Doctor Valeris gave a quick, cool press of the hand, and gestured me to a chair. “Tell me what happened,” she said, with no further preamble.
I closed my eyes — on the insides of my eyelids danced scenes of glory and conquest, as they had for the past three weeks - and tilted my head back.
“I’d hired out as a guard to an archaeologist up in the steppes. We spent a week riding around barrows, with nothing more than a couple of wolves to bother us. Then he reread a text or something, and pointed us further north. Have you been up there, doctor? Probably not. It’s so big. The sky, sure, but everything. No trees for a hundred miles, just you and the horse and a few mounds where no one alive has walked for three hundred years, and the wind. I remember there was one tree, though, where it shouldn’t be. It was the tallest thing there, and it felt like a mountain. An oak, tall and straight despite the wind that had scoured anything taller than a barberry bush off the face of the world. The archaeologist bent and scraped some earth off a rock between its roots. He pulled a crowbar off his horse’s equipment and pried it up. ‘After you,’ he said, and I went down. That’s when the ghost entered me.”
The doctor nodded. “Let me read the statement back to you. ‘I had been entombed under the strength of oak for centuries. I had begun to fear that I would never again feel a horse surge into a gallop under me, or the wind in my hair; that I had failed the ritual; that the promises of the gods were naught but lies.’” She paused. A muscle in my jaw clenched and then relaxed, but I stayed quiet. “’At last there came a breath of fresh air: a wind from the outside, and with it, a bright spirit. Ah, I thought, the gods spoke true. I am fortunate indeed. She is my kin, and she will serve me well. She is thrice bound to me.’” The doctor waited for a response.
“That’s not what I said,” I told her, firmly.
“No,” Valeris responded. “But it’s what I heard."
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