@maybepeace
She never wants to see another sick or dying child again.
She learned her herbcraft for this, but she can tell by looking at the little girl that it won't be enough. She's been too sick for too long. Even though she's only, what, three or four years old? The age her sister was.
Alice tries to be careful. She learned something useful so that she could use it. But this refugee camp is the most starved and ragged Alice has visited since the end of the war, and the people here—they're not from Aquila. Maybe, maybe. They wouldn't see magic and think devil.
The daemon stirs. Wounded? Prey?
Young, she corrects. We protect our young. She knows it will listen to this, because when she was young, it protected her.
Its wings flutter inside her rib cage. Quickly, she asks the girl's mother to fetch water, and once she's stepped away—
Alice flexes her fingers. Something moves in her hands, like talons pushing out from under her nails. A gust of wind picks up under her hair. As if she were flying. A flash of yellow in her vision.
When the mother joins them again, Alice is smoothing back the little girl's hair with entirely human hands; the hectic red of her cheeks has faded to a more normal color. Her skin is already cooler. She tells the mother to give her water—don't be sparing, we brought enough—and moves on to the next person.
But with an instinct that goes beyond sight, the daemon says, Watched.
***
She tugs at Fynn's sleeve to get his attention, but a powerful sense of being fourteen again comes over her. She lets go abruptly.
"Do you see the man with the metal arm? Is he staring at me?"