“Curious about what?” Loclen broke into our private exchange with more than a hint of frustration sharping her tone.

Ressia straightened behind me, the smile still in her voice. “Why I can talk to you without acting like a whipped dog, and you don’t snub us on reflex.” She shifted and drew our attention to where Morgan was laughing with the whisper women he was marking. “You can tell the dynamics are different here.”

I watched as Loclen’s eyebrows drew together and Breck began to catalog the dozen different warm interactions happening between healers and whisper women around us. I doubted they ever really had cause to notice healers as people rather than as an unsavory part of the background before. Didn’t ever feel the need to notice every little nuance in an interaction to make sure things went smoothly, which was why they didn’t immediately notice when that underlying tension was nearly absent.

I turned back to Ressia. “How?”

She scoffed lightly as she waved one hand. “I’m hardly the person to explain the entirety of it, though”—here she smiled at me again—“come to the healers' nests and we could try to delve into it.” Ressia glanced back over at her cousin, proud and satisfied. “The simplest answer, I guess, is that we’re family here, the whisper women and fire starters and us. Oh, and our marks.” She held her gray marked hands.

I resisted the urge to rub my head while I tried to parse through all the questions that came tumbling out. Part of me was still freaking out that Loclen and Breck had learned about my blessing while another had the idiot urge to stare at the sight of a male healer laughing with whisper women, and the remaining part of me was struggling with the reality altering information Ressia was off-handedly sharing.

Unsurprisingly, Breck beat me to asking a question. “Marks?”

“We’re not called the Black Handed Healers for nothing.” Ressia considered the marks on her hands. “Gray might’ve been more accurate, but I think that reminded people too much of shamble men or the causalities that could occur if we built up too much life.” She shrugged and dismissed the thought. “Regardless, think of these marks as a kind of Carver’s Maze, except instead of holding the body in place while letting the soul through, they keep us from giving or receiving too much life. The Beloved really does an excellent job, doesn’t she?”

Loclen choked on the breath she sucked in and I was too preoccupied with the feeling that my brain might explode to pay any attention to Breck over her sputtering. Nevermind the fact that the Beloved would have had to touch Ressia to mark her or that the healer would have needed to be granted hours of her time to receive them, if the Beloved had truly given the marks then that meant the healers, of all people, were sanctioned by the goddess.

Our goddess.

Who was mainly associated with death.

Who forbade dancing and singing and who had myths upon legends that featured the villainous or idiotic healer.

I could understand Her leaving us—them to rot, but to approve a subset made even less sense than the fever dream of all the healers getting accepted. Unless, of course, the Beloved really was marking the healers in the Seedling Palace, because there was no way she would be expected to do all the healers everywhere.

But why would she, our founder and savior, even take up that task?

It was unconscionable. And ludicrous and went against everything I had been brought up knowing. I couldn’t—

Ressia gently chucked me under my chin. “It’s true, little seedling. The Beloved marked me. No one else can get the lines just right to have the needed effect.”

I felt myself go cold and distant as she doubled down on her assertion. It was too much, too painful to deal with the little flashes of imagination of what my life could have been if I had been born here, otherwise. I needed the cold to rein in my thoughts, focus, get my questions answered and not think until I had time to deal with what I learning on my own.

Ressia glanced over the three of us. “You all look like you just saw a shamble man cry.”

Now the fluttery feeling in my ribs was a barely noticeable itch. I was protected and safe now that it didn’t feel like I was in my body; I didn’t need to worry about the flutters erupting from my mouth if I parted my lips.

So I asked my most pressing question. “What do you mean you’re family?”

“Oh.” She blinked and dropped her hand as she collected her thoughts. “We often partner with the whisper women. It works well for those who want children and the understanding that both groups are forbidden to marry helps keep things…less complicated. If a daughter is born blessed then she joins the whisper women and we raise the rest to be healers, unless they cut off their beads, of course.” Distaste briefly passed over her face before she recovered. “Those ones tend to marry into the fire starters so, in a way, we connect everyone in the Seedling Palace into one big family. Makes it more difficult for them to treat us as tainted outsiders, too.”

“I don’t see why being family would make that much of a difference.”

Ressia looked over me before nodding slightly to herself. “No, perhaps you wouldn’t, but you can understand why being chosen would?” She made sweeping gesture that encompassed us and the crowds of whisper women. “Your Her chosen servants.” Ressia touched her chest. “We’re Her chosen healers.”

“And the fire starters?” Loclen prompted.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Ressia shrugged. “Servants of servants, more through happenstance than anything else.”

Loclen’s eyes narrowed. “The same could be said of you.”

“It could,” Ressia allowed, “but we have marks whereas their skin is blank.”

“They don’t carry as much life as you,” Loclen pressed.

Ressia chuckled though her stance seemed to have become rigid. “Perhaps, but we carry hardly more than a man thanks to our marks. Nothing worth feeling threatened over, unless you don’t trust the Beloved is able to perform her task?”

Ominous silence fell over our little group before Loclen reined in her shock enough to swallow some of her pride and snap, “Of course she is!” Then, in a quiet hiss, “You can’t just call the Beloved’s abilities into question!”

Ressia blinked blandly at her, unfazed. “I don’t believe I did.”

We stood awkwardly together for a few moments longer while I struggled to wrap my mind around everything we had been told, Breck frowned, and Loclen held her tongue despite looking cross. Ressia took pity on us and clapped her hands together to break us out of our individual reveries.

“Come, you didn’t find your way here to discuss healers and social dynamics. Enjoy yourselves!” Ressia gestured to the fights and games and merriment happening behind us all throughout the arena.

Breck didn’t need any further encouragement. She set off down a pathway leading to the nearest fighting platforms and the group of red marked whisper women waiting for their turn on a wide platform there. Loclen drew in a fortifying breath before turning to me.

“You owe me a game.”

I didn’t want to face her. Didn’t want to be in the arena any longer, but she grabbed my wrist and started walking. My feet wouldn’t listen to me, not that they really felt like they were mine in that moment, but they knew as soon as she started pulling that it was walk or fall over. So, they took one step and then another.

Healers being chosen by the goddess; accepted because one new mark and some excuse of family. I had had those things. Sure it had been a bless mark on my thigh and a barely acknowledged connection through my father, but I had had those things and it hadn’t made one storming bit of difference.

My jaw clenched tight.

No, that wasn’t quite correct.

I had managed to also be ostracized by the outsiders.

The cold in my chest and throat felt brittle and sharp, like ice formed in a sudden freeze. It wasn’t fair to know that I supposedly had all the makings to have had what the Black Handed Healers had, but the pieces refused to fit correctly. To know that they got to work with the plants and their mysteries every day, heal and treat and create without even a hint of the anxiety she and I had to endure every day about taking on too much life. They were tolerated—accepted to an extent I had never dared to dream, but I could have had it too if only I had been born in a tree.

Loclen sat on a cushion and I copied her. Dimly, I recognized we were on a platform where a handful of different games were being played, but the one in between us was circles and stones. Simple, quick and easy. Six circles drawn on a side, two larger ovals capping off the two columns, and four stones to a circle to start off with. Whoever got more stones into their oval won. I had played it with the twins when I would watch them when we were younger, before they learned to completely keep their distance. I had always won then.

Loclen picked up the fourth pile of stones in on her side and then dropped one at a time into the piles in front of it until the last landed in her cache. She got to go again. She picked up her third pile and moved around the drawn board until she ran out of stones. I picked up a random pile and let the stones fall. I didn’t reach my cache. She huffed, giving me a dark look, and went again. On my next turn I got a single stone in my cache after picking up another random pile.

I didn’t care about winning now. There were more important things to think about. Like the fact that the girl sitting across from me and the one barely holding her own against a whisper woman playing with her knew about my blessing. Of course, given how healers apparently were treated and that other whisper woman was accepted despite how close her blessing was to healing, perhaps not being about to die wasn't as dire of a blessing as I initially thought. But I still didn’t like that the knowledge was going to spread without my consent, and I doubted everyone would be understanding. Can’t die, has a trial mark, and refuses to work with anyone? That was a threat if I ever heard one.

And yet the thought of swallowing my pride and taking on the risk of listening to Jin sickened my stomach. Others would be more apt to try to use me once they knew, and I could do things just fine on my own. Not to mention that the thing I had really wanted was staring at me in the face now, as if it had always been an option if I had only known to look. Some errant part of me was ignoring my lack of beads and trying to devise ways the goddess might be convinced to exchange the bless mark on my thigh for dark gray lines on my hands. It was idiotic and futile and desperate, but cold and distant as I felt, I could hardly feel the pain of dragging myself through the hopeless options.

“You’re not trying,” Loclen snapped.

I scooped the stones I had somehow accumulated in my cache and dumped them in hers. “Does that make things clear for you?”

Then I got up and left. I don’t really remember making my way back through the arena or passing by Ressia or climbing down the braided needles, though my right ankle kept twinging after from the necessary fall at the end of it, so I figured I hadn’t suddenly discovered how to walk through shadows to my hidden platform. I slept there that night, using my arm as a pillow, still numb and distant but clear headed enough to know I wouldn’t get any sleep if I went back to the housing area.

When morning came I was gritty-eyed and stiff, and Fellen hadn’t magically appeared to help pull me out of the weird state I was in like she had done in the past. Instead, I had the debatable comfort of her mantra and a secondhand ambition I had clung to all my life. The constants that wouldn’t leave even when I ripped out everything else.

I couldn’t be a healer. I knew that. Knew it even before I had cut off my healer’s beads and denied myself the chance to retain even a sliver of the practice. Knew that it had never really been an option ever since my mark bloomed on my thigh a few days after I was born.

From that point on, I could only become a whisper woman. There wasn’t any other choice, no matter what I might want, and if I was forced into the option than I needed to at least act on the choice of what kind of whisper woman I would be.

But that had never really been a choice either.

I had to be the best.

Nothing else was acceptable.

So, even though it seemed like everything had changed last night, nothing really had. The Black Handed Healers’ state of affairs didn’t matter. My cohort’s knowledge about me didn’t matter. My pride and feelings didn’t matter. None of that changed what I needed to do.

The cold distance made everything easy to calculate out.

Winning and proving my worth mattered. Discipline mattered. Becoming the best mattered.

If healers could act like the near equals of whisper women, I could play Jin’s game, prove myself, and deal with the fallout later. After all, it wasn’t like the hurt could reach me now.