Unexpected Inspiration - Short Stories

"A Glimpse of the Past"

A telepath's magic forces her to relive one of her own memories. 

(This started as a flashback scene in an early draft of one of the books. I discarded it in the next draft, so it's no longer canon to the series, but it's cute and sweet and romantic and I'm glad I was struck by the idea to edit it into a story.)  

Blythe scrubbed at the soil caught under her nails until they were as clean and neat as she could get them in the poor light. She hadn't intended to work in her window garden, but she needed the familiar comfort of cool dirt and growing life beneath her hands. Etri had left to do... something tonight, something he'd kept vague, and she was alternating between annoyance at being told just enough to make her fret and aggravation that if it was that important, he should have taken her with him. If Etri wasn't telling her, it was because it was dangerous, and if it was dangerous, it was her job to watch his back. He'd done his horribly annoying vanishing thing where she looked away for five seconds to check her watch and when she turned back to ask him a question, he was out of sight. One of these days she was going to tie a length of string around his wrist and keep him near her like he was an ill-trained puppy. Try to see him slip away when he was connected to her!

Gardening had calmed her as it always did, yet a strange feeling still fogged her mind. She could have sworn she'd been somewhere different a moment ago. At the same time it was so right to be repotting her aloe in the new yellow pot Sol had bought her to replace the cracked one he'd accidentally knocked over. As she reached for a towel to dry her hands, she glanced out the window above the sink. Lantern light glimmered off a thin layer of freshly-fallen snow. It was pretty and it probably brightened up the wagon considering she'd been too stupid to remember to light a lamp.

Snow... that couldn't be right. There hadn't been snow for months...

A knock on her door echoed loudly in the dark even though it was hardly louder than a tap. Everything always seemed so muffled and quiet in winter... or was it spring? She tried to ignore the lingering disorientation and walked over to see who needed her at this hour. Etri stood on her doorstep, his head bowed as he wrung his hands together. "I need your help, Blade. I have been poisoned."

Blythe was about to chew him out for disappearing earlier when his words stopped her cold, half out of fear and half out of recognition. She'd heard this before. She could remember standing here with fear eating at her heart, she could remember taking him by the arm and tugging him inside out of weather, she could remember the way he looked at her with faith in his pale eyes when she began to heal him. She tried to take a few deep breaths to clear her mind and found her body wouldn't listen. Instead she watched herself lead Etri into the wagon and hang his wet coat to dry by the stove, just as she knew she would. She knew she would because she already had.

She had no idea how it happened, but somehow she'd inadvertently managed to read her own memories. Wonderful. She knew from her training that she could only sit back and let this play out until she snapped out of it or the memory ran its course, so she hunkered down in her own head to watch. When she was back in her current time, she was going to give herself a stern talking to because this was not okay for a fully trained healer to do. This was an amateur mistake. She hadn't screwed up telepathy and memory reading in years and never her own.

"What do you mean you've been poisoned?" past-Blythe asked, oblivious to her later self being carried along for the ride.

"I touched a trapped window while I was attempting to break into the home of a merchant. Normally I avoid such things, but this was a type I had not previously come across. It contained two kinds of needles instead of one. I caught sight of the other and disabled that which I recognized. Too late I realized it had a secondary mechanism. It was not the paralyzing type, which was the one I disabled. I believe that one was intended to incapacitate a thief long enough for the authorities to arrive, in which case the needle which pricked me would have allowed the thief to give away why they were there. I did not spring the first trap, so I was able to get in and then out again with the information I needed. The house did in fact belong to-"