Chapter 3

The caravan moved before the sun cleared the tree line, and I moved with it, because that was what you did here. Nobody asked if you were ready. You just were, or you learned to look like it fast enough that no one noticed the difference.

I sat near the back of Mira's wagon with a basket of drying herbs in my lap, sorting them by smell the way she'd shown me, mint from sage from something bitter she called ward-root. My hands knew the sorting before my mind caught up to it, sliding leaves into piles without me deciding to. I stared at my own fingers doing it and felt like a stranger watching someone else's hands work.

"You've got a gift for that," said the boy across from me. Deshi, maybe twelve, missing a front tooth, endlessly curious about the girl who'd shown up half-dead and full of secrets she didn't seem to know she was keeping. "Mira usually has to teach that for weeks."

"Lucky guess," I said, and kept sorting.

He didn't believe me. I didn't blame him. I didn't believe me either.

"Bet you were a healer before," he said, undeterred, propping his chin on his knees to watch me work. "Or a cook. My gran always said cooks and healers have the same hands. Quick ones."

"Maybe," I said, because it was easier than admitting I had no idea what my hands had been before three weeks ago, only what they seemed to already know how to do without asking me first.

The Windborne weren't what I expected, though I couldn't have told you what I'd expected, since I had no memories to measure against. Just an instinct, buried somewhere under the fever, that clans like this one were beneath notice. Lesser wolves. Nomads who sang for coin instead of holding land like proper packs did. I caught the thought and hated it before I understood where it had come from.

Nobody here acted lesser. They acted like people who had chosen a harder, freer life over an easier, caged one, and didn't regret the trade.

We stopped at midday to water the horses, and I wandered to the last wagon where the sick and struggling herbs got kept, the ones too far gone for the market stalls. A little starflower sat wilted in its pot, brown at the edges, curling in on itself the way things do right before they give up entirely.

I don't know why I hummed. It wasn't a decision. It rose up out of me the way a yawn does, involuntary, before I had the sense to stop it.

The starflower straightened.

Not all at once. Slow, like it was remembering how to hold itself up. The brown edges didn't vanish, but the curl eased, and one small white bud that had been sealed shut cracked open a fraction.

I stopped humming immediately and looked around. Nobody had seen. Deshi was three wagons back arguing with another boy about whose turn it was to ride the front bench. Mira was checking a horse's shoe.

I looked back at the flower. It looked back at me, if a flower can be said to look at anything, small and stubborn and undeniably more alive than it had been thirty seconds before.

Something came with me, I thought. Whatever happened to me, whatever fever burned through and left this stranger's body behind for me to wear, something else came through with it.

I didn't tell Mira. I didn't tell anyone. I pinched a few dead leaves off the starflower like I'd only stopped to tidy it, and I walked away before my hands could do anything else I couldn't explain.

That night I dreamed.

I don't remember choosing to dream it. It arrived whole, uninvited, the way the humming had.

A room I'd never seen and somehow already knew, dark furniture, cold stone floor, a window cracked open to let in air that smelled like pine and smoke. A man's hand closing over my hip from behind, broad and certain, thumb pressing into the soft place just above the bone like he owned the right to be there. His mouth at my ear. His voice, low, rough, saying one word that wasn't even a word so much as a claim.

Mine.

I woke gasping, tangled in a blanket that had gone damp with sweat, my whole body lit up like a struck match, want pooling low and shameless before I'd even finished opening my eyes.

I pressed my thighs together and lay very still, furious. Furious at my own body for responding to a man who didn't exist, a memory I didn't have, a voice I'd never heard while awake. Furious at the ache that lingered even after the dream had burned off, refusing to leave with it.

Who are you, I thought, glaring up at the dark canvas ceiling of the tent. Who was I to you, that you'd still be doing this to me from wherever you are?

The tent flap rustled. I went still, embarrassed even though no one could possibly know what I'd been dreaming, what my body had just done without my permission.

It was only Mira, checking on me the way she did most nights since the fever, an old habit she hadn't broken yet.

"Couldn't sleep either," she said, not really a question, settling onto the stool by my cot.

"Bad dream," I admitted, because it was easier than the whole truth.

She studied me in the low lamp light, and something in her face went careful, the way it did whenever she was deciding how much to say. "What kind of bad dream leaves a girl looking like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like she's angry at someone who isn't in the room." Mira tilted her head. "You said a name once, you know. During the fever. Only the once."

My whole body went cold and hot at the same time. "What name?"

"I couldn't tell you. You said it like it hurt to say it. Then you never said it again, not once in three weeks, no matter how high the fever climbed." She reached over and tucked the blanket higher around my shoulders, gentle, the way you'd handle something you were afraid might break if you weren't careful with it. "Whoever he is, Rael, he left a mark deep enough that your body remembers him even if your mind's decided to forget."

I opened my mouth to say I don't have a him, there's no one, you're imagining things. But the ache under my ribs, low and stubborn and still faintly warm from the dream, called me a liar before I could get the words out.

"I don't want to remember," I said instead, and it was the truest thing I'd said since I woke up in this body.

Mira nodded slowly, like that answer told her everything she needed to know. She rose, smoothed her skirts, and paused at the tent flap with her hand on the canvas.

"For what it's worth," she said, not turning around, "the ones we don't want to remember are usually the ones we can't afford to forget. You might want to sit with that before we reach the next town."

She left before I could ask her what she meant by the next town, or why her voice had gone tight and careful on the word, like she already knew something about where we were headed that she wasn't ready to tell me yet.