Chapter 113 Ayla's Gift

Chapter 113 Ayla's Gift
The first time Ayla healed someone, no one realized what had happened.

It was a small thing, almost nothing—a scratch on Damon's hand from a sharp branch, bleeding lightly, stinging enough to make him whimper. Elara was busy with Kael, who had been fussing all morning, and Caleb was outside chopping wood. Ayla, three years old and always watching, toddled over to her brother and put her small hand over his cut.

"Better," she said, with the certainty of a child who had not yet learned that the world did not always bend to her will.

Damon stopped crying. He looked at his hand, then at his sister, then back at his hand. The scratch was gone. Not healing, not fading—gone, as if it had never been.

"How did you do that?" he asked.

Ayla shrugged. "I fixed it."

Damon ran to find his mother, dragging Ayla behind him, his voice high with excitement and confusion. "Mama! Mama! Ayla made my owie go away! She touched it and it went away!"

Elara was skeptical at first—children exaggerated, and three-year-olds were not known for their reliability as witnesses. But she examined Damon's hand anyway, turning it over in the light, searching for any sign of the scratch he had described. There was nothing. No mark, no scab, no redness. Just smooth, unbroken skin.

"Ayla, come here, baby." Elara knelt, pulling her daughter close. "Can you show Mama what you did?"

Ayla reached out and placed her hand on Elara's arm, where a small burn from the cooking fire had left an angry red mark. She frowned in concentration, her small face serious, and the skin beneath her palm began to change. The redness faded. The edges of the burn softened. Within moments, the mark was gone.

Elara stared at her daughter, her mind racing, her heart pounding. Ayla had a gift. Not the slow, learned healing of herbs and poultices that Elara had spent years mastering, but something faster, more instinctive. Something that looked very much like the gift Elara herself had been born with.

"Ayla," she said carefully, "how long have you been able to do this?"

Ayla shrugged again, her attention already drifting to a butterfly that had landed on the windowsill. "Always."

Elara sat back on her heels, her eyes moving from her daughter to her son to the door where Caleb would soon appear. She thought about what this meant—another healer in the family, another gift to nurture, another responsibility to shoulder. She thought about Maya, who had trained her so patiently, and wondered if she would be able to do the same for Ayla.

"Ayla's got the gift," she said when Caleb came in for lunch, his arms full of firewood.

He set down the wood, brushed off his hands, and looked from Elara to Ayla to Damon, who was nodding vigorously. "The healing gift?"

"The healing gift. She fixed Damon's scratch and my burn. Just like that." Elara snapped her fingers. "No training, no herbs, no effort. She just... did it."

Caleb knelt beside his daughter, taking her small hands in his own. "Ayla, can you show Papa?"

Ayla placed her hand on Caleb's arm, where an old scar from a hunting accident marked his skin. She frowned in concentration, her small face scrunching up with effort, and the scar began to fade. Not completely—it was too old, too deep, too much a part of him—but it lightened, softened, became less visible.

"Bir şifacı daha," Caleb said, looking up at Elara with wonder in his eyes. "Sürümüz şanslı."

"Şanslı," Elara agreed. "And a little terrifying."

\---

The weeks that followed were a process of discovery, for all of them.

Elara began teaching Ayla the basics of healing—not the advanced techniques she had learned from Maya, but the fundamentals: how to clean a wound, how to apply pressure, how to recognize when a body was fighting infection. Ayla absorbed the lessons with the same ease she brought to everything, her mind quick, her hands steady.

But her gift was different from Elara's, and they both had to learn its limits.

Ayla could heal fresh wounds almost instantly, the skin knitting together, the blood retreating. She could ease pain, calm fevers, soothe the ache of sore muscles. But she could not heal everything. A broken bone required splinting and time, even with her touch. An infection deep in the lungs needed herbs and rest, not just magic. And she could not bring back the dead—a lesson she learned when she found a bird that had flown into a window, its neck broken, its eyes already clouding over.

"Fix it," she demanded, thrusting the bird at her mother.

"I can't, baby." Elara knelt, taking the small body gently. "It's gone. Its spirit has flown away."

"Fix it!" Ayla's voice rose, her face crumpling. "You fix everything!"

Elara held her daughter as she cried, the bird cradled between them, and tried to explain that even healers had limits, that some things could not be mended, that death was not a wound you could close with a touch.

Ayla did not understand, not really. She was three, and the world was still supposed to make sense, still supposed to bend to her will. But she stopped demanding, stopped pushing, and eventually stopped crying. She helped her mother bury the bird in the garden, patting down the earth with her small hands, saying the words Elara taught her.

"Thank you for your life. Thank you for your song. We will not forget you."

\---

Damon watched his sister's training with a mixture of curiosity and envy. He had no gift for healing—his hands could not close wounds or ease pain—but he had other skills, other ways of contributing. Still, he could not help feeling a little left out when Elara spent hours with Ayla, teaching her the properties of herbs, the names of bones, the way to read a patient's face.

"Will I learn healing too?" he asked one evening, when Ayla was asleep and Kael was nursing and the cabin was quiet.

Elara looked up from the poultice she was preparing. "Do you want to?"

Damon considered the question. "I don't think I can do what Ayla does. I don't have her hands."

"You have your own hands, and your own gifts. They're just different." She set aside the poultice and patted the space beside her. "Do you remember when you used to shift without meaning to? When your wolf would come out in the middle of the night, and you'd wake up as a cub?"

Damon nodded, his face coloring with embarrassment. He did not like to remember those nights—the confusion, the fear, the feeling of being out of control.

"You learned to control it. You learned to shift when you wanted, not just when your body decided. That's a gift too, Damon. A rare one. And one that will serve the pack well when you're older."

"Do you think so?"

"I know so." She put her arm around him, pulling him close. "You're going to be a great hunter, a great protector, a great leader. Ayla will be a great healer. Kael will find his own path. That's how families work—not everyone is the same, and that's what makes us strong."

Damon leaned against her, comforted and proud. "I'm going to protect Ayla. And Kael. And you and Papa."

"I know you will." She kissed the top of his head. "That's who you are."

\---

Ayla's training continued through the autumn and into the winter. She learned to identify the herbs that grew in the forest around their cabin—chamomile and lavender, yarrow and willow bark, comfrey and feverfew. She learned to prepare poultices and teas, to grind powders and mix salves. She learned to be gentle with patients, to speak softly, to hold hands when there was nothing else to do.

Her gift grew stronger with practice, responding more quickly, healing more deeply. Elara watched her daughter's progress with a mixture of pride and something else—a quiet sadness, perhaps, or a recognition that Ayla would soon surpass her.

"She's going to be better than me," she told Caleb one night, after Ayla had healed a deep cut on a warrior's arm without any visible effort.

"Maybe." Caleb shrugged. "Or maybe she'll be different. Not better, not worse—different."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

"Is it working?"

She laughed, the sound surprising her. "Maybe a little."

"Good." He pulled her close, his arms wrapping around her. "You're allowed to be proud of her. You're allowed to be jealous, too, if that's what you're feeling. Just don't let it get in the way of teaching her."

"I'm not jealous."

"You're a little jealous."

"Maybe a little." She sighed, leaning into him. "I spent years learning what she can do without trying. It's hard not to feel like I wasted my time."

"You didn't waste anything. Your gift is different, deeper. Maya saw that. That's why she chose you."

Elara was quiet for a long moment, thinking about Maya, about all the years of training, about the weight of the wisdom she now carried. "I hope you're right."

"I'm always right."

"You're not."

"Mostly right."

She kissed him, and let the matter drop.