Dragging the old man was exhausting work, and it was made worse by the knife wound in my shoulder. Thankfully, we hadn’t expected to slip through the Fang’s new territory unscathed so we had bandages Prevna used to at least stem the blood flow. I would have done it myself, but the wound’s placement made it difficult for me tie the bandage properly on my own.

I did take of everyone else’s bandages. Made sure they were tight and secure rather than the loose draping that the clueless tended to do in case they accidentally dabbled in healing. Still, seeing the cuts and bruises and knowing all the things that could be done to help heal them properly and quickly without being able to act on the knowledge was still its own kind of torture.

Our pace slowed without Emre to pull the second travois but Prevna, Jika, and I did our best to drag it, and the old man, in turns as fast as we could. Perhaps I should have mourned Emre for more than the lack of his utility, but the goddess took what She took and there was little the rest of us could do about it. Nor was there ignoring the fact that I had barely known his name, much less who he had been to his band or as a person.

So we dragged and pulled and bled—bandages could only hold up so well to our struggle—until the band we had set out for came into sight. We kept on high alert for the sound of footsteps or to someone crashing through the forest like the attackers had been but the mountainside was back to its unusual silence for the most part. There were two more instances when we heard yelling or fighting in the distance but no one came sprinting toward us.

All in all, the late afternoon sun was dipping toward the horizon by the time we finally got the healer’s camp in view. A few tents crouched on top of a triangular outcropping. It was probably only about fifteen feet high but the outcropping’s sides were sheer, without any good bumps or cracks to help some scale it. It also gave the band flat ground to rest on instead of the lesser incline the Red Hand tribe dealt with. The mountain also rose up at a steep angle a short ways behind the outcropping, so the only way to reach the band was two small paths that led up to either side of the outcropping’s base.

We followed that path up and around, clearly within view of the camp. As we got closer I saw that there was an opening to a cave behind the camp, so they had bit more room than just the few tents we could see. A man stood where the path ended at the camp and took us in with a stern gaze though he didn’t have healer’s beads.

He spoke as our group stopped a handful of feet in front of him. “All injured?”

Harup shook his head slowly. “One dead. We were attacked on the way over.”

The man nodded back but otherwise didn’t react to the news. “Your band?”

“Red Hand.”

“All of you?” His gaze flicked to Prevna and me, our shadow black lips.

Prevna answered, “We’re whisper women apprentices. Our mentors left us in the care of the Red Hand while they dealt with the death bringers.”

The healer’s entrance keeper looked like he had some unfavorable thoughts about that but he kept them to himself. “Very well. The most injured can go in the the cave. Everyone else will wait in the guest tent. The dead rest outside. Mirabeth’s orders.”

Harup nodded again like he had expected all of that and the man let us pass into the camp. We set Emre’s body down by the guest tent first and then helped Kuma and the younger man past the long woven strands of pine needles that had been pulled to the side’s of the cave entrance to let the daylight in.

I braced myself before I stepped across the threshold. Like I feared it smelled of herbs and poultices, smoke and sweat and blood. Precisely like a healer’s domain should. Between that and the cave’s low and wide interior, memories crowded at the back of my mind, tried to pull me under with the details that clearly connected past and present but I had been through a few different healer’s tents since being abandoned. The sheer amount of memories was no longer enough to drown me, though it was interesting that this cave was the one I found most reminiscent of her healing tent. Perhaps it was just due to that pompous whisper woman’s comment.

An old thin woman with frizzy hair and wiry muscles knelt over a injured woman laying on a mat on the cave’s floor. The old woman was checking the woman’s leg which had clearly been broken but was now set and wrapped tight. Even though I couldn’t see her beads from this angle there was little doubt that the old woman was the healer.

Another dark skinned woman was spoon feeding a boy across the cave but she didn’t have beads in her black hair. Both the healer and the man who had greeted us had similar skin tones to her. It made me wonder if they had come from the same area before they had become Pickers or if that was pure coincidence. She was probably around ten years older than I was and didn’t seem disturbed at all to be within a healer’s domain or with helping her patients. Not an apprentice, but an assistant? I wasn’t sure what to make of that.

The healer gestured to some empty mats along the cave’s left side. We listened to the silent directive and got the coughing old man, the younger one, and Kuma all settled on their own mats. I wanted to tell the healer what was wrong with them but I didn’t doubt that she already had a decent idea from our entrance. Nor was I sure I wanted to give away that I was more familiar with injuries and healing than I should be.

Harup, Jika, Prevna, and I turned to head back out of the cave but the healer suddenly pointed at me and then at an empty mat next to the others. I frowned back at her. My shoulder wound might be deep and bleeding freely after dragging the travois and my arm felt weak, but my mark wasn’t tingling. I wasn’t in danger of being on the edge of death yet and the others had more dire than me. They could die.

I gestured to the old man. “I’m fine.”

The healer cocked her head slightly to the side and then turned so that her helper could see her hands. She flashed through some rapid gestures which caused her helper to sigh slightly and set the bowl and spoon she had been using to feed the boy. Then she signed something back before rising to come over to us.

“Mirabeth says that she didn’t leave her tribe to have a brat question her judgment in her own cave.” The helper pointed to the mat. “If she says you stay, you stay or you forfeit any future healing she might provide—should you survive long enough to need it.”

Part of me was very, very tempted to say that I’d survive regardless but that put me in mind of all the patients who had made me wish I could hit them over the head with a sack full of flour, just once. The stupid, belligerent patients who acted out of fear or who simply thought they could overcome anything through sheer willpower.

I’d survive, yes, but that didn’t mean I be able to do much more than that or that I wouldn’t lose part of my mobility if I let the knife wound heal on its own.

Prevna caught my gaze as she silently asked if I’d be fine and I gave her the tiniest of nods back. Then I went and sat on the mat. I could keep the memories at bay long enough to get healed and get out back into the fresh air. I could see through the cave entrance, nothing was blocking my exit.

The others left and my eyes narrowed at the way Jika stepped up next to Prevna but I shifted my attention back to the helper as she knelt down in front of me to ask, “Injuries? Or sickness?”

So she didn’t have the healer’s eye then, but at the same time I didn’t see much point in keeping my silence. At least about the obvious things.

“Knife wound to my left shoulder blade. Shallower cut across the middle of my back.” I indicated the others. “He has puncture wound to his stomach and a fever. The old man won’t stop coughing when he’s not practically unconscious and Kuma has two long cuts: one down her upper arm and the other across her chest.”

“I see.” The woman rose and left to relay the information to the healer.

Kuma leaned closer to me from where she sat on the mat to my left and spoke softly, “Mirabeth might speak with her hands but they’re all sharp tongued. There’s a good number of us who would be dead without Mirabeth’s skill though and a few went onto their second life because they thought she wouldn’t make good on her threat.”

I blinked at that. “She let them die?”

“Didn’t lift a finger as one bled out at her feet and another wasted away.” Kuma looked grim. “Said that if she wanted to be beholden to fools she’d have stayed with her tribe. Desai, that’s her helper, and Dahrii knocked out anyone who tried to attack her for refusing. Once those people were refused healing as well everyone got the message.”

The insanity of it was like realizing that black handed healers had respect and privilege that tribe healers could only dream of all over again. Except, instead of being born in the Seedling Palace and marked by the Beloved, Mirabeth had gone in the opposite direction and left all privilege and respect behind to carve her own place out with her own two hands. A place where her skill demanded those that needed her respect her anyways.

I bit back a laugh. To think, she could have had everything she wanted—people listening to her every word, authority and importance—if she had just been willing to throw the tribe away. But then she would have had to give up Father and she craved the tribe’s high opinion too much to give that up either.

I watched as the pair worked. Mirabeth finished up with the broken leg patient before coming over to start checking on the young man first while Desai went back to feeding the weak boy. The old familiarity of their action didn’t take long to become painful, so I switched my focus to the area outside the cave.

There wasn’t much to see other than the tents and a low banked cook fire and the trees beyond the outcropping, but paying attention to that was preferable if I didn’t want to suddenly be in another time and place. It also helped me catch when Mishtaw, Eliss, Petra, and Creed arrived.

Dahrii stopped them like he had with us, just beyond where I could see out the cave entrance, but his short questions had noticeably less effect against two whisper women and their fire starters.

“We have no injured your healer needs to tend to, but I do need to speak to my apprentice, so step aside.” Mishtaw.

She appeared a moment later so I got the impression Dahrii had done as she demanded. Her gaze swept over the camp until it landed on me. “We need to talk.” Then her attention shifted past me and I turned slightly to see that Mirabeth had held out a staying hand. “If she needs tending you can have her back once you are finished with the others. I promise you, I don’t want her short sighted behavior to cause any more complications either.”

Mirabeth stayed tense for another moment before she relented. The goddess’s authority, even only hinted at through black lips, always won.

I rose and went to Mishtaw. She gave me an expectant look so I answered, “Two knife wounds to my back. Prevna’s in the guest tent, she didn’t get that injured.”

“And why was escorting their injured through death bringer territory a brilliant idea?”

“They would have died otherwise. If they had stayed in the camp.”

Mishtaw pinched her nose and let out a long breath before she turned to direct the others. “Eliss, Prevna’s in that large tent. Petra, Creed, help where you can after you take a breather. You deserve it.”

Mishtaw led me over to the outcropping’s point. It was as secluded as we were going get without wandering off to some random part of the forest. At least I’d have the beautiful scenery of the forest covering the mountain below us all the way down to the Cut while she chewed me out.

She sat on one side of the point with her feet dangling over the edge and I copied her on the other side. I could tell that she had taken the time to clean up a little but there were still splatters of blood staining her clothes and she hadn’t escaped injury either. Her neck was bandaged, but she was wearing a similar outfit to the one that the annoying whisper woman and her firestarter had been wearing. In fact, the whole group wore similar gear. I made a mental note ask her how they had gotten the new outfits and why they would have changed, but I knew this wasn’t the time for it.

Mishtaw gave me a sidelong look. “You always have a reason. So explain what happened and why. In detail.”

I complied. From our short time among the Red Hand band to deciding to bring the injured to the healer to how the journey actually went for us to arrive here.

Mishtaw started flipping her knife with one hand while I spoke and she kept the idle motion going as she asked, “Have you ever wondered why we didn’t just pull all the fish into the shadows? Why we bothered fighting them?”

I knew the answer I had wasn’t the one she was probing for but having any kind of answer was still better than none. “There wasn’t shadows near the beach and you’d have to be touching one to pull it into the shadows which would be difficult while they were trying to kill us. And most whisper women can’t bring a lot of people with them through the shadows over and over again.”

“True.” She caught the knife and pointed it at me. “What about the Envoy then? We were surrounded by trees and there were some decent shadows. Why didn’t I just grab him and abandon him in the shadow paths? Why let him beat us bloody in a fight if I could have ended it in a moment?”

My lips pressed together and she took that small tell of frustration as answer enough. “The answer is that we could. We could grab anyone and anything we wanted and leave them to rot in the shadow paths, just like the death bringers decided to use their knives and their spears and kill everyone outside of their band that they could.”

“But that—” I cut myself off as the point she was making settled in.

Mishtaw sheathed her knife and nodded. “Exactly. But the death bringers infringed on the goddess’s domain by killing. That man you left in the shadow paths might have been alive when you left him but do you really think anyone can really live in there? No food, no water, no way to escape?”

My heart sank. “But She hasn’t punished me.”

“There are stories.” Mishtaw tilted her head back to take in the sky. “Some whisper women take the possibility of accidentally overstepping into the goddess’s domain as reason enough to never use the shadow paths as a potential weapon; they think we should only use our boons as they are explicitly stated to be of use and that using the goddess’s boon to kill is a special kind of sacrilege. Opal, the whisper woman who found you in the forest, is among them.”

I prompted, “And others?”

“I’ve never seen it, but it’s said that the Commander, as the Head of the Peacekeepers, is allowed to use the boon in that way as a special form of execution. Other than that we all know better than to risk the goddess’s wrath and there are bits and scrapes of stories from when the whisper women were newly formed and the goddess was so enamored with Her Beloved that She didn’t pay attention to anything else. Those warn off even the most determined whisper women—those and the few who were lost to the shadows who managed to crawl back out.”

“Tell me.”

Mishtaw’s lips quirked up just a little at my insistence on hearing the stories. She knew I had a weakness for them. “Back in those early days its said that the whisper women were dropping enemies in the shadows left and right, but their solution quickly caught up with them. We can’t know for sure but its said that the trapped dead became ghosts that dragged the whisper women who trapped them into the shadows so they could never leave and became ghosts in turn. There’s also a bit that hints that somehow the dead were messing with the paths, making it so whisper women would step out a different path than they intended or so they couldn’t create paths at all. Somehow they managed to clear them out and we don’t use that method anymore.”

I wished there wasn’t such huge holes in the story but we couldn’t even be sure if the facts Mishtaw was telling me were correct, not with how long it had been since that time. “And people really escaped after being abandoned to the shadows?”

Mishtaw lifted one hand. “We have record of five. Mostly whisper women and a seedling who had the been but accidentally got separated on someone else’s path. The last was a man who disappeared again less than a day later. He got called the Ghost.” She paused, becoming more somber. “None of them were the same when they returned and not one would go into the specifics of what they experienced. Again, these were all before my time, but it’s said that they became…tethered to the shadow they escaped from. That they wouldn’t want to go too far from it despite the horror they must have gone through to escape.”

We sat in silence as what she said sank in.

Finally, I asked, “Do you think I’ll have a ghost haunting the shadow paths now?”

She sighed again. “Let’s hope not.”