The Healer by Becca St. John

Author:Becca St. John [John, Becca St.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Winterbourne Farm Publishing
Published: 2013-11-21T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5 ~ COAL MAKER’S HUT

“You will come with me!”

The sleeping beast had woken and now she must deal with it. The fault was hers.

With a heartfelt sigh, Veri glanced over her shoulder at the huge mass of a man, slumped against the paltry doorway of their shelter, skin as clammy and white as the belly of a fish. She was amazed that the simple hut didn’t give under his weight.

Their shelter, an empty charcoal maker’s hut, was no more than a bundle of reeds roped together at the top, splayed at the bottom, with a modest framed door. Far too small for the man to stand within, barely room for his pallet and the small rock- rimmed fire. As it was, he had to lie in a curl along the wall of the hut, to fit without his legs dangling over the threshold.

A gentle rain fell behind him. He’d only been off his pallet for the breadth of time it took her to toss out his old bedding and arrange the fresh, which was no time at all. She’d had the new bedding ready before he had woken. Still, here he was, drooping like a water- starved leaf, demanding they pick-up and travel for days.

Obviously, size and age were no measure of the ability to reason.

Patiently, Veri corrected him, as she wished his people would return to take him. “You are going nowhere.”

Weak though he was, he managed to show affront. “You are a slip of a girl to be telling me what to do.”

“Aye,” she agreed, for it was so, “a slip of a girl who has not been shot with arrows nor hit with great chunks of rock that knocked sense straight out of me.”

His scowl reappeared.

Leaning over from where she knelt before the fire, Veri grabbed a cloth, dipped it in a basin of water and wrung it out, giving herself time to think. She was so small and he so big, how was she to get him to do what she commanded?

“I have to return to Oakland.” The whole structure shuddered when he slumped down further, speaking to himself more than her. “Yesterday was too late.”

“Oakland.” Veri breathed. He’d talked of Oakland incessantly. Whispered of it, shouted of it, in his dreams and again upon waking. Before he had the strength to move at all, he had told her of his home, the places he’d been, the ways of others.

He didn’t know, nor could she tell him, that his people were coming for him. Rose and Kenneth promised a message would be sent to Oakland. Some wayfarer spotted a wounded knight in a coal maker’s hut.

A child sharing that hut, such as he knew her to be, could not possibly know this.

Frustrated, she knelt beside him, mopped the sweat from his forehead. “No importance can be met by a dead man or by one who will never find health again. You should still be abed, allow your wounds and your head time to mend.”

“There is no time for that!” Impatiently, he grabbed her wrist, “I must be home.

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