I have been called many things in my life. Maggi the loudmouth, Maggi Who Knows Everything, and Maggi the Mage—a title I will explain presently, as it was not always mine and I did not always deserve it.

  My mother called me her greatest achievement and her deepest exhaustion, often in the same breath. My father called me the son he never had. I don't know if it was good thing.

  But above all else, I'm Maggi the Umalahokan of Tondara— the town crier. The one the Council sent into the square when something needed to be known immediately, completely, and with no room for misunderstanding. I was very good at this. There is a particular power in being the voice that carries truth into open air — in standing in a square and knowing that what leaves your mouth will reach every corner of a kingdom before nightfall. I took that seriously. My father thought too seriously.

  I have been a healer mistaken as a hilot.

  A singer with passable voice.

  A midwife twice by accident.

  And once on a very strange evening involving a collapsed bridge— a builder.

  You see, I'm good at other things too, mostly involving magic and spirit works—conjuring as they call it now, as if a fancier name makes it something new.

  Then one morning, salot arrived. I was already in the square.

  "People of Tondara!"

  I threw my voice from the chest, filling the walls, the rooftops, and the gaps between buildings where sound likes to settle. People started to flock the square within minutes. Some listened in their windows, their doors, and their balconies.

  "The Salot has been sighted in the lower quarters. Boil your water. Cover your mouth when sneezing. Pay attention to your children. The Council is convening."

  I said it cleanly. Officially. The way the Council wanted it said.

  What I did not say — what I was already thinking, standing in that square with my best healer's confidence quietly was this:

  I had been preparing for something like this my whole life without knowing it.

  Every herb I'd studied, every spirit I'd learned to call, every charm I'd practiced, and every spell I came up with myself, prepared me for this. The Salot was serious. The Salot was frightening. But I was Maggi the Umalahokan of the Kingdom of Tondara, good at everything and modest about none of it, and I genuinely believed that this was my moment.

  Three weeks later I was back in the square.

  "People of Tondara."

  No exclamation this time. I had learned, in those three weeks, that some announcements don't deserve one.

  "The Salot has reached the upper quarters. The Council has sent for a Babaylan. Until their arrival, continue to boil your water. Keep your children inside. Do not—"

  I stopped.

  Not because I forgot the words. I never forget words. I stopped because I had just announced, in the same square where three weeks ago I had stood full of quiet certainty, that everything I knew had not been enough. That we needed someone else. That I — Maggi, good at everything, modest about none of it — had run out of options and the children were still dying.

  I finished the announcement.

  I went home and sat in the dark for a while.

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  I want to say something here about death, because a certain ancient turtle has strong opinions on the subject and I have been disagreeing with her for longer than most kingdoms have existed.

  She says dying is not an ending. That the dead cling to echoes, to names, to halls that still remember their footsteps. She says this with the confidence of someone who has never had to tell a mother that the floors that remembered their child's footsteps have gone quiet for good.

  I have told seventeen mothers that. In a span of three weeks.

  I know what ending looks like. I have held its hand.

  So when I say the Salot humbled me, I mean it the way genuine helplessness humbles a person. Not philosophical humility. Not the graceful bowing of a scholar before a greater mystery. The kind where you have exhausted every option and you are standing in a square announcing it because that is the only thing left you know how to do.

  They sent for a Babaylan.

  I expected an old woman. They always sent old women— grandmothers of the valley, white-haired and certain, smelling of herbs and authority. I had met two in my life, and both had looked at me like I was a problem they didn't have time for.

  What arrived instead was a young man.

  He walked into Tondara's square on the first morning with nothing but a woven bag on his shoulder and the particular quality of stillness that I would spend the next decade trying to describe accurately and failing.

  Not calm exactly. Not quiet. Something underneath both of those things.

  I was at my post. Of course I was.

  "People of Tondara!" I called. "The healer from the Babaylan tribe has arrived! Make way! Make way!"

  He looked up at the sound of my voice.

  He smiled— not at the crowd, not at the performance of arrival, but specifically at me. As if I had said something privately amusing.

  I did not know what to do with that. So I kept announcing.

  I watched him work from a distance the first day. Professional curiosity, I told myself. Due diligence. The umalohokan's responsibility to verify what she announces. I was not — I want to be clear about this — hovering around.

  He moved through the lower quarters without ceremony. No grand gestures. No declarations. He sat beside the sick the way you would with someone you've known for a long time. He put his hands on the earth sometimes. Closed his eyes. Spoke quietly to things I couldn't see but could feel at the edges of the air around him.

  Spirit work. Real spirit work. Not the cautious, careful communion I had practiced my whole life. This was something older and more effective.

  I told myself I was not impressed.

  I was lying.

  On the third day, the Salot stopped spreading.

  Just stopped. Between one morning and the next, no new cases. The lower quarters held. The upper quarters held. Tondara woke up and the Salot had simply ceased creeping.

  I stood in the square that morning and announced it.

  "People of Tondara! The Salot has not spread in the night. The lower quarters report no new cases. The upper quarters hold."

  I had announced births and deaths and wars and harvests and the arrival of dignitaries whose names I'd had to practice for days. I had announced the Salot itself, twice, with my voice steady and my certainty quietly crumbling behind it.

  This was the first announcement in three weeks that felt like breathing.

  The square erupted. I let it.

  On the sixth day, the last patient recovered.

  I announced that too. Differently. No preamble, no Council language, no careful official framing.

  "People of Tondara!" My voice carried the way it always carried — to the walls, the rooftops, the gaps between buildings. "The Salot is gone. Every living soul it touched since the Babaylan arrived has been returned to us. Every. Single. One."

  The square was very loud for a very long time.

  Somewhere in the middle of it, I found Silang— the man who cured the people I cared about and the one who made me question my own abilities. He was standing at the edge of the fountain with seven moons carved into it, water cascading between them, watching the celebration.

  He was eating an atis, a custard apple fruit someone with a grateful soul had given him.

  "You could go stand in the center of it," I said, because I was standing beside him now and I wasn't entirely sure when that had happened. "They'd like that. They'd probably carry you."

  "I know," he said. He didn't move.

  I looked at him.

  "You're not going to, are you."

  "No."

  I thought about that for a moment. In my experience, people who did extraordinary things wanted the public square to know about it. Loudly. Repeatedly. That was, after all, why they had people like me.

  "Why not?" I asked.

  He looked at the fountain. At the seven carved moons with the water running between them. "Because it isn't mine," he said simply. "The healing. It was never mine."

  On the seventh day, I showed him Tondara.

  I want to be honest about how that happened because it did not happen the way I planned. My plan was to announce his departure— another official duty and then return to my regular responsibilities. That was the plan.

  What actually happened was that he asked, quietly and without any particular expectation, if someone might show him the kingdom before he left. And I was standing there.

  So.

  "I can do that," I said.

  "I thought you might," he said.

  That smile again. The specific one. The one that had caught me mid-announcement on the first day and still hadn't entirely let go.

  His name, I had learned on his first day, was Silang.

  Just Silang. No title. No crest. Nothing before or after it.

  That would change.

  I just didn't know yet that I would be there to watch every step of it.

  Do you still remember the book Silang authored?