It Wakes in Me by Kathleen O’Neal Gear Page B

not.”
    “Really, Priest?” she scoffed. “Do you know me so well?”
    His expression slackened as he looked at her. “I know you are alone.”
    He was, of course, right; it was a strange, hollow sensation. As the daughter of the chieftess, she had rarely been alone. There had always been someone close by who would answer if she called out.
    He leaned forward and tossed another branch onto the fire. Sparks flitted upward toward the smokehole in the roof. “Don’t fight it. Your loneliness may help me to Heal you.”
    “How?”
    “It is only when we are lonely that our afterlife soul can
seek us. If your reflection-soul truly is lost in the forest, it may find its way home by itself.”
    “You mean loneliness draws the reflection-soul back to the body?”
    He lifted a shoulder. “Loneliness is more like a signal fire lit in the darkness. The reflection-soul walks toward it out of curiosity, sees its own body, and rushes home.” Pausing, he rearranged his dark cape around his feet, keeping them warm, and said, “Did you want your father to die?”
    The question startled her. “No, of course not. I loved him very much.”
    “As much as you loved your mother?”
    “More. Mother was not particularly kind to me. She preferred my older sister. I was my father’s pet.”
    On the hearthstones, the small pot began to bubble. Suds boiled up and spilled over the lip into the fire, scenting the house with the fragrance of soap. He must have been preparing his nightly bath when his spies brought him the news that Flint had taken her to the forest.
    Strongheart wrapped his cape over his hand, grabbed the pot, and set it on the floor between them.
    “I’ve been told your father was a traveler.”
    Her father’s face formed behind her eyes, as eerie and dreamlike as it had been when she’d been a small child. In most ways, he was very ordinary; he had a plain round face with a broad nose and ears that stuck out through his black hair. Ordinary in every way except his eyes. Those eyes might be looking straight at you, but he wouldn’t be seeing you. He would be seeing faraway places. Even now, twenty-five winters later, she didn’t need to remember the tale he’d told her of the far western ocean. All she had to do was remember his eyes. He could look that vast blueness right into your heart until you felt you were drowning. Her tongue still tasted the salt in the air.

    “Your father visited the islands far to the south, I’m told.”
    “Yes, he—he was a great Trader before he met my mother. He traveled far and wide. It was his reputation that gave him the right to marry into my family. But I think it was a bad choice for him. Marrying a chieftess meant he had to stay in Blackbird Town and help my mother. It withered his souls. His greatest pleasure came from seeing distant horizons.”
    Absently, as though thinking about other things, Strongheart brushed at the suds on the pot rim. “Did he tell you stories about those places? About the islands to the south?”
    “Often.”
    She opened her left palm and stared at her hand. The beautiful flowers of those islands scented her fingertips—though she had never seen them. Never touched them. Her father had been there long before she’d been born. “He was a very good storyteller,” she said softly.
    Strongheart reached into the sudsy pot and squeezed out a cloth, then rubbed it over his own arm as though testing the temperature. “I want you to tell me more, much more, but for now, I imagine you are feeling dirty.”
    After what she’d been through tonight, she felt filthy, but it surprised her that he was concerned about it. She finished her tea and set the cup on the floor.
    “Is that for me?” She gestured to the soapy water.
    “Yes. Please,” he said, and held out his hand as though he wanted her to take it.
    Reluctantly, she gripped his fingers. To her surprise, rather than putting the cloth in her hand, he used it to wash her arm.
    Sora let herself