It is betrayal poison. The wound came from her sister. Put her in the stream.
She’s freezing and shaking from fever. She’ll die if I put her in the stream. Isika frowned. Jabari was angry. Why?
“What’s going on?” That was Ben. Isika tried to open her eyes.
“The bird thinks we need to lay her in the stream to see if she can gain some healing from the earth. But she’s shaking with cold and the stream is freezing.”
“Could you try to heal her, Jabari?” Isika heard Brigid ask. Brigid!
“Me? I don’t have a healing gift.”
“I think you might, if you tried it. You can do many things that Isika can do. Why don’t you try that forehead thing that she does. Draw the poison out through your body.
“It’s better than nothing, Yab,” Ivy said. “If it doesn’t work, we should consider the stream.”
“I’d rather try anything but the stream,” Jabari said. “Here, Brigid, support her so she can sit up.”
Isika felt her arms and legs being rearranged, and she smelled the orange bright scent that Brigid carried with her. She smiled again.
“What are you smiling about, dear one?” Jabari whispered from somewhere in front of her. “I’m going to put my forehead on yours and try an Isika-kind of healing, okay? Don’t be startled.”
After a moment, Isika felt the slight pressure of Jabari’s head against her own, and smelled his skin and firewood smell. Then a rush of warmth as pain left her and her arm ceased its throbbing. After a few moments she opened her eyes, feeling curiously light and not as cold, but very sleepy. She smiled into Jabari’s face as he leaned back to look at her.
“Brigid smells like oranges and you have a nice voice, all deep and growly,” she said. “Did you remember to send the poison into the earth, where it can’t hurt you?”
Jabari’s eyes filled with sudden tears, and she put a hand up to his face.
“Don’t cry,” she told him. “You did it perfectly.” But the world was growing foggy again and she fell into a deep sleep.
After that, Jabari spent time drawing poison out of her each evening. She faded in and out of sleep, sometimes having energy to talk, but usually not. It began to feel as though she and Jabari had traveled on Wind forever. She knew her horse was tired from having two riders, but he was trying to hide it out of concern for her.
She had dreams of Aria coming toward her with a sword, and she woke up from those dreams crying. It felt strange for everyone to be so worried about her. She was used to being worried about others.
Then they were thundering into the Karee camp and Jabari didn’t stop to say hello, didn’t stop galloping until he rode Wind directly to the healer’s tent and jumped from the horse with Isika still in his arms. She noticed this vaguely from the strange place she had retreated to, a garden within her own mind.
The healer came. Isika heard him make a long hiss.
“Your whisperer is dying,” he said.
“Do you think I don’t know that?” Jabari asked in the angry voice he seemed to be using a lot lately. “Can you save her?”
“She needs to get back to her lands,” the healer replied. “She’s tied to them and it’s breaking her to try to heal so far away.”
“She won’t make it there.”
“I can’t do anything for her here.”
Brigid started to weep. Isika heard Ben shouting.
“Please,” Jabari asked, and he sounded broken. Isika had never heard his voice sound like that before. “There must be something.”
“There is one thing, but you must know that it is very dangerous.”
“Danger doesn’t matter. She is dying.”
“I can put her into a deep sleep so that her body barely takes any energy at all. She will not wake until she is back in your land and has recovered enough to break out of this sleep. But if she doesn’t recover quickly, she may never wake again. It is a huge risk.” He paused. From far away, Isika heard his next words. “But you are right, if I do nothing she will not live long enough to get home. She could die tonight.”
From her far away place, Isika pondered dying. She would see Nenyi all the time. But Auntie would be sad. She heard Ben and Jabari coming near. Someone gripped her hand for a moment, whispering to her. It was Ben. Jabari put his face very near hers. Isika couldn’t open her eyes to see him but she could hear him and smell his woodsmoke smell.
“Do you want to do this, dearest one? Did you hear?” Isika gave the tiniest nod, and Ben sighed.
“She hears and understands. I can tell by her music. Isika, do you want to do this? Do you want the healer to put you to sleep?”
Isika nodded again.
Ben hugged her. “Get better, sister,” he said. “I need you.” Then he stood up and Isika heard his soft footsteps as he moved away. Beside her, Isika could still hear Jabari’s shaky breath.
“I love you, Isika,” he whispered. “I would give you my own breath if I could. Stay with me, okay? Don’t leave me here alone. It took me so long to find you.”
I love you, too, she told him, but the words couldn’t reach him. And then there was nothing.
* * *
The next time she opened her eyes, she thought she might be dead. It was so bright and clean. No dust, no desert. But no, this was her room at Auntie Teru and Uncle Dawit’s house. She smiled and closed her eyes again, falling back into sleep.
The next time she woke, she was being carried. She peeled her eyes open. It was Abbas.
“There you are, little one,” he said. “We think you’ll get better faster if you lie in the grass each day. The healers have been feeding you broth to sustain you, but you need to wake up more, eat good food. Come on, little one, Auntie is going crazy. So is Jerutha.”
He lowered her gently to the grass, and Auntie tucked a blanket under her head. Isika ran her hands over the springy blades of grass, and they curled around her fingers like they had missed her. She felt so much happiness in the life song of Maween that she could have cried, but instead she looked at Auntie and smiled. Auntie burst into tears.
Isika lay in Auntie’s garden for hours, every moment that she could. As she grew stronger, she ate Auntie’s soups and even bits of flatbread. She ran her hands over the grass just to see flowers spring up at her touch. Then she could sit, and later walk, but she hadn’t left the house or seen anyone besides her family, including Jerutha and Abbas.
“Where is Jabari?” she asked one day. She remembered asking when she first woke up, but she couldn’t remember the answer.
“Doing some recovery of his own,” Auntie said. “He nearly killed himself trying to heal you as you traveled home.”
“What?” Isika asked, terrified.
“Don’t fret. It’s why I didn’t tell you earlier. He’s doing much better now, walking and eating again, like you. But from what I understand, the palace servants have discovered him trying to leave the palace to come to you a few times, crawling down corridors when he is too weak to walk.”
Isika grinned, but for some reason there were tears in her eyes.
“Auntie,” she whispered, “he told me he loved me.”
Auntie snorted. “He’s a dimwit if he just now realized that. Do you love him too?”
Isika thought. “I think so,” she said. “Remind me what that feels like again.”
“Oh, no no, I’m not telling you that. You need to figure that out.”
She thought, by the tears in her eyes and the way her heart sped up, that she had already figured it out. She sent him a note.
“Do you feel like walking to the market tree? It might do us some good.”
He came for her the next day, leaning on a cane. She was shocked by the sight of him, almost as shocked as she had been the first time she saw her own face in the mirror. The two of them were a sight, all angles and hollows now. Jabari even had a few silver hairs around his face. But he nearly took her breath away. He was so beautiful. She remembered him behind her on the horse, hol
ding her all that time. She swallowed.
“Ready?” he asked.
He walked slowly, so she matched her pace to his and tucked her arm under his elbow.
She didn’t know what to say. “I’m so sorry,” she settled on finally. “I’m sorry that healing me made you so sick.”
“It was an honor,” he told her. “But the earth doesn’t heal me the way it does you, so it’s taking me a bit longer to get my strength back, even though your wounds were worse.”
Isika glanced down at her shoulder and thigh reflexively. She bore scars in both places—thin silver lines that didn’t seem like they would ever go away.
They walked in silence for a while. Isika tried to ignore the stares from the Maweel they passed.
“They are only worried about us,” Jabari said, when she looped her ser over her head to gain more privacy.
“That’s what I don’t like,” she told him. “I’m supposed to be queen someday, after all. It feels bad to have them see me like this.”
They had reached the tree, and Jabari turned to look at her, his face drawn and exhausted.
“Betrayal poison kills people,” he said, “with or without sword wounds. Betrayal of a family member is almost unthinkable. They are not thinking of you as weak. They are thinking that you are the most magical creature they could imagine and that they would do anything to offer themselves to you. So would I.”
Isika smiled into his lovely, tired face. The line of his jaw, the deeper shadows under his eyes, his skin, the same dark, dark brown as the tall tree above them.
“Let’s not climb,” she said. “Let’s just crawl into that seat right there.” She pointed at a crook in the tree that was low to the ground.
“Thank you for pretending that not climbing is a choice for me right now,” Jabari said, smiling. “But is there room there for two of us?”
“There is. We may have to sit close together. But we were on that horse all the way home.”
“We were,” he said. She couldn’t look at him.
They did sit very close, legs and arms touching, and leaned their backs against the tree. It was just high enough that their legs were off the ground. Isika closed her eyes and felt the tree’s life force flowing into her cells, buzzing and flickering behind her eyelids. She waited for the pictures she needed to see, and she wasn’t disappointed. There they were—Herrith and Aria in the garden, sitting on a swing, Gavi hovering in the background. She couldn’t hear them, but they were whole and well, and outside, not in a cell somewhere. She heard music and the sound of Nenyi’s voice, and she may have drifted off to sleep, because when she opened her eyes, it seemed like a lot of time had passed. Jabari was staring at her. She smiled at him sleepily.
“You have such a nice growly voice,” she said, and she put her hand on his face. His skin was warm beneath her fingers. He stared at her and then moved toward her and kissed her. His lips were warm and soft against hers. She sighed and leaned into him, kissing him back. Then she pulled away, but not too far.
“You told me something when I was very sick,” she said, feeling shy. She looked down and caught his hands in hers. He wove his fingers between hers and held tight but still didn’t speak. She went on. “I couldn’t talk, so I couldn’t answer.”
She glanced up. His eyes.
“I want to answer now,” she said. “I love you, too, Yab. I think I always have.”
He grinned then, the huge white grin that split his face, transforming it. “Of course you do,” he said. “Look at me. Who wouldn’t?” And then he leaned forward and kissed her again.
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What is the most important ingredient for a book’s success? Besides, of course, the book itself?
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It’s what you, the Reader, says about it. Social proof. Reviews.
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When people are out there, in the wilderness of the book jungle, looking for something to read, the main question they ask is, “Have other people read this? Did they like it?”
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So if this book is your kind of book, and you think it might be someone else’s kind of book, I will be over the moon if you leave a review on whatever site feeds you your books. Reviews can be the key to a book’s success. Thank you!
Acknowledgments
First of all, thank you to you, dear reader. Thank you for loving Isika and Benayeem and all the rest, for following their story and being so supportive along the way!
I’m lifted and loved by my family and community as I write these stories. Thank you Chinua. You are my one true love for life, and I am so thankful that you love me and this series.
Susan Offner, what an editor you are. Thank you!
Kai, Kenya, Leafy, Solo and Isaac, I love you more every day. Thank you for being my kids and friends.
Rowan and Mom, thanks for lending me your eyes and finding the mistakes. Mom and Dad, you are more supportive than I deserve. Thank you.
Tj and Mark Chapman, Diane Brodeur, Brittani Truby, Ami Thompson, Rowan Keyzer, Alicia Wiggin, Annie Laurie Nichols, and Jessie John, you are still magical creatures. People like you are the reason God made jellyfish. I pray that you will be surprised by sunsets and unexpected beauty. Thank you for being my rockstar patrons.
Journey Mama, readers, I love you so much. Thanks for being such a kind group of friends. I couldn’t do this without you.
Shekina Community and Pai Community. I have found a home. Thank you for letting me live with you.
Invisible, blazing, loving Creator, you sustain each breath of mine. I am endlessly thankful.
About the Author
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Bio
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Rachel Devenish Ford is the wife of one Superstar Husband and the mother of five incredible children. Originally from British Columbia, Canada, she spent seven years working with street youth in California before moving to India to help start a meditation center in the Christian tradition. She can be found eating street food or smelling flowers in many cities in Asia. She currently lives in Northern Thailand, inhaling books, morning air, and seasonal fruit.
Works by Rachel Devenish Ford:
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The Eve Tree
A Traveler's Guide to Belonging
Trees Tall As Mountains: The Journey Mama Writings- Book One
Oceans Bright With Stars: The Journey Mama Writings- Book Two
A Home as Wide as the Earth: The Journey Mama Writings: Book Three
World Whisperer : World Whisperer Book 1
Guardian of Dawn : World Whisperer Book 2
Shaper’s Daughter: World Whisperer Book 3
Reviews
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Recommendations and reviews are such an important part of the success of a book. If you enjoyed this book, please take the time to leave a review.
Don't be afraid of leaving a short review! Even a couple lines will help and will overwhelm the author with waves of gratitude.
Contact
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Email: [email protected]
Blog: http://journeymama.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/racheldevenishford
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/journeymama
Instagram: http://instagram.com/journeymama
Also by Rachel Devenish Ford
Rachel has spent twelve years writing about life on her blog, Journey Mama. She has collected the best of these posts in the Journey Mama Writings series. If you love to know everything you wanted to know about authors and their children, you might like The Journey Mama Writing Series.
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Book One: Trees Tall as Mountains
Book Two: Oceans Bright with Stars
Book Three: A Home as Wide as the Earth
If you like literary fiction, you might like A Traveler's Guide to Belonging.
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"A beautiful, beautiful book." -Sara J. Henry, Award-winning author of Learning to Swim
Twenty-four-year-old Timothy is far from his home country of Canada when his new wife dies in childbirth. Stunned, he finds himself alone with his newborn son in the mountains of North India and no idea of what it means to be a father. He begins a journey through India with his baby, seeking understanding for loss and life and the way the two intertwine.
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Set among the stunning landscapes, train tracks, and winding alleys of India, A Traveler's Guide to Belonging is a story about fathers and sons, losing and finding love, and a traveler's quest for meaning.
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