Of Blood and Bone (Chronicles of The One #2)(60)

She landed hard, her right arm cocked beneath her. Dazed, she whimpered, but when the others ran to her and turned her, she screamed in pain.

“Bagger, get her mom,” Mick ordered. “Fast! I think her arm’s broken. It’s okay, Twila. It’s going to be okay.” He smoothed back her dense black hair from a face gone pasty under brown skin. Blood trickled from scrapes on her forehead and cheekbone.

She just screamed again. “Mama!”

“I’m going to take you to your mom, okay? I’m just going to pick you up and—”

“No.” Though she understood the elves had their ways of healing, and that a child so young needed her mother, Fallon stepped forward. “Don’t move her. She may have hurt something else.”

Fallon knelt down, laid a hand on the sobbing girl’s shoulder.

Tears rolled like liquid glass down the girl’s cheeks. “I want my mama.”

“I know. She’s coming. Do you see me, Twila?”

She murmured it as she glided her hands just above the girl. Head, throat, heart, torso, limbs. “Do you see me?” she said again with her eyes on Twila’s. Those dark, pain-filled eyes that pulled at Fallon.

Slowly, she let what rose in her ease out. “Do you see me?” she repeated, and watched those dark eyes glaze with the trance.

“I see you.”

“Do you hear me, Twila? Do you hear my voice? Do you hear my heartbeat? Do you hear what lives in me stir and rise?”

“I hear you.”

Fallon ignored the sound of running feet, a cry of alarm, and kept what she was, all she was, focused on the girl.

Behind her, Mick’s father gripped Twila’s mother’s arm. “Wait. Wait. The One has her.”

“I will be in you, you will be in me. Your bones are soft still, and the break is clean. I’m in you, you’re in me. We share the pain, and it lessens. Here. See me, only me.”

Fallon laid her hand on the break, gave herself to the knowing. “With me, Twila. Quick.”

And gripping the snapped bone, squeezed. Her breath caught as the girl’s did in that shared moment of heat and pain. Twila’s eyes widened in shock, pupils going from saucers to pinpoints, then back again until her eyes closed on a whimpering sigh.

A new tear slipped out.

“You’re all right now. She’s all right.” With the power still bubbling in her, Fallon eased back. How could she feel so strong, she wondered, with that ghost ache in her arm, with her stomach shaking?

“It was her arm,” she managed as she rose. “The rest is just bumps and scrapes. She’s all right.”

On a cry, the mother leaped forward, gathered Twila up, rained kisses over her hair and face. Cuddling her daughter, she reached up for Fallon’s hand. “Thank you.”

“Sure.” She turned to Mick’s father. She thought of Thomas as a kind of scarecrow man because of his tall, thin build and the mass of corn-silk hair he wore in a bushy braid.

Just then he seemed a little blurry.

“The branch broke. It was the way her arm was bent when she fell on it.”

“Yes. Here.” He pushed a canteen on her. “Drink some water.”

Realizing her throat burned with thirst, she started to gulp, but he laid a hand on the canteen. “Slowly now. Slowly.”

She did as he said, found the world clearing, settling.

“We won’t forget your care for one of our children.” He touched her hand when she started to shrug off his gratitude. “Caring for another matters most of all. We’ll get Twila back to camp, and Mick will walk you home. Mick?”

“Yes, sir.”

Thomas turned, picked up Twila. “We won’t forget,” he vowed, and carried the girl away while her mother stroked her hair.

The others scurried after them.

“I didn’t know you could do that.”

Neither did I, Fallon thought.

When Fallon got back to the cottage, she found Mallick harvesting honey, a chore he’d come to enjoy—despite the occasional sting.

He wore the big hat with the net, and gloves. She could see the last wisps of smoke he’d conjured to chase whatever bees weren’t out hunting from the combs as he slid out the rack, slipped in the spare they’d made.

With the rack in the bucket, he turned, saw her.

“Our bees have been productive.”

As she’d instructed him, he began to walk with the bucket toward the greenhouse—to get out of the open air because the scent of the honey would attract bees.

She walked with him and into the scents of the earth and growing things.

“Something happened.”

He gave her a quick, sharp look, but whatever he saw on her face had him relaxing again. He reached for a knife, warmed it, and began to uncap the comb.

“What happened?”

“One of the girls—her name’s Twila. She’s about five or six, I guess. She fell. She was tree-climbing and a branch broke. She hit really hard, and her arm … Anyway, she broke her arm.”

He paused, concern renewed. “Do they need our help?”

“No. I … I healed it. Her. The arm.”

He nodded, continued to work, separating the honey, the propolis, and the beeswax. All could be used. “How?”