I should have run.

  Every story I had ever been told about the shadow-marked ended in blood. They stole children from cradles, burned fields to ash, poisoned wells so slowly no one knew until it was too late. My father had spoken of them without superstition, without dramatics—just fact. If you see one, you don’t hesitate. You don’t look twice. You run.

  He had seen what they could do. And yet the man before me did not look like a monster. He looked like someone who had already fought one.

  His hand trembled where it pressed against his side. Blood slipped steadily between his fingers, dark and glossy in the dim forest light. It soaked into the leaves beneath him, staining the roots of the oak that held him upright. His breathing came shallow and uneven, each inhale catching as though it scraped against something broken within his ribs.

  He wasn’t a legend. He wasn’t a warning. He was dying.

  Slowly, I lowered my basket to the ground and lifted my empty hand so he could see I carried no blade. The motion felt fragile, absurdly small in the face of everything I had been taught to fear. My heart beat so loudly I thought the forest itself might hear it.

  “You’re hurt,” I said, and immediately wished I had chosen better words.

  His eyes—sharp and golden-brown—narrowed despite the fever blooming across his skin. There was strength in that gaze still, something unyielding. “Stay back,” he warned, though the threat was frayed at the edges.

  The sensible part of me begged to obey. This was not my responsibility. Not my fight, not my kind. Instead, I stepped closer. The air shifted the moment I crossed some invisible boundary between us. It felt denser, charged, like the air before lightning splits the sky. The hairs along my arms prickled.

  “If you keep pressing there,” I said quietly, nodding toward his side, “you’ll worsen it. You’re tearing what little clotting has begun. I can help.”

  He studied me with unnerving focus. Not merely suspicious—evaluating. As if he were looking for something beyond what my face revealed.

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  The markings along his collarbone moved. At first, I thought it was the trick of flickering moonlight through branches, but no—the black lines shifted beneath his skin, slow and alive, like ink swirling in water. My breath thinned. The stories had never described that part. They had never said the shadows lived.

  Still, I knelt. The earth was cool beneath my knees. Close enough now, I could feel the heat radiating from him. It wasn’t only fever, there was something deeper beneath his skin, something that hummed faintly—like a current beneath still water.

  My hand hovered above his wound. The gash was deep, angled across his side as if from a blade swung hard and meant to kill. The edges were ragged. He should not have made it this far.

  “May I?” I asked.

  The question felt strangely intimate. Not Can I save you? Not Will you allow this? Just that small, fragile offering of choice.

  For a long moment, he did not respond. His breathing grew heavier, the marks along his skin tightening as though drawn inward by strain. Then, without looking away from me, he slowly removed his blood-slick hand from his side.

  The wound opened fully, causing fresh blood welled immediately. The sight snapped something in me into place. Doubt fell away. Fear thinned beneath instinct. I reached into my basket and withdrew linen, comfrey, and crushed yarrow. My fingers moved with practiced efficiency even as my pulse raced. “This will sting,” I warned softly.

  He did not answer.

  I pressed the cloth firmly against the wound. The reaction was instant—and not entirely his. The markings flared darker, the black deepening like spilled ink. Heat surged beneath my palm, not burning but alive, and something pulsed outward from him in a wave that rippled through the air between us. The leaves overhead shuddered though no wind touched them.

  My breath caught. For a moment, it felt as though something beneath the earth answered him. His hand closed around my wrist—strong, unyielding. Not violent, but urgent. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  The question unsettled me. “I told you,” I whispered. “I’m a healer.” But even as I said it, I felt the tremor beneath my knees—the faint hum threading through root and soil. The forest was not silent anymore. It felt aware, like it had been listening all along.

  His eyes searched mine, and something in his expression shifted from suspicion to something far more complicated. The heat beneath my palm steadied. The writhing of the marks slowed, as though responding not to the herbs but to my touch itself.

  I swallowed. “I’m going to close it,” I said, meeting his gaze steadily despite the tremor in my spine. “If you try to hurt me, I will reconsider saving your life.”

  A faint flicker—almost a smile—touched his mouth. Then he released my wrist, and I began stitching him back from the edge of death.