The encounter had been full of madmen's chants. He hadn't said much, but what he did say was enough to make her mortal mind roll its eyes. A wolf, she thought. Rubbish if you ask me. What she wanted to understand was the miracle she saw in the hay. She insisted that he remain in the barn, at least so that she could give him pomace for his rough skin.
The whole of his torso was covered in slippery, raised scars. They were only shadows of flesh, but she could tell some of the injuries by their shape and size. Whip marks. Burns. Indentations where meat had been gouged out. When she stared at it, she felt the pain on her own skin. No matter how she soothed it now, there was no soothing it then.
"They say the agony entices power," he remarked, watching her trace the place on his back where a cloaksman had impressed hot iron. "Don't worry. It bothers me not."
She took her eyes away from it, blushing.
"It seems that you've used up the last of my pomace," she remarked, reaching into the empty jar, diverting. "I will run to the kitchen and make more. Hopefully it's soothing your skin."
Faolan weakly nodded, still in a trance. His bloodied shirt sat on the floor beside him, a reminder of his fall from power. The Darkness was gone from him. The heinous acts he'd committed under its power were distant memories – now a shell of the tyrant he once was. He was free to live among men.
"It has been, Briar," he rasped. "I still don't understand why you must continue helping me. I've already indebted myself to you once. Just allow me some rest, and I'll be gone in a few hours."
"Nonsense," the girl assured, unaware of his otherworldly dealings. "I don't know what sort of accident you had, but you're lucky that you didn't rupture any of your internal organs. You may have had one miracle today, but you're still weak. You lost more blood than most people can survive. You're only human."
Human, he soured. Faolan had always considered himself superior to such beings, yet his mortality was evident. He raised his eyebrows, confused but continually intrigued by the girl.
"You have very skilled hands, milady," he mused. "And apparently quite the knowledge of this world's remedies. Would you be some sort of a doctor?"
"An apothecary."
Ah, Faolan sighed. Now he understood. An herbalist. These human doctors and healers always seemed to straddle both sides. To them, a burn was a burn regardless of the devil it belonged to. They treated ailments, not people. The peculiar one occasionally studied and experimented for their own enjoyment. That aspect was something he understood.
"Has it interested you, then? To see this spectacle of medicine before your eyes?"
Briar was taken aback. Of course, it was intriguing, but more than anything else, it shook her.
"Um, yes, I suppose –" she stammered. "What exactly do you mean?"
"The blood. My rapid healing. Those are the two reasons you've remained here. To study me," he softly brushed his fingers against hers. She closed her eyes for a moment, made uncomfortable.
Briar scrunched up her nose. It was something that she often did when she was perplexed. She'd already been over this, and it was getting rather old. Rather than give him another rebuttal, she instead replied with just as much wisdom as she had earlier that day:
"I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug."
Empathy. It was a state rarely accessible to Faolan – existent but rarely decipherable. Oh, how these healers confused him. He tried to stand now, but pain shot through his scar. It was no longer a cavernous wound, but the memory of it embedded itself in his skin. He moaned.
"Nerve pain," Briar said. "Your body hasn't forgotten. I know what can help."
The rust-haired girl stood up and pushed her way out of the stable. A brown goat stood over Faolan's head, uncomfortably breathing down his neck with its malodorous breath as he struggled to understand this strange woman. It yelled persistently, screaming as a mad man while it chewed on hay.
"If I had my power, you'd be nothing more than a cockroach under her shoe," he grumbled.
Briar made her way into the house and found her medicine cabinet. Pulling out her pestle and mortar, she began grinding a myriad of leaves and seeds to a pulp. She sloshed a handful of oil in her fingers, using the herbs to create a numbing mixture. This was where Briar could display the most skill, where she felt most at home. She streaked a blob of it across her arm to see if the potency was just right. No, she told herself. This isn't strong enough.
She cracked open a brown sketchbook on the counter and thumbed through its pages. It contained hundreds of illustrations and notes about the flora of Moorland. The moor was a cold and swampy place of grass and stone. Briar had lived and foraged it since she left the safety of her mother's hip. To a foreigner, one glance at the vastness of the wet heath would assume there is nothing good to eat, let alone heal with. These underappreciated "weeds" made Briar's way of life possible. She knew that there were great and useful treasures to be found, if only you knew where to look.
Sprinkle in heather to soothe the skin. She placed it into her jar in unison with the words she read. What else? Oh yes, she remembered. Thistle sap. She took a thorny stalk from the window and cut its purple head. Out of it oozed a white, rubbery liquid that Briar knew was good for all sorts of skin conditions. Finally, she added her pleasantly aromatic favorite, lemon balm.
"That ought to do it," she grinned.
Before applying the salve, she gave him a cup of willow bark tea. He sipped it as she slathered the oil over his abdomen. It was pale and chiseled, not at all awkward to her against the lankiness of his arms and legs. She felt the scars again.
"You're not from the militia, are you?" Briar asked him, eyes wide as she ran her finger over a smooth elastic ridge between Faolan's shoulders. "Are you...a slave?"
"I was a slave, once. A slave to the Order. My master has taken on a new apprentice. Now I'm free, but the things I've learned will never leave me," Faolan told her.
She remained silent and pained. He continued sipping on the tea, unbothered. With each tilt of the cup, his complexion improved. It took on a hearty silver tint that matched his eyes, which shifted between blue, green, and pewter. They glowed as a cat under the moon. There was crusty blood, black and red, still smeared over his features. Briar took a comb from her satchel and loosed a few clumps of it from hair the color of cold onyx.
"It sounds more like you were in a cult," Briar whispered under her breath.
It wasn't an unfair assessment. The power he served was a heinous religion, and its taste was sweet firebrands. Yet, he was the fire. It invigorated and heightened his abilities. With the trainer gone, his defenses were weakened. The Darkness could very well come back and devour him now. Faolan panicked, hearing footsteps. The barn door opened, and he waited to see if it was the curse returning for his soul.