The woman clucked her tongue and ushered Amaris into the back. Soon closed doors separated them from the tavern beyond for privacy as they sat beside a washbasin. The woman helped her scrub off the wound on her chest and bandaged it properly, blinding Amaris completely in one eye with bandages, covering half of her face with gauze. The other straps of clean cloth wrapped around where Amaris had nearly mutilated one of her small breasts, tightly binding half of her chest to her shoulder in a crisscross of bandaging. While wrapping her, the woman marveled at how she’d managed to keep so much blood on her face given the age of her wounds.

Amaris intended to correct that it had happened nearly that very morning, when she caught sight of the scarcely scabbed, grimy-looking wounds in the mirror above the washbasin. The violent lines did indeed look weeks old. Amaris had never heard of a healing tonic before she drank the one Odrin had given her. A memory of Matron Flora administering medicine in a brown bottle tugged at her, but she’d never been educated on its contents.

The woman filled the washbasin with warm, soapy water. She had Amaris flip her blood-stained hair into the basin and scrubbed at her scalp.

Once the crusted, crimson stains were cleaned from her strands and she had been fitted with a fresh tunic, the kindly woman was finally able to see precisely how strange Amaris looked. She could no longer hide behind the excuse of wounds or blood or dirty clothes. She flinched, feeling dreadfully self-conscious.

“So,” the woman started, attempting to sound casual while Amaris looked at her bandages in the mirror, “was it your mother or your father?”

“Excuse me?”

The woman asked again. “Who was fae? Was it your mother?”

Amaris shook her head, comprehension eluding her. Her brows pinched in the center as she waited for the woman to explain.

The woman scoffed. “This village may be small, but we’re not so backwater that we don’t get our share of the fair folk from time to time, at least, some with distant lineage… Though I will say, it’s been ages…I do know how to spot a faeling. I’ll be damned, I’ve never seen one who looked like you… I haven’t seen a purple like that since the lilac bushes blossomed last spring! Then with your hair… Well…” Her voice trailed off with each peculiar sentence, growing quieter with each passing word.

Amaris wasn’t sure what to make of the stranger’s speech. She involuntarily began with honesty, finding herself responding before she thought better of it.

“I never knew my parents. I grew up in—” She bit her tongue.