Healer

Chapter 2

Hybern Castle - 6 weeks later

     Talia had started to notice a dip in the dirt floor where she lay every night. She had been held here since the attack the day she had met the shadowsinger. She tried to move around several times a  day, to keep her legs working. She spoke out loud to herself to keep her voice from disappearing.
For the first few weeks, she had wondered what their plan was for her, but lately she had accepted that they had probably forgotten her existence altogether, except to feed her slop and warm water as they did all the prisoners.

Once, she even punched her stone wall and cut up her hand to test if her healing abilities had stuck with her. They had.
Her fear had been palpable for that first little bit. Would they torture her? Would they want to know what she had been doing with him in that ruined room? They should, but by now they must have moved on to something else. Or gotten the info some other way.

She refused to believe that the winged soldier hadn't made it back to where he came from, but she knew there was a chance he hadn't. The blast had come from a substance Hybern's witches had been working on for some time. An explosive powder mixed with faebane that rendered fae powerless for a short time and blinded them by a bright white light. Talia knew she wasn't supposed to know that. That it would keep even a shadowsinger down for minutes, at least.
If they had taken him, they wouldn't be kind. 

There were worse things here, and many, many faebane chains waiting to hold down powerful arms like his. They might have killed him, but not for a while. It would have been slow.

She traced her fingers through the dust on her floor as she forced herself to imagine a different scenario, one where he ran with his men and landed back at the Night Court, hurrying to share to his high lord that there was dark magic brewing here, he had heard it from a healer. One he almost saved. She imagined what it might be like to meet him again one day. To thank him.
He had seen her, heard her, and she hadn't been treated that way in many years. Maybe ever. But she heard nothing here in the cell.

A small window about 5 feet above her head provided her with the knowledge of what time of day it was. Had allowed her to track how many days she had been here. The thick stone walls around her kept her in complete silence and she saw no one save for the hands that slid her meal across the floor twice a day. It was almost time now for her second. It came and went and she sat the dishes by the door, as always.
She felt tired, unexplainedly so. Maybe it was due to her mind running wild circles around the cell as she sat. So much of her life had been a prison.
Even as a child she had to hide, to trick her friends in to thinking she was someone else. Something else. When she ran from her mother's killers, she worked fields for farmers who lived outside of villages for a while. They let her take what she needed to eat and keep to herself.
After pushing her luck for over a year, she overheard one of the men mention that the apothecary in her village had been torched, that it had killed the family living upstairs. She had paced for hours that night, knowing that either she were in danger or she were putting the families around her in danger. Likely both. She had run then, and never looked back.

Talia squeezed her eyes shut harder as she remembered the next few nights after that, cold and unable to end the tears knowing the only family that she had ever had was gone. All of them. Talia shuddered. And then she opened her eyes. It was summer in Hybern, she shouldn't feel cold. It was dark in her cell, dark enough that she blinked a few times to be sure her eyes were truly open. She felt it again.....a cool breeze. And then someone was there. Out of the darkness, as if he appeared out of thin air, stood a tall, dark haired high fae. 

His stance was disarming, as if he were waiting to see if she started, and against her own will, she did. She fought against her instinct to scramble away and pulled herself up in to a sitting position instead. He smelled familiar. Like cool, night air and pine trees. But he had no wings and as he tentatively stepped toward her, she could tell easily that she had never seen him before.