nothing, which I was starting to understand was probably the point of a lieutenant's face.

"You've been gone two hours," Ronan said, to Kael, not to me. Pointedly not to me.

"I'm aware of how long I've been gone."

"Sable's already fielding questions from three different pack elders about why the Northern Alpha spent his morning alone with an unclaimed border-pack girl instead of finalizing the diplomatic terms we came here for." Ronan's eyes flicked to me, brief, assessing, gone again. "Questions I don't have good answers to, because I don't actually know what you're doing, Kael."

"I'm doing exactly what my wolf told me to do last night."

"Your wolf isn't the one who has to manage the fallout when three border packs start whispering that the Northern Alpha's judgment can't be trusted."

Ronan's voice stayed level, but there was real strain underneath it, the specific strain of a man who cared about someone and was watching him do something reckless. 

"I'm not telling you to walk away from her. I'm telling you that if this is real, you need to treat it like it's real  publicly, politically, carefully instead of sneaking off to a training ring like a teenager.

Kael's jaw tightened, but he didn't argue.

"You're right."

"I usually am." Ronan finally looked at me directly, and something in his expression shifted  not warmth, not yet, but a kind of grudging reassessment.

"No offense meant. I don't know you. I know what happened last night looks like, and I know what people are going to do with it if we're not careful, and neither of those things are your fault. But they're going to land on you anyway. That's how this works."

"I've had nineteen years of things landing on me that weren't my fault," I said. "I'm familiar with how it works."

That got something close to a smile out of him  small, surprised, gone almost before it started. "Fair enough."

"I need an hour," Kael said. "Then we'll deal with the elders, the terms, all of it.

Properly, the way you're asking."

Ronan studied him a moment longer, then nodded, once, and let it go. "One hour." He glanced at me again on his way past. "For what it's worth whatever he's doing, he doesn't usually do it without reason. I've known him a long time. I've never seen him do this."

He left before I could figure out whether that was meant to be comforting.

Kael excused himself not long after. pack business, the real kind, the kind that couldn't wait even for whatever this was and promised to find me again before he left for the Northern Territories that evening. I believed him, which surprised me more than it should have.

I didn't go back to my room. I went to find Damon, except halfway there my feet took a different turn entirely, down the path toward the old healer's cottage at the edge of the pack lands, and I didn't fully understand why until I was already standing in front of it.

I hadn't been here in years. Healer Voss  no relation to anyone important, just an old woman with the same common surname who'd tended the pack's scrapes and fevers since before I was born had retired sometime when I was small, replaced by a younger healer from the eastern packs. But the cottage was still standing, empty now, windows dark.

I stood there a long time, not sure why I'd come.

Then it hit me, the way old memories sometimes do not gently, but all at once, like a door blown open by wind you didn't feel coming.

I was small. Four, maybe five. It was night, and I wasn't supposed to be awake, and I remember the specific creak of the third floorboard from my door that I used to step over on nights I wanted to sneak and watch the adults through the crack in the kitchen doorway. 

My mother was there  I barely remember her face anymore, just an impression of warmth and dark hair, the same color as mine and Healer Voss was there too, older even then, her hands moving over something on the table between them.

My mother was crying. Not sad-crying. Scared-crying, the kind adults tried to hide from kids and never quite managed.

"It has to be tonight," my mother said.

"Before she's old enough to remember it."

"She may remember pieces regardless," the healer said. "Rituals like this leave marks on more than just the body."

"Then we'll deal with pieces. Better pieces than the whole truth finding her before she's ready."

I remember the healer's hands glowing, faintly, gold at the fingertips. I remember my mother holding something small and dark  a lock of hair, maybe, or a scrap of cloth over a bowl of water that didn't reflect the candlelight the way water should. I remember a smell, sharp and strange, gone from the room entirely a moment later, like it had never existed at all.

I remember waking up in my own bed the next morning with no memory of leaving it.

I sat down hard on the healer's front step, my heart going too fast, my hands pressed flat against the wood like I needed something solid to hold onto. I hadn't thought about that memory in over a decade. I wasn't even sure, until just now, that it was a memory, and not some fragment of a dream I'd absorbed as a kid and mistaken for something real.

Rituals like this leave marks on more than just the body.

Better pieces than the whole truth finding her before she's ready.

I thought about Damon's face in the long hall I know it's the reason you have no scent, and I know it's not a flaw. I thought about Thorne's voice, careful and old: the kind who don't announce themselves at a Choosing ceremony.

The kind who watch, first. I thought about a healer with glowing hands and a mother who'd cried while doing something to her own four-year-old daughter, something urgent enough to do "before she's old enough to remember it"  something that hadn't worked completely, apparently, because here I was, twenty years later, remembering it anyway.

I didn't have the whole truth. I understood that much, sitting on that cold step with my pulse hammering in my ears. I had a piece, one single piece Healer Voss had warned might surface despite everyone's best efforts, and it was terrifying precisely because of how small it was because if this one fragment had survived whatever they'd tried to erase, what did that mean about the rest of it, still buried somewhere I couldn't reach?

Better pieces than the whole truth.

Somebody had decided, when I was four years old, that the whole truth was dangerous enough to erase from a child's mind entirely.

I was starting to understand that whatever it was, it might already be finding its way back to the surface on its own with or without anyone's permission.