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Out of the four of them, Helga was the most gifted healer.
Many had perhaps expected it to be Rowena, whose natural talents and magic always seemed to surpass those around her. But while Rowena could stop a wound bleeding or correct a broken bone with practiced calm, it was Helga who managed time and time again to not only heal wounds but to make it appear as though they had never been, all while smiling gently and putting her injured patients at ease.
She could tame the roaring lion that was Godric, like a mouse pulling a thorn from a wounded lions paw. Even Salazar admitted she was talented, but as he always did when someone’s abilities surpassed his own, put on a show of being able to heal just as well as Helga. But even he would bring his wounds to Helga in the dead of night instead of attempting to heal himself.
Yes, Helga had many undervalued talents of which the healing was not the least. But because she did not boast her abilities as her companions did and did not take praise or compensation for any of her talents, it was often forgotten just how gifted she was.
Rowena never forgot.
She couldn’t forget, not since the days before the school where they’d come to live, during the dark days of war and death, when it had been Helga who had pulled a broken and beaten Rowena from a field of battle and nursed her back to health. When Rowena, ready and wanting to die, had been pulled back from her precipice by the gentle healing hands of a girl who never asked anything in return but that Rowena live.
Rowena could not forget.
So it was always with feigned nonchalance that Rowena would stroll into Helga’s chambers, with a broken toe or a sliced open finger or a split lip. Helga would smile a genuine smile, inquire as to how this particular scrape had happened, and no matter what Rowena said Helga would go about her work, making Rowena’s hurts disappears.
“Trying to set a record, I think,” Helga teases, applying something sticky to Rowena’s shoulder on a bright and warm afternoon, “Most trivial injuries acquired in a school year.”
Rowena purses her lips. “I wouldn’t have had to harm myself if Salazar could gather his own damned potions ingredients, but he has neither the wit nor the skill nor the courage to pull a feather from a Seven Tailed Sparrow Sprite.”
“Mmmm,” Helga hums, putting away her tools and then waving her hands over Rowena’s skin. The concoction on her shoulder begins to warm, and Rowena feels her eyes fall closed as Helga hums under her breath and her skin mends.
When she opens her eyes, Helga is kneeling in front of her with a small wooden cup of warm milk. Green herbs swirl on the top of the foam.
“You should rest,” Helga says, pushing the cup into Rowena’s hands, her pale fair skin contrasting Rowena’s own rich brown in the dimming light of Helga’s room. Helga’s soft fingertips brush Rowena’s calloused knuckles lightly, sending shivers up her spine.
“I will,” she promises, lifting the magicked milk to her lips and sipping.
Helga’s hand reaches up to Rowena’s hair, sweeps it back and away from her face as she smiles brightly. “After you catch the Sparrow Sprite, I suppose?”
Rowena’s lips quirk, but she doesn’t answer. Helga stands and walks away, her fingers ghosting through Rowena’s long dark hair before falling away.
Rowena finishes the milk while staring out Helga’s window, and the taste of it brings back flashes, as it does every time, of the first time they met.
The visceral feel of blood caked in her hair, the smell of mud and smoke, the slippery feel of dark magic all over her, and Helga’s soft and strong hands pulling her from the wreckage of what had been her destructive life.
When she had awoken in Helga’s cottage, she had been so weak she couldn’t move, with one eye so swollen from a swelling hex that she couldn’t see, and aches in every inch of her body. She tried to lift herself up, to defend herself, but her wrists could not support her weight.
“Where I am?” She had called out, her voice hoarse and quiet, “Who’s there?”
A gentle hand on her shoulder had pushed her back down on the hay bed where she lay. “You are safe now, lie still,” Helga’s voice had come back, and Rowena felt liquid tipped into her lips, the warm milk with herbs touching her tongue for the first time. “My name is Helga,” the woman above her had said, “And I promise that as long as you are with me no harm will come to you. Rest now.”
And then Rowena had blacked out.
She remembers, in a haze, whimpering as Helga had set her broken bones. “Please,” she had called, “Please, just let me go. I have nothing, am nothing.”
Helga hadn’t even paused as she’d wrapped Rowena’s leg in a green pasty bandage. “I can’t do that,” she had said, “And one day you’ll understand why.”
Rowena had lost consciousness again from the pain.
The first time she could remember ever actually laying eyes on Helga had been weeks later, when her swelling had abated and her pain decreased. She had opened her eyes to see Helga nursing a bird in a cage, wrapping its wing and cooing gently. The raven nudged her hand, grateful for the care, and when Helga had lifted it to her cheek it had cawed gently before nuzzling her again. Helga put the bird back in the cage, and turned to where Rowena was laying.
Their eyes had met for the first time.
Rowena opens her eyes back in Helga’s castle chamber, to the view of the untamed forest and mountains beyond, to the sapling tree she had just planted out on the grounds, to the magic made lake and it’s endangered inhabitants. And then to the feel of Helga’s chin coming to rest on her uninjured shoulder.
Helga’s hand comes up to brush away Rowena’s hair before settling on her shoulder gently. “You were somewhere far away from here,” Helga says gently, pulling Rowena even further back to the present, “Where were you?”
Rowena reaches up and grabs onto Helga’s hand, lacing their fingers together. “Still with you,” she says quietly, “Always with you.”