Chapter 15: The Healing
[Eastern Meadows — Morning, Day 38]
The wallerbog hit me at ankle height, moving at full sprint, trunk extended and chittering at a frequency that registered as pure panic. It bounced off my boot, scrambled upright, grabbed the hem of my trouser leg, and pulled south with every ounce of its body weight.
Not a greeting. Not an invitation to another mud fight. Something was wrong.
I crouched. "What happened?"
Chittering. Frantic, layered, overlapping syllables in a language I couldn't speak but was learning to interpret through context and Verdant Communion. The wallerbog pointed south with its trunk, then mimicked something large falling—arms wide, body tilting, hitting the ground.
"Something fell? Something big?"
More chittering. The trunk pointed at a tree, then made a cutting motion across its own body.
"Something hurt a tree."
The wallerbog's eyes widened. It grabbed my trouser leg again and pulled.
I flew.
---
[Deep Forest — Minutes Later]
Diaval intercepted me a quarter mile south. Raven form, banking hard through the understory, matching my speed and then exceeding it—he'd always been faster in the air, and today the difference was stark. He cawed twice—the alarm call I'd learned to associate with genuine emergencies—and dove toward the forest floor.
I followed him down through the canopy. The deep forest opened into a section I'd visited three weeks ago during my early explorations—ancient groves where the trees were so old they predated the thorn wall, where the ambient magic ran thick as syrup, where tree spirits moved through the root networks like slow thoughts in a vast communal mind.
One of those spirits was dying.
It lay collapsed across the forest floor—fifteen feet of bark and root and living wood, splayed in a posture that was unmistakably wrong. Tree spirits didn't lie down. They stood, always, rooted and upright and permanent. This one had fallen, and the impact had cracked its trunk in three places, and from the largest crack—a wound that ran from what would have been its shoulder to its hip—dark sap bled in thick, slow pulses.
But the sap wasn't the worst part.
Embedded in the wound, buried deep in the tree spirit's living wood, a shard of iron protruded. Three inches of dark metal, oxidized at the edges, driven into the trunk with enough force to split bark and shatter the wood beneath. The flesh around the shard was blackened—not blight, not disease, but the specific, chemical burn of iron on fae-touched material. The burn was spreading. Radiating outward from the shard in dark veins that crept along the spirit's body like cracks in ice.
Iron poisoning. In a tree spirit. Deep in the Moors.
This wasn't an accident. Someone had attacked a Moors creature with an iron weapon.
Diaval shifted beside me. His face was tight, jaw locked, the sardonic mask stripped away entirely. "Found it ten minutes ago. The wallerbogs were screaming."
"How did iron get this deep into the Moors?"
"That's the question."
The tree spirit groaned. The sound was subterranean—felt in the chest, in the bones, in the teeth. Its knothole eyes were half-closed. Its branching arms twitched against the forest floor, weak movements that sent tremors through the root network. Other trees were responding—shifting, creaking, the forest itself reacting to the injury of one of its own.
I knelt beside the wound. The iron shard was buried at least four inches deep. The burn around it was twelve inches across and growing. If the iron stayed in, the poisoning would spread until it reached the spirit's core, and then—
"Anyone else would die touching that," Diaval said.
"Good thing I'm not anyone else."
I wrapped my hand around the iron shard and pulled.
The metal resisted. Embedded deep, bonded to the wood by the chemical reaction of iron against fae-magic-infused material. I adjusted my grip and pushed into the Iron Sovereignty—the same instinctive connection I'd used to bend Stefan's soldiers' swords. The iron responded. Not immediately—this was different from shaping manufactured steel. This shard was ragged, half-corroded, fighting me. But it yielded. The grip on the surrounding wood loosened, the metal contracted slightly, and I pulled again.
The shard came free.
The tree spirit screamed. Not the low groan of injury—a full-throated shriek of living wood being torn, a sound that shook leaves from branches for fifty yards in every direction. The wallerbogs scattered. Diaval staggered. Even the ambient magic seemed to flinch.
Dark sap gushed from the wound. I dropped the iron shard and pressed both hands against the opening.
Verdant Communion. Full power. Everything I had.
The warmth in my chest erupted outward—not a gradual push like the blighted oak, but a flood, a dam breaking, pouring down my arms and through my palms and into the wood. The tree spirit's living tissue was different from an ordinary tree—more complex, more aware, more present. Healing it was like performing surgery on a patient who was conscious and watching, who could feel every touch and respond to every intervention.
The burn started to recede. Slowly at first—the blackened wood lightening, the iron-poisoned cells dying and being replaced by new growth. My hands sank into the wound as the wood closed around them, new bark forming over my fingers, the spirit's own regeneration kicking in where I'd cleared the toxic residue.
I pushed deeper. The headache arrived immediately—not the gradual build of the blighted oak sessions, but a spike that went through my skull like a nail. My vision blurred. The world narrowed to the wound and my hands and the connection between us, the flow of something I still couldn't name traveling from my center into the broken body beneath me.
"Nathan." Diaval's voice, distant. "Nathan, you're bleeding."
Nosebleed. I could taste copper at the back of my throat. Didn't matter. The burn was still spreading on the far side of the wound—I hadn't gotten all the iron residue. I pushed harder. The warmth in my chest guttered, sputtered, like a candle in wind.
"Nathan, stop."
The tree spirit's knothole eyes opened. Focused on me. And in that look—ancient, slow, deep as centuries—I read something that wasn't gratitude or pain but recognition. The spirit saw me. Not the gravity-walking stranger, not the iron-immune anomaly, not the border guardian. Me. The part of me that healed things because he couldn't stop, that pushed past limits because the alternative was watching something die.
The same part that had gone back into the burning hospital a third time.
I held its gaze. Pushed the last of the Verdant Communion into the wound. The burn retreated—not gone, not fully, but contained. The active spread stopped. The wound sealed over with pale new bark, fragile but holding.
My vision went gray. Then white. Then nothing.
---
[Same Location — Later]
I came back to consciousness on the forest floor with my cheek pressed into moss and Diaval's hand on my shoulder.
"Breathe," he said. "You passed out. It's been about twenty minutes."
Twenty minutes. I'd been unconscious for twenty minutes in the deep forest with an iron attacker potentially still in the area. Not ideal.
I rolled onto my back. The canopy swam above me—green on green, fractured by my unfocused vision into abstract shapes. The headache was massive, a full-skull throb that pulsed with my heartbeat. My nose had bled freely down my chin and neck, dried to a sticky crust. My hands—
I lifted my hands. The palms were stained green. Tree sap, absorbed into the skin, permanent or close to it. The Verdant Communion's signature, marked on my body.
"The spirit?" I managed.
"Alive. Stable, I think. It hasn't moved, but the wound is closed and the burning stopped."
I let my hands drop. Stared at the canopy and waited for the world to hold still.
"You could have died," Diaval said. His voice was carefully controlled—the sardonic mask back in place, but thinner than usual. Stretched. "Pushing that much power. You didn't know what it would cost."
"But I didn't die."
"That's not the point."
"It's a little bit the point."
He made a sound—not a laugh, not a caw. Something between the two, expressing frustration and reluctant admiration in a single exhaled syllable. His hand was still on my shoulder. He hadn't removed it.
I sat up. The motion cost me—a lurch of nausea, a spike in the headache, the distinct sensation of a body that had been drained past empty and was now running on whatever biological fumes remained. But I sat, and the world steadied, and the tree spirit was in front of me.
It had shifted during my unconsciousness. Not standing—it couldn't stand yet, the wound was too fresh—but its branching arms had moved, reaching toward where I lay. One massive hand rested on the moss beside me, close enough to touch. The gesture was unmistakable. Reaching for the person who'd saved it.
I pressed my green-stained palm against the bark of its hand. Warm. Alive. The pulse was slow and irregular, but present. A patient in recovery, stable but critical.
"I'm staying," I said. To Diaval, to the spirit, to the forest. "Until it can stand."
Diaval looked at me. Looked at the spirit. Looked at the darkening sky above the canopy.
He sat down.
Not beside me—across from me, leaning against a neighboring oak, positioning himself so he could see both me and the approaches to the grove. Guard position. Sentry posture. The body language of someone who'd decided, without discussion or negotiation, that if Nathan was staying, Diaval was staying too.
We sat in the deepening twilight. The tree spirit breathed—slow, labored, but breathing. The wallerbogs crept back, one by one, settling in a loose perimeter around the grove. The forest murmured to itself, processing the trauma, adjusting to the new reality.
"The iron shard," I said.
"I saw it."
"Someone brought that here deliberately. That wasn't a leftover from the soldier incursion—those were all accounted for. This is new iron, brought past the thorn wall, used to attack a tree spirit."
Diaval's expression was grim. "Might be scouts. Testing deeper. Seeing if we can handle attacks inside the perimeter."
"Or it's something else."
"What else would it be?"
I picked up the shard from where I'd dropped it. Three inches of dark iron, ragged-edged, more like a broken spearpoint than a forged weapon. Old iron. Rough. The kind of thing a villager might carry for protection against fae—not military grade, not Stefan's armory.
Someone had crossed the thorn wall—which should have been impossible—penetrated deep into the Moors, and attacked a tree spirit with iron. Then left, without being detected, before anyone could respond.
That required either incredible skill or inside knowledge. Neither option was comforting.
I pocketed the shard. Evidence. Data. Something to analyze when my brain wasn't throbbing like a bruised organ.
---
[Deep Forest — Dawn, Day 39]
The spirit could stand by morning.
Not well—it listed sideways, its cracked trunk groaning with each adjustment, and the new bark over the wound was thin and vulnerable. But it stood. Rooted. Upright. The position of health for a creature that measured its life in centuries.
Diaval watched me watch the spirit. His sardonic mask had never fully reformed since yesterday. What remained was something more honest—tired, concerned, the face of someone who'd spent the night on a forest floor guarding a man who'd nearly killed himself saving a tree.
"I'll tell her what happened," he said, standing. Stretching, his spine popping in a sequence that betrayed seventeen years of human-form learning curve. "You rest."
"Tell her I'll find whoever did this."
His expression shifted. The concern deepened. The calculation returned—Diaval weighing possibilities, assessing risks, running the same analysis he'd run every day since a stranger dropped out of nowhere into his mistress's domain and started breaking rules of nature.
"That's what I'm afraid of," he said.
He shifted. The raven launched upward, gained height fast, and vanished through the canopy heading north. Toward her. Toward the report that would include an iron attack in the deep forest, a tree spirit nearly killed, and a guardian who'd poured his life force into saving it.
I leaned against the recovering spirit's trunk. The bark was warm against my back—the same living warmth I'd learned to associate with the Moors, amplified by the healing bond between us. The green stains on my palms were still there. Permanent, probably. A mark of what I'd become in this world.
The iron shard sat in my pocket, cold and foreign, a sharp reminder that the Moors' defenses had a gap somewhere. A gap large enough for someone carrying iron to slip through, strike, and disappear.
I closed my eyes. The headache throbbed. The nosebleed had stopped but the taste of copper lingered. Every muscle in my body ached with the specific exhaustion of magical overuse—a deeper fatigue than physical, as if the well in my chest had been scraped to bare stone.
Around me, the forest settled into morning. The tree spirit's breathing steadied. The wallerbog sentries dozed at their posts, trunks curled in sleep, trusting the border guardian to keep watch even when the border guardian could barely keep his eyes open.
I kept watch anyway. That was the job. That was what I'd asked for, what I'd earned, what I'd been given.
Somewhere north, a raven was delivering news that would bring the Mistress of the Moors to this grove. And when she arrived, I'd be here—exhausted, green-stained, iron shard in my pocket and questions in my mouth.
Someone had attacked her domain. I was going to find out who
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