Not the feeling of eyes on the back of my neck.
I have only one aim in mind, and that is to find yarrow as swiftly as I can. The fevers in the village have outpaced our stores, and it is imperative that I find more so that we can make more of the salve that has been easing symptoms. My mind’s eye is full of labored breath and red flushes on cheeks, and sparkling, distant gazes. We could lose some of our community tonight, if I do not hurry.
At last, the close set trees give way to a clearing, and I see it: an abundance of yarrow, like lace dotting the high grasses. I drop to my knees, weak with relief, and begin to harvest with swift and grateful fingers.
I reach for a stalk. Then another. Then another.
I stop.
I turn.
It has penetrated my notice at last, that feeling of being watched. I do notthinkI will find someone standing at the edge of the clearing behind me, Iknowit. I know it as surely and effortlessly as I know my own name. The knowledge doesn’t frighten me. I have never met anyone or anything in these woods that I need fear, and so it is only with curiosity that I turn and gaze upon him for the first time.
He is a stranger, in every sense.
His shape is that of a man—a young, broad shouldered man with dark, wide-set eyes and a square jaw. He wears a loose white shirt, open at the collar, and a pair of worn, brown woolen breeches. His feet are bare, and oddly long. Even in stillness, he is graceful.
It is in this grace, in my awareness of it, that the strangeness unfurls itself. I know before he moves what his stride will be like—loping, easy, silent—and this knowledge helps me to know that I am not looking at a human man. Not a true one. Whoever this stranger is who looks so calmly at me, he is not a man as I have known men.
And I have known men. Known them and found myself quickly bored of them.
I rise slowly to my feet. Still, I am not frightened. As I survey the figure, I twirl the stalk in my hand thoughtfully. The stalk… the yarrow…
The fever.
Fear rips through me then, and I chastise myself for being so easily distracted from my purpose. It does not matter who this figure is. I have no time to spare for him.
“You do not ask who I am.” His voice is melodic, a song at once familiar and strange.
“I care not who you are.”
“How can that be so? I am a stranger on your land. Surely you wish to know who I am?”
“Whether I do or do not wish to know does not matter now, sir,” I say, keeping my head bent. “I must hurry.”
“In what must you hurry?”
“I am gathering yarrow. I must gather as much as I can find.”
“To what end?”
“To create a salve that can put an end to the fever.” Even as I say it, I feel a bead of sweat trickle the length of my neck, and down into my blouse. A frisson of fear skitters through me. It cannot be sickness, surely, only the heat of the summer, the weariness of the long hours.
“I can help you.”
The words catch on the night, hanging over me, and I still my busy hands. “Why would you help me?”
There is a pause. “You ask why?”
“Yes.” And because I wish to accuse him, I raise my eyes to him. “You do not know me, and you do not know the fever of which I speak, for if you did you would turn tail and flee. You have no reason to care, or to help me. And so, yes. I ask why.”
The man has closed half the distance between us, and yet there was no rustle of grass beneath his feet. He is just as still as before, but now I can see into his eyes, down, down…
I pull my face away and will my gaze to the frothy white bloom of yarrow still clutched in my hand, waiting for the answer I have compelled from him. And after a moment, he gives it to me.
“I can feel your distress. It has overrun this place, tangling with the air and clinging to the moisture from the sea. It drags and claws at me. I wish to alleviate it. Will you deny me this wish? For it will ease your suffering as well as mine.”
All my life, I have known if someone is lying to me. Even as a child, I could hear it at once, the sharp sour note of it on the tongue, or else see the shadow of it crouching in the pupil of the eye. It is part of my spirit gift, for the essence to reveal itself even when the mortal form tries to hide it. Now, though I know it a risk, I look the man in the eye again. This time,bracing for it, I do not fall. Instead, I stare, as though into a mirror, at a reflection of my own pain. It throbs in my head and in his eyes with the same, aching rhythm, like our pain shares a single heartbeat.
