Kovren #2
Her fingers uncurl from my shirt and come up to my jaw. She doesn't have to strain now. Her palm fits against the bone, warm and certain.
I lean my forehead against hers. Close my eyes.
For a long time, neither of us moves. Her breath is warm against my mouth. Her heartbeat pulses through the bond, steady and calm, and the rage is so quiet I almost can't find it.
“Now,” she says eventually, pulling back enough to look at me. “You should know about me.”
“I know you're a healer.”
“You know what I do. You don't know why.” She sits on a flat rock beside the road, and I stay kneeling, and for once we're roughly the same height.
“My father was a healer. The best in our village. He never turned anyone away, never refused a patient, never charged more than people could pay. He worked himself to death by the time I was sixteen.”
I don't say anything. Just stay where I am and wait.
“After he died, I took over. It was expected. The healer's daughter becomes the healer.” Her voice is flat, distant. The voice of someone reciting facts, not feelings. “But I wasn't as good as him. Wasn't as patient. And when I lost my first patient...”
She stops. Breathes. Keeps going.
“A child. Fever. The same thing that would have killed the girl in Gorvani, except I didn't have the right herbs, the right knowledge and I didn't get there in time, and she died in my arms while her mother screamed at me.”
“Maren.”
“The village blamed me. Said I should have done more, should have known more, should have been better.” Her voice doesn't waver, but I can see the tension in her shoulders, the old pain she's carrying. “I left that night. Took my father's bag and started walking. That was eight years ago.”
Eight years. The same as me. Both of us walking since the same wound opened.
“You didn't fail that child,” I say. “The one who died.”
“You don't know that.”
“I know you. I know you would have done everything possible. Everything your father taught you, everything you'd learned on your own. If she still died, it wasn't because you failed. It was because some things can't be saved.”
Her eyes are bright. Not crying, but close.
“That's what I tell myself.” Her voice is barely above a breath. “Some days I even believe it.”
I look at her. The bruise on her jaw, the shadows under her eyes, the pack straps that have worn raw spots on her shoulders because she carries everything and asks for nothing. She stitched me back together with her last supplies and never mentioned she was freezing until her teeth gave her away.
“You're not afraid of the monster,” I say. “But you don't think you deserve to be taken care of.”
Her mouth opens. Closes. She looks away.
“You give until there's nothing left, and then you keep going. Your father did the same thing, and it killed him. You watched it kill him, and then you did it anyway.”
“That's not the same.”
“It is.”
She doesn't answer. For a moment I think she's going to argue. Instead, she just looks at me, and the fight goes out of her.
“Believe it today.” I reach up, cup her face in my hands. My palms nearly span from her jaw to her temples. I hold her carefully, the way she holds her instruments, the way she handles wounds. “You stayed for me. No one's ever stayed for me.”
“Someone should have.”
“Someone is. You.”
She leans forward and rests her forehead against mine again. Then she shifts, tilts her chin, and presses her mouth to mine.
Not gentle. Not tentative. She kisses me the way she stitches wounds.
Direct, certain, with hands that don't shake.
Her fingers grip the front of my shirt and pull.
I let her, allow her set the pace and the pressure and the distance, because she is brave enough to start this and I am not going to be the one who stops it.
My hands tighten on her face. Not too much. Never too much. But enough that she can feel me holding on.
She pulls back. Her breathing is unsteady, and her hands are still fisted in my shirt.
“The beast?” she asks.
I check. Search for the rage the way I search for a sound in silence.
“Quiet,” I say. “Completely quiet.”
Something changes in her expression. Not surprise. Confirmation. Her chin dips once, a small nod, and she turns back to the road.
“Good.” She stands, brushes off her clothes, adjusts her pack. Gets back to business after kissing a Bogatyr on his knees in the middle of a road. The practicality of it undoes me more than the kiss itself.
“Maren.”
“What?”
“Your pack. Let me carry it.”
“I'm fine.”
“I know you're fine. But it weighs nothing to me, and it's wearing grooves into your shoulders.”
She stares at my outstretched hand. Then she shrugs off the pack and holds it out.
The weight barely registers. I could carry a dozen of these and not notice.
“Thank you,” she says quietly.
I rise from my knees, and the world resizes itself. She's small again, the top of her head below my chest, the distance between us measured in feet instead of the inches it had been a moment ago.
But the space between us doesn't sting the way it did before.
We walk.
The road winds through abandoned farmland, past crumbling walls and wild orchards. The sky stays gray. She's thinking. Her brow furrows, her lips press together.
“The creature,” she says after a while. “Rodvek. You said the oath keeps him alive. Keeps him trapped.”
“Yes.”
“And the berserker took him because he went into the rage to protect the stronghold. To fulfill his oath.”
“Yes.”
“So the oath and the rage are tangled together. The oath won't let him die, and the rage won't let him stop.” She's working through it the way she works through a diagnosis. Methodical. Precise. “There have to be texts. Records. Someone who's studied this.”
“There were. At the stronghold.”
“Which is gone.” She starts walking faster, the way she does when her mind is moving ahead of her feet. “What about other sources? Other orders, scholars? Anyone who's studied the berserker condition?”
“There's a woman. In Vorneth.” The name surfaces from memories I've been avoiding. “Mother Sanque. She's a healer, like you, but she also collects knowledge. Old texts. Forbidden books. Things the temples would rather forget.”
“Would she help us?”
“She owes me a debt. From a long time ago.”
“Then that's where we go.” She glances up at me with the same look she gets before she cuts into a wound. “How far?”
“A day's walk to the portal.”
She snorts, and I nearly laugh at the sound.
“I have the gold. I don’t spend much, hunting on the road.”
One quick nod of acceptance. “Then we'd better keep moving.”
She walks ahead of me, my cloak still wrapped around her despite the growing warmth of the day. The knot at her waist has loosened, and the hem is picking up mud, but she's moving too fast to fix it. Her mind is already in Vorneth.
I follow her. Carrying her pack, carrying my wounds, carrying eight years of guilt that sits differently than it did this morning.
She heard the worst of it. The village, the bodies, the not-knowing. And then she told me about the child who died and the village that blamed her. And she kissed me and I understood something I hadn't before. She isn't unafraid of me. She's unafraid of everything. Including herself.
The road stretches ahead. Vorneth by evening. Mother Sanque. Answers, maybe. Or at least the right questions.