Chapter 4

Three weeks in, I still hadn't told anyone about the starflower.

I told myself it was nothing. A trick of tired eyes, a flower that had been closer to blooming than I'd realized, coincidence dressed up as magic because my mind wanted something to hold onto in a body that still felt borrowed. I believed that story for exactly as long as it took me to stop believing it, which was not very long at all.

The truth was, it kept happening. A wilted herb here, a dying seedling there. Small things. Things nobody would notice unless they were looking, and nobody was looking except me, and one man who I hadn't realized was watching until the night he sat down across the fire from me and didn't say a single word about weather or food or the road ahead.

Toven led the Windborne, though you'd never guess it from how he carried himself. No raised voice, no posturing, nothing that announced itself the way Kael's presence used to announce itself in whatever dream had left the shape of that word behind. Toven just sat, dark and still, watching the flames with the patience of a man who had learned a long time ago that most things sort themselves out if you stop grabbing at them.

"You hummed at the herb wagon again today," he said, not looking up from the fire.

My whole body went cold. "I was clearing my throat."

"You were clearing your throat at a dying fern, and it stopped dying." He finally looked at me, and there was nothing accusing in it, nothing that made me want to run. Just a question, patient, waiting for me to decide whether I trusted him enough to answer it honestly. "That's the third time this month."

I could have kept lying. Some instinct in me, old and practiced, knew exactly how to make myself smaller, how to deflect a question until it lost interest and wandered off somewhere else. I'd clearly done it before, in whatever life had left this instinct behind.

But something about the way he asked, like the answer mattered to him for my sake and not for what he could do with it, made the lie stick in my throat.

"I don't know what it is," I admitted. "It just happens. I open my mouth and something comes out that isn't mine, and things that were dying stop dying, and I don't know why, and it terrifies me."

He nodded slowly, like I'd confirmed something he'd already suspected rather than told him something new.

"You carry the Old Song," he said. "It's not a talent. It's a responsibility, and it's older than either of us. I've only heard of two people who carried it in my lifetime. Both of them are dead now."

"That's comforting."

"I'm not trying to frighten you," he said, and something in his voice gentled, just slightly. "I'm trying to make sure you understand the stakes before you decide how to carry this. The last person I heard of who carried the Song this strong burned through herself in a season, giving without ever learning how to hold anything back. I'd rather teach you a slower way, if you'll let me."

The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. "I didn't say it to comfort you. I said it because you should understand what you're holding before it decides to hold you instead."

"What does that mean?"

"It means the Song takes as much as it gives, and it doesn't ask permission first." He studied me across the fire, something careful in his expression, like he was choosing each word the way you'd choose a foothold on unstable ground. "I can teach you how to use it without it using you. If you want that. I won't force the lesson on someone who'd rather pretend it isn't happening."

I thought about the starflower straightening under my breath. I thought about the fever dream that still visited some nights, a hand on my hip, a voice claiming me in the dark, and how something in my chest answered that voice even now, weeks and towns away from wherever it had come from. I thought about how tired I was of not understanding my own body, my own voice, my own name that had arrived from nowhere and stuck.

"I want that," I said.

"Then we start now." He gestured to the space beside him at the fire, not close, careful, the distance a teacher keeps from a student until trust has been earned rather than assumed. "Sit. Breathe from here." He touched two fingers to his own stomach, low, beneath the ribs. "Not from your chest. The Song doesn't come from where you think it does."

I sat. I breathed the way he showed me, and it felt wrong, too deliberate, too much like performing a thing that should have come naturally.

"You're holding your shoulders like you're bracing for a blow," he said.

"I'm not bracing for anything."

"You are. You just don't know you're doing it yet." He moved around the fire, unhurried, and knelt behind me, and for a moment neither of us moved, like we were both waiting to see if I'd flinch away first. I didn't. "May I?"

I nodded, not trusting my voice.

His hand settled against my lower back, warm through the thin fabric of my shirt, steady in a way that asked nothing of me beyond permission already given. "Here," he said. "This is where the breath should start. Not your throat. Not your chest. Here."

I breathed. His hand rose and fell with it, patient, correcting nothing, simply present, a point of contact that didn't pull at me the way the dream-memory pulled, didn't demand anything, didn't vanish the moment I needed it to stay.

It was the first gentle touch I could remember in either of my lives, and something in me, some old habit of bracing, of expecting a hand to take more than it gave, waited for the catch. The catch didn't come.

That was what unsettled me. Not the touch itself, which was nothing, a teacher's correction, professional and brief. What unsettled me was how much I wanted it to stay exactly where it was, how my body had gone quiet and unguarded under it in a way it hadn't gone quiet in longer than I could remember, and how some small, frightened part of me understood, in that moment, that I had just found something I could lose.

I didn't lean into his hand. I didn't pull away either. I just breathed, low, from beneath my ribs the way he'd shown me, and let myself notice, with a kind of dread I didn't examine too closely, that I hadn't wanted a hand on me like this in longer than I could name, and that wanting it now, from a stranger who asked before he touched and stopped the moment I needed him to, terrified me more than the Song ever had.

"Better," Toven said quietly, and drew his hand back.

The absence of it landed harder than the touch had.

I sat very still by the fire long after he'd gone to check the horses, staring into the flames, my lower back still warm where his palm had been, and thought, with a clarity that frightened me: I am in more trouble than I realized, and it has nothing to do with the Song at all.

Somewhere out past the firelight, one of the horses shifted in its tether, a small, ordinary sound that should have meant nothing, and yet it was enough to pull me back into my own body, reminding me the world hadn't stopped simply because something in my chest had.